Ev Williams: "Odeo like Blogger for podcasts"

Evan Williams, close to making his new podcasting service Odeo live and public, posted a lengthy entry at his personal blog recently, concerning how the idea for Odeo first came about, and what he hopes to do with it. As I guessed in an earlier entry on the subject, Mr. Williams' main goal with Odeo (which only exists on the web right now as a 'coming soon' page) is to combine the power and untold new projects of podcasting with the ease of posting and managing entries that Bloggers gives a person. It was directly inspired, in fact, by Blogger's longstanding feature Audioblogging (the same technology I'm using to do my own podcast), and how the current Blogger setup doesn't allow those posts to get sent directly to podcast software. From how it sounds, Odeo is going to provide not only new software to deliver such files to an MP3 player, but also server space for people to store audio feeds (ala Blogspot's relationship with Blogger), not to mention a stunningly large central searchable database of audio feeds, for others who are looking for interesting things (that is, once more and more people start using Odeo, which isn't an outrageous prediction to make). I'm excited!