Being the superdude that he is, Rey gave me one of his invites to Odeo today. Apparently they’re quite hard to come by, although they’re not as sought after as Gmail invites were last year. When you can get an Odeo invite on eBay, you’ll know it’s taken off big time.

So what’s Odeo all about? Well it’s about podcasting which, apparently, is gonna be the next big thing. Podcasting is just a fancy name for audio blogging really, where you record yourself speaking la blog and post an MP3 of it to your weblog. The only difference is that podcasting can be more than someone just speaking their blog outloud. Seasoned podcasters will add a soundtrack or musical interludes to their production, and will also discard the ‘blog’ format altogether, instead going for radio-show-esque, sketch-show-esque, or whatever-esque.

Where Odeo comes into this at the moment is that it lets you find podcasts easily, it lets you subscribe to channels (and optionally download new podcasts to your computer automagically), and it allows you to easily manage all your podcasts subscriptions. Where Odeo will come into this in the future (it’s in beta at the moment, surprise surprise) is by giving you the means to create your own podcasts. Unfortunately, this part of Odeo hasn’t been developed yet, so I can’t even give you an idea of how it might work or what features it might have, etc, but I expect it will be a paid part of the service (Odeo Incorporated has to start making money somewhere along the line).

So how useful is Odeo at the moment? Well it’s ok, but it hasn’t struck me as anything too impressive. It’s all fairly straight forward stuff, although the ability to listen to podcasts right from within the Odeo site is pretty slick. I have already found some sweet podcasts with varying styles (from varying genres maybe?) and the Odeo Syncr manages to download them to my PC without problem most of the time. However, it’s what’s coming in the future that will rock, and it might just be the start of the podcasting revolution. I know Rey will be in on it :)