Watching odeo grow - a long tail directory

We had our celebration today and watched the invites go out. It’s really exciting to see people use the site. Watch what they subscribe to. A few channels which are clearly going to be popular such as IT Conversations are getting a lot of subscribers. Our hope is that Odeo will be a way for people to find the long tail of content. Shows for the niche.

Last week i added a very simple little feature, the zeitgiest, which showed the most recent 5 channels people have subscribed to. Just to create some churn, some way of seeing what’s happening across the site.

Once we launched, the zeitgeist also a way to see in to the users activity. Each time i reload the page, i get a different set of interesting channels which are just being discovered. But with hundreds instead of dozens of users, the feel of the site changes. There’s more activity. So i whipped up a whole zeitgeist page. Within a couple minutes of getting the idea, the working code was deployed to the staging servers, played with, and then pushed out to the site. Rails is truly wonderful for this kind of thing.

Eventually i’ll expand it out and to try and make it as cool as the 43 things zeitgeist.

One thing i get from the zeitgeist already is it shows what kinds of channels people are subscribing too. Odeo does have featured channels but the directory is built to be navigated horizontally and organically. Most of the time users today on odeo are the first person to subscribe to that channel. Making a directory which works for finding and evaluating audio content with a focus on the tail not the head has been tricky, but perhaps we’ve figured part of it out.