Free Podcast Services

Performance has been a bit spotty at Odeo lately so I've been experimenting with other free services for uploading and creating popdcasts and also having the ability to easily embed a podcast player into a blog post or other webpage. One of the problems I've had with the Odeo player is its tendency to choke while using IE as the browser. It works fine in Firefox, Flock, and a few other browsers that I have tried. I don't use IE much myself, but about 50% of my blog readers do use it, so I don't want them to go away without listening. I haven't tried to figure out whether the problem is on the Odeo side of things or not, but for some reason I feel like they (Odeo) might not be long for the world, so I'm looking for alternatives.

All that I'm looking for is a service that is 1) free, 2) allows uploads of podcasts created on my computer, 3) has an easy to embed podcast player that works in Blogger AND WordPress, and doesn't have major annoyances such as intrusive advertising. Two that I've tried with less than successful results were WildVoice and SwitchPod. I still have hope for WildVoice and have received communications from them about how I can get the embedded player to work in Blogger, but haven't got it to work just yet.

To see how these different players render in a blog post, I made four short recordings while reading from Richard Florida’s book “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Those four recordings/players are shown below for you to compare and contrast.
--------------

Richard Florida - Part 1 on Gcast

--------------

Richard Florida - Part 2 on Odeo

powered by ODEO
--------------

Richard Florida - Part 3 on Podomatic
Barry's podcast

---------------

Richard Florida - Part 4 on Clickcaster

Technorati Tags: Gcast, Odeo, Clickcaster, Podomatic, podcasting