- Podcast Creation Guides (such as iLounge’s Beginner’s Guide to Podcast Creation)
- Podcast Advertising (like Podbridge)
- Video Podcasting (a la blip.tv)
- Mobile Podcasting (see Yodio)
- Podcast to Text (try CastingWords)
- Podcast Directories (such as Yahoo! Podcasts)

Waxxi was named in the Live Podcasting category, as such:

Audio shows streamed live, mainly with notable technologists. Once recorded, the live shows are available as podcasts.

Mashable has been doing a bang-up job with other compilation posts, such as Craigslist Alternatives, the 7 Most Disruptive VoIP Services, and Mini-Blogging: 8 Pownce Rivals Compared.

Another great question (not to mention, answer) from the ‘cast with Seth:

“Does Yahoo! have a chance?”

Well, wait a second. Yahoo! makes millions and millions of dollars every day. They have more register users, I think, than just about any other site in the world. And, they deliver huge amounts of information on finance and everything else. Millions and millions of people have Yahoo! mail.

If someone wanted to hand me the keys to Yahoo!, I’d be happy to show up. They’re not doomed, by any stretch of the imagination.

The real question, I think, should be: what’s Yahoo!’s next Dip, and how do they get through it? Is Yahoo! on a dead end in which they’re going to keep cranking out money but not become a superstar in something new. Or, are there Dips that the people at Yahoo! could focus on and put their huge resources behind, and push through. Or, is it a better strategy for them to do forty things, and hope that one of them pops?

And, based on what I’ve said so far today … the way you win on the Internet and everywhere else is to find an area that people are going to choose to talk about, overwhelm it, push through the Dip and then erect a barrier behind you – what I call the Valley of Death – so it’s harder for the Microsofts and the Googles to catch up with you.

“What was your biggest Dip?”

I’ve had lots and lots of Dips, which is really lucky for me.

There are plenty of people I went to business school with who have been on a dead end ever since. There are plenty of people who I worked with at my first job, who have been at a dead end ever since.What I have tried to do is seek out Dip after Dip.

Now, there have been a few times when I’ve quit in the Dip and regretted it. There have been a few times when I almost quit in the Dip, and managed to just squeak through. Just before I sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo in 1998, the good news is the day before we sold, we were profitable which was very unusual in those days. The bad news is that in the six weeks before we sold, there were three occasions where we almost missed payroll. We were within an hour of not having the money in the bank to pay our employees.

And it would have been really easy in those days to give up. To look around at the well-funded companies that had raised twenty or forty or eighty million dollars. We had raised four. To look at the companies in California that were getting great deals and hook-ups because of who they knew, and we were in New York and knew no one.

It would have been easy in the pressure of the moment to say, “Well, we gave it a good try. Let’s go home.” I’m really glad we stuck that Dip out.

Originally blogged over at The Long Blonde Tail.

Can you tell us more about Wikia?

Basically, Wikia is my new project. We are building thousands of Wiki communities in parallel. The way that we like to describe it is that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, and Wikia is the rest of the library and the magazine racks. So, it’s a totally new organization completely separate from Wikipedia, and growing really quickly. [We’re] spending a lot of energy in trying to improve the software and make it easier to use, to try to push this whole free culture revolution out to the next wave of participants.

How will human powered search work?

So, the search project is one of the projects of Wikia, and basically what we’re looking at is everything is open source software – all free software. We want to publish all the algorithms; we want to bring some transparency into the search business.

There are a lot of people who are trying to do human powered search, or trying to do new algorithmic search, but I don’t know of anybody who’s really trying to make a radical commitment to being open and transparent in the sense of free software. So, that’s basically what our goal is.

How it’s actually going to work? Well, that’s yet to be determined. I mean, we’re still in the open design stages. It’s not the kind of thing where we labor for twelve months in stealth mode, then build it all out and announce it in a flurry. It’s a project to build a search engine, so anyone can participate and we’re discussing and debating how to go about it.

How do you plan to successfully compete with Google? A question via chat, from the incredibly participative Rick Myers:

Um…I have no idea! I mean, I think the real answer is, if you believe as I do: that quality search is becoming a commodity. So, if you take a look at the results from Yahoo!, look at the search results from Google, from Ask – they’re really quite similar in many respects, and that’s been increasingly so in the last couple of years. And then you look at some of the stuff that’s been going on in the open source world, around search engines. I think we’re in striking distance of having good quality search in a free software package.

If that’s true, then it’s really a matter of just having the servers and people that manage them, and then you can really compete. If that’s true, then competition is not about having the most money and the most rocket scientists. It’s about having open transparency: search results people can trust because they can understand how things are ranked and sorted.

So that’s basically the approach we’re taking. I don’t normally think much in terms of competition, I think more in terms of finding something cool and fun to do, and doing it.

Well, we could’ve told you that.

Jimmy Wales came out, fully loaded, with some fighting words — or about as peaceful as fighting words can get:

The idea that Google has some edge because they’ve got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now.

He went on to describe Google and Yahoo! as “black boxes” that won’t reveal how they rank search results. And, that collaborative search technology could transform the structure of the Internet.

What this translates to is Wikia, the for-profit sister site to Wikipedia, will take great lessons from the non-profit’s core. Wikia Search, then, is a place where:

…users could work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users had tweaked and rewritten articles on the sprawling encyclopedia.

Wikia as a whole hosts collaborative community publishing sites, and is supported by advertising. Examples of some of these communities include 24, the Muppet Wiki (one of Jimmy’s favorites), and the currently featured collaboration, Gears of War.

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