Pluggd podcast community launched today
Marshall Kirkpatrick
33 comments »
Seattle based start-up Pluggd opened their podcast directory for public use today; the company aims to make podcast listening easier for nontechnical users. It has several features that I think look great.
Company CEO Alex Castro came from Microsoft, with an emphasis in multimedia. The Pluggd team also has members with backgrounds at Real and ESPN.com.
Pluggd offers a few things that really differentiate it from other podcast communities. A javascript bookmarklet lets you send podcasts you discover off-site to your Pluggd bookmark list. That list is different from your subscription list so you can evaluate podcasts before subscribing. As I test it, sometimes the bookmarklet works for autodiscovery of podcasts and sometimes it doesn’t. Since the service launched just minutes ago, I hope that will be taken care of soon.
The Pluggd search engine actively crawls the web for new podcasts to index, instead of relying only on user submissions. The podcast player can be put in a pop-up from the listening page, so you can navigate around or off of the Pluggd site without breaking the podcast you are listening to. The site design is totally unpretentious without looking unprofessional, too, I like that.
The service takes two thematic approaches that are interesting. First, Pluggd believes that social networking and podcast listening work well together. That means that commenting and list sharing are available throughout the site. Second, the company believes that the majority of podcast listeners are listening at work and at school, in a web browser instead of a mobile device. There has been a growing chorus of voices arguing that prime time media consumption hours are shifting from night time to 9 to 5 work hours and Pluggd seems well positioned to respond to that.
The podcast directory space couldn’t be much more crowded, but I like this one. Presuming that all the early kinks get worked out, it looks good.
The design looks pretty good, very simple but I don’t know about the pink text at the very bottom
looks useful though 
What do you get when you cross Flickr and Digg’s names? Pluggd.
I’ve never been a fan of iTunes (mac or PC) and downloading podcasts, so this will be nice to stream and tag, discuss etc., all from the web.
It looks similar to Odeo. Anyone know the points of differentiation?
Nice idea, I run a Podcast and find that whilst it’s a great platform, it’s not very accessible and the whole iTunes thing puts people off. If this works well, I’d like to use it to promote our Podcast as an alternative to iTunes.
Unfortunately my Podcast isn’t playing through it. The latest episode has a feed error (their site says), and other episodes just hang on ‘buffering’… Has anyone else got it to work?
Although I’m flattered my podcast is in there… I don’t see how it’s any different than any of these other websites that do the same thing. There are TONS of podcast directories. They all look like this.
–Dave
Urban Coffee Podcast
Good to see this space is continueing to attract attention. I am currently working on a site, grepr.com, that we are planning to go into beta beginning of July (Monday July 3rd). Our goal is to offer custom recommendations to registered users based on their current listening habits. While offering basing directory service for unregistered users. If anyone is interested in learning more or participating in our beta feel free to check us out, grepr.com. The landing page is still going through some final work, but figured this is a good time to first mention our site.
Very nice! I agree - the design is good. I find Pluggd’s search engine provides better results. I thought the idea of searching within the audio, like Podzinger does, was a cool idea, but without the right ranking algorithm you end up with worse search results. I’m making Pluggd my podcasting site of choice.
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Good site. Thanks:-)
We’re fans!
How is this compare to Melodeo? I’m using their Mobilcasting app on my T-Mobile RAZR and it’s very fast. Their site seems more developed than Pluggd too.
Good site. Thank you:-)