The new podcast site (and Yahoo! Music Engine plugin) is a really strong implementation for bringing podcasts to the rest of the world. We found in a research study done recently that very few people are actually consuming podcasts yet. So, it makes a lot of sense to build a set of tools that will help the general public discover, listen to and subscribe to the stuff that matters to them. Before this launch, it was really just too complicated to figure out how to get a podcast or even just identify one that might be interesting to you. You don't have to have an iPod to enjoy a podcast.
Similarly, RSS has a big adoption curve ahead of it still. The same research shows that about 27% of the US Internet population are consuming RSS feeds without being aware that RSS is the transport mechanism. Again, My Yahoo! is enabling that wider adoption of RSS by simplifying how people adopt it. It's conceivable that without the introduction of RSS into My Yahoo! that RSS consumption in general might have stayed below 5%.
Then today the search team launched Blog Search. But rather than offer a copycat solution, the team here thought about the right use case for an index of blog data. It makes much more sense integrating that index in relevant context than as purely a standalone search engine for blog content. Why would Average Joe want to search blogs? Average Joe has a lot to gain by discovering relevant blog posts, but he's not likely going to want to search against a big index of blog posts without context.
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