Yahoo! tunes into podcasts: On Monday, Yahoo is launching Yahoo Podcasts, a podcasting search, directory and listening service. I’d like to add that I personally believe it was a major mojo move for Yahoo! to announce the service first in an interview with a podcaster, John Furrier of the infoTech Podcast. A transcript of John’s interview with Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Geoff Ralston is also avaiable at that link.

Also, here’s the AP story.

Of course, this must be another sign of the death of podcasting. (Note to the humor-challenge: the term “death of podcasting” is a reference to the preceeding link, a satirical piece by Steve Gillmor.)

Sweetness smiling down: Just watching ESPN and see that #7 on Chris Berman’s top 10 plays of the week’s is Jarrett Payton’s first NFL touchdown (in his second game). While the play did not include the flash and wildness of a typical play of the week, it is a special moment for those who know Jarrett’s hard-working journey to the NFL and who know that he is the son of the late Walter Payton, one of the greatest (and favorite) players in NFL history.

GE brings a sorta Web 2.0 thingee to life: This white board flash thing from G.E. has been around for a while — I’ve seen it tied into the company’s online advertising. However, they’ve recently added a collaboration feature that now makes it (at least to me) more than a gimmick, but a tool that can be used in certain conference call circumstances. Hint: there’s a typing tool as I doubt few of us can use a mouse or track pad as a drawing tool with enough skill or speed to be that practical in a business meeting context.

If you’re away from home, however, it may be fun to draw pictures with your young children back home.

The first book I read about Katrina: Will be the one written by New Orleans native Michael Lewis. I guess the article in today’s NYT Magazine is a preview of how fascinating it will be. Everything he writes is fascinating.

The Google RSS reader makes me feel illiterate (or, Why can’t Rex read?): Besides giving me lots of “Oops, an error occured” messages, Google’s new RSS reader is uncharacteristically unintutive. This is scary for me to say, but I can’t figure out how to use it. As I read reviews from people saying it misses this or that feature, I’m thinking to myself, to heck with adding features, I can’t figure out the ones they already have.

And that’s bad. Because if I am confused, I’m fearful that those who’ve never used an RSS reader are going to be overwhelmed — and Google should be all about being “simple.”

I never had this problem with gmail. I “got it” the first time I used it and like many things about it. It has never confused or baffled me the way the Google reader does. Gmail works on my Mac in every browser I use: Firefox & Safari and an old version of IE.

Yet I can’t get the Google reader to work in a way I understand in any of these browsers. And I’m not talking about it being buggy (which it is), I’m talking about it be head-scratching confusing to me.

Perhaps I should not have so quickly imported an OPML file with a few dozen feeds (however, that’s what I usually do to try out a new reader). I am challeged now to figure out how to manage a long list of feeds, something that is easy to do in other readers that have something akin to “folders” in which you can organize multiple lists. There’s something called “label” and I think I’ve created several of them and perhaps they are supposed to be like folders, but all my guesses as to how they work have come up short. I don’t even know where they’ve disappeared to.

Figuring I should at least see what the reader is like for someone starting from scratch, I decided to start all over, but now I can’t figure out an easy way to unsubscribe to a large batch of feeds. And when I unsubscribe one feed at a time (which is, in itself, a challenge to figure out how to do), I get the feeling that the feed is not really unsubscribed. I get this feeling because the next time I come back to the reader, the feed is still active.

Again, I was hoping Google would offer a simple “starter solution” for people who fear the whole “newsreader” thing, but I now fear if the Google reader is someones first experience with a newsreader, they’ll give up after a few minutes and not try again for months.

I still recommend Bloglines for a web-based reader, or wait a couple weeks for Yahoos new reader.

If you’ve had a good experience with the Google reader or you can explain it in a way that a non-technical, RSS-averse, lay person could understand (which is the type of person I think a Google-branded reader would appeal to), please feel free to add a comment to the post. I’ve got better things to do tonight than keep trying to figure out how to clear out all those feeds.

Update: I can’t figure out where I came up with that Yahoo! new news reader remark, but since I’m not able to reconstruct the mix-up that led me to file that mistake away, I’ll remove it. Obviously, MyYahoo and other Yahoo features have been using RSS feeds for a long, long time. (Thanks to Steve for asking the question.)

Update II: While watching tonight’s football game, I decided to revisiting the Google reader to at least figure out why I was having so much difficulty with the interface. I figured out my problem. I was confused because I was trying to filter it through a newsreader interface metaphor that is based on an email client interface. Duh. As a Mac user, I should have recognized that when you click on the “Your Subscriptions” option, you have a OSX-ish interface metaphor. So, if you use iTunes and can use that as a metaphor to which to compare the Google reader interface. Think of the list of subscriptions in the right box as your “library” and the label window as “playlists.” You can have the same feed in multiple playlists, I mean, labels. I still don’t like it, but at least now, I understand how it works.

Pacman needs some love, people: I think when a rookie gets major national press coverage for how fans boo him whenever he walks onto the field and because his teammates stick him with a $14,000 restaurant tab, it’s time for someone to start an unofficial fan club for that rookie.

Okay, I volunteer. I’ve already purchased a #32 P. Jones jersey (while the link goes to one that has merely “Jones,” mine says P. Jones) and the other day I registered the domain PacManFans.com (no link ’cause there’s nothing there yet).

Who knows, maybe some day soon I will link that URL to an I have forwarded the PacManFans.com URL to a possible “unofficial” weblog (temporary address - http://pacmanfans.blogspot.com/) I may (or may not) post to about the future NFL Hall of Famer that everyone I know except me loves to hate.

If you’d like to join my unofficial Pacman Jones fan club, I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll actually have members or dues or anything like that. I figure why go and do something to invite lawsuits from both a giant videogame company and an NFL football player who already has a record of suing people.

So, let me get this on the record: The Unofficial PacMan Fan Club has no affiliation with either the videogame PacMan or with Pacman Adam Jones or, for that matter, with Atari (or whoever owns the Pacman license) or the NFL.

Update: Pacman just broke open a kickoff return, so, as I’ve said before, maybe the boos will stop.

Jason Fried, philosopreneur: Tightly written, convincing and inspirational. Jason Fried continues to articulate the essence — and power — of small business.

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