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Looking for Internet radio stations? You can browse or do keyword searches with the new search engine iheard, at http://www.iheard.com/ .

The front of the site has a directory with the usual categories (jazz, rock, folk, oldies, talk) and a couple of unexpected (ambient, eclectic.) (There’s a much more detailed category page if you want one.) There’s also a keyword search. I did a search for one of my favorite Internet radio stations, Groove Salad, and got three results. Results include brief description, genre, a play button, and (painfully small) icons that indicate the software you’ll need to play the station (Real, WinAmp, etc.)

Click on the name of the station for a little more information about the station, but it’s not clear where the ratings are coming from and sometimes the descriptions are just too minimal.

If you don’t know what you want to listen to and can’t even think of something to search, you can always check out the most popular stations or even the stations organized by language. I just wish a bit more information was offered…

According to the top of the its page, Yahoo Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com/) is shutting down October 31. Yahoo “apologizes deeply”, but it’s still going.

I’m baffled. Yahoo Podcasts was nice. It had a lot of content. It worked. Why is it being shut down? Just as the new iPods have been released, new DRM-free music stores are becoming available on Amazon (to spur the interest in portable music and thus other portable audio content), why is it being shut down? Yahoo has one property that Google doesn’t have, why is it being shut down?

Oh, well. Perhaps we’ll hear, perhaps not. In the meantime, to find podcasts of interest I recommend Podcast Alley and PodcastPickle (and its podcast metasearch, Podcast Inspector. If you’re more interested in searching podcast transcriptions than browsing podcasts, I recommend Podzinger, which is now known as EveryZing (and which searches audio and video).

Yeah, I’m still an old-fashioned text crawler, but I am starting to get more interested in the Internet radio out there. I was not aware of the huge number of programs listed at BlogTalkRadio http://www.blogtalkradio.com/.

The site, which is in beta, describes itself as “extending the blog”. The free service allows folks with blogs to create podcasts to go along with them. Show listings are divided into a number of categories, including business, politics, sports, education, and paranormal. You can also search by keyword if you like.

A search for home found 213 hosts and 999 shows. At the top of the search results you can filter your results by country, language, and genre. Search results give show name and description, listing of when the next show will be, and a pointer to play the most recent show.

The shows have their own pages, providing additional information on the show as well as pointers to archived segments and additional program notes (most of the shows I looked at did not have any program notes.) The couple of shows I listed to sounded like it was basically a conference call which was being recorded, but that’s not a bad thing. I could hear everything fine.

I can see that this site could be a huge timesink for me. My only issue with it was load time. Sometimes just doing a simple keyword search took a lot longer than it should have. And sometimes just loading a clip to listen to was a bit of a wait. Might be because things are in beta. Worth a look, but be prepared to spend a little extra time.

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