There’s no lack of podcasting directories. If I blogged about every new one that came along it would get old fast. But this week a new one was launched that deserves mentioning.
ZapZap is a "user-managed podcast episode directory". They list individual episodes of audio and video podcasts for you to browse and "zap". Zapping an episode adds it to your own zaplist and also serves as a sort of popularity meter for other ZapZap users. The more zaps an episode gets the more popular it is. This is a similar system to the popular social news site , Digg.
ZapZap sports your typical Web 2.0 look and feel. At least they decided to keep the vowels rather than opting for a name like ZpZp. The interface is nice and offers a pleasant user experience. It takes a couple minutes to realize that the Audio and Video tabs list individual episodes while the Channels tab lists podcast by show name. Zapping a channel turns on an autozap feature. This zaps all the future episodes for you.
Feeds are provided for recent popular episodes, recent episodes in a category and your zaplist. However, if I found a channel that I liked, there wasn’t an easy, quick way to subscribe to that show. They don’t even provide the podcast feed in the channel profile. All I could do is zap individual episodes and then subscribe to my zaplist.
Another problem I ran into is that the iTunes subscribe button opened Juice Receiver on my computer. If they used the itpc:// prefix on the feed links, I think that would that would fix the problem.
Since the site is new, the only a few thousand shows are listed so far and the zaps are few, but if it catches on, ZapZap could be a great way to find new material to listen to. I like that I can search according to popularity according to episodes that have been zapped by others. I also like that I can subscribe to my Zaplist. I can piece together a hodge podge of individual episodes and subscribe to that list without subscribing to the entire show and getting every episode. This makes it easy to take a variety of new stuff to sample on the go.
I plan to keep an eye on this one. We’ll see if they stay the course. I’m not sure what their business model is.
In any case, it’s is worth adding your podcast to ZapZap. To submit your podcast, visit the ZapZap site, scroll down to the bottom and click on Add a Channel.
Dan Kuykendall is host of Mighty Seek, a podcast on Web Application Security. You might know him as the creator of Podpress, one of the best podcast publishing systems available (and it’s free). But that’s not what this post is about.
Mon, Jul 17, 2006
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