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).