by Lee Gibbons, Podango CEO

The Podango team are getting excited about the opportunity to learn that we are about to dive into as we open our “closed beta” of Podango Press. This bit of work is the third manifestation a fundamental shift in vision our company embraced over one year ago. (The first was the development of our API set, and the second was the release of our embeddable, viral players). That paradigm shift was from a paradigm of Podango as a walled garden, destination site where people would interact around easy-to-create podcast-centric pages to Podango as a set of useful, easy-to-use services and widgets that can enable other points of interaction across the web with rich media.

Our brand is subservient to the brands that are the shows hosted on Podango. We are an enabling set of components, sometimes more closely tied together than others. But, fundamentally, our mission is to make rich media communications easily and affordably distributed and socially interactive both by context and function. That means our technology is enabling content everywhere and anywhere, and can also be reflected through Podango.com.

Back to Podango Press. One of the realizations we have had over the past year is that people struggle to create rich-media capable blogs. They also need a center, or hub, from which to anchor their new media publishing activities that takes advantage of the properties of blogging, while being SEO enabled and rich in new media functionality. Setting up such a blog is hard work and requires way too much expertise most people with expertise in areas other than web development just shouldn’t have to worry about.

Podango Press is based upon WordPress, podPress and a set of themes, plugins, and best practices that the most proficient podcasters and bloggers have taught us how to configure. It is a turnkey service that is designed to make setup and maintenance “stupid proof.” The goal has been to make it easy enough for newbie users, yet complete enough that pros won’t hesitate to embrace and endorse it. We think we are hitting the mark. We look forward to learning the truth about that and making it true.

For those interested in applying to be part of the closed beta, please shoot us an email at beta AT podango.com and grovel and plead your case. We are looking for a variety of users with varying podcasting and blogging prowess, so don’t hesitate to jump in and get really wet with us in figuring out how this product needs to change to meet your/our objectives.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under beta, Podango Press, Closed Beta, WordPress, podPress, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.