However, there is a large number of people that need a personalized audio solution beyond FM and satellite radio, and some solution is going to trickle up and fill the gap.

At http://www.stitchr.com , we’re working on it…

by time yahoo actually turns off a site you can be sure it was in a headcount-coma for probably a year prior, yahoo photos being the exception and even more galling in that they poured money into upgrading it shortly before killing it in favor of flickr

When you say that publishers won’t let other people monetize with advertising, are you referring to use of a non-commercial license like the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA?

Until someone figures out a better way to get content onto iPods, iTunes will trump all those web directories for true podcasts/video podcasts. Mobile phones might also be a way to beat iTunes – but so far every effort I’ve seen has been pretty lame, and the average consumer doesn’t yet think of the mobile phone as a media device.

According to their site, the Yahoo! Podcasts site is due to close at the end of October. It was funny to see the news spread from a post to my Twitter account, on to Marshall over at Read/Write Web, then out to the rest of the blogosphere and TechMeme….

First Odeo was sold, bought, sold, then bought again. Now Yahoo Podcasts is shutting down. What is the future of audio podcasting? The market is clearly a video game, but is there a need for audio podcasts and can they be monetized? Our answer is a res…

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

As a podcaster, I’m happy it closed. I’m all for the big guys coming in and providing more exposure to podcasting, but if they’re going to put up a site that only works sporadically and then just forget about it, I’d rather it didn’t exist in the first place.

Why?

Yahoo obviously has the muscle to turn these projects “profitable” at some level, so why not keep them?

Because they have realized they need to FOCUS to save their business.

Yahoo is taking notes on a hard earned lesson that Google should too take note of: abandoning your core business to pursue opportunities, no matter how closely related, will ultimately damage your core business.

Yahoo has been getting their ass handed to them by Google quarter after quarter in the extremely lucrative search engine arena and it looks like they’re finally waking up and realizing that to be truly competitive they need to refocus their attention on their foundation: being a search directory.

Yahoo over the past several years has become a “Portal”. Becoming a portal in the late days of Bubble 1.0 was something that many large web properties strove to become.

Yahoo has arrived at their goal of becoming a portal. But the problem is that by becoming a portal, Yahoo lost any real value or specialization that made them valuable beyond their brand.

Sure, they do a monster amount of business, but just look at how profitable google has made search. And just look at their stock price to realize the value that the market puts on Google owning an extremely profitable, scalable area of specialization on the web.

A chapter from Al Ries’ classic business book “Focus” teaches us the following lesson:

“If there were nothing but general surgeons and you were the only brain surgeon, you would have an incredible business and you could charge outrageous prices.“

Hmmm, it seems to me that Google has succeeded in becoming just that! What is somewhat mind boggling, however, is that Google is beginning to segment their brand into completely new and unrelated areas: desktop software (to combat MSFT?!), email, and a dozen other apps.

Apps like Google Maps, which again are within Google’s core business of helping consumers find things more quickly and efficiently are smart.Desktop software, email, iGoogle, google notebook, Picasa, a potential social network and others are only going to damage Google in the long term by decreasing their most valuable asset – the brand name that is synonymous with SEARCH.

Go Yahoo!

What on earth could they have spent $23 million on in less than 24 months?