ONTARIO, CA -- The third keynote presented Friday at the Portable Media Expo was given by Joe Hayashi, Senior Director of Product management for Yahoo! Mr. Hayashi took a few moments to let us know why Yahoo! loves podcasting, what they've learned, and where podcasting and subscription media is going.

Mr. Hayashi noted that podcasting is the latest wave of social media for a number of reasons, including the breadth of content, the ability to personalize, the power of audio and the human voice, and the fact that audio can easily scale from a one-to-one to a one-to-many medium. According to Mr. Hayashi, Yahoo! felt that consumers needed an easier way to find and listen to great podcasts.

From his perspective, delivering podcasts fits into Yahoo!s mission to deliver the right content to people when and where they want it. The company feels that Yahoo! can attract an existing audience to podcasts, provide accessibility and simplicity, and provide a podcast exposure across the entire Yahoo! network.

Mr. Hayashi polled the audience, and it looked that around 85% have already tried Yahoo!'s podcast beta site, but he then gave us a demo just to be sure.

Of course the site offers a way to search podcasts. Once a podcast has been located, one can either listen to the podcast, or subscribe to it. If you choose to listen to the podcast, you are provided with a playback speed control; if you'd like to subscribe, you can do it via either Yahoo Music, or Apple's iTunes.

Mr. Hayashi then offered us some early insights since the site was launched nearly a month ago. The largest audience segment is greater than 80% male, in an age range from 30-44. However, women are stronger in the younger demographics, similar to the evolution of the blogging phenomenon.

A surprising statistic is that people seem to be OK listening from their PC (or Mac) versus a handheld device. Yahoo has noticed that there are twice as many who choose to listen to a podcast versus subscribing to it. This could be due to the fact that not all listeners have portable devices. For those that do choose to subscribe, they subscribe to 3 or more podcasts.

The company also noted that community matters, in that it has allowed people to rate podcasts. Each podcast also has various keywords associated with it, so that one can tell with a quick glance what a particular podcast is all about.

Mr. Hayashi noted that metadata is the lifeline to your listeners. He stressed the importance of creating and using show notes, creating and using album art, to put something in the duration field, be careful of the RSS data format, to use a spell checker, to match ID3 tags to episode information, and to use an RSS validation so that your feed is processed properly.

As for the future of podcasting, Mr. Hayashi is seeing growth that many like to see, in that it is moving up and to the right. According to him, here will be more content, in more genres and forms. Consumption will tend towards personalization, in that users are subscribing to THEIR media.

Publishers will be bringing new tools to market, and new publishers will enter the space. More devices will offer support for this type of media, including phones, TVs, PSP and more, and of course there's a monetization angle, where we'll be seeing more marketing and advertising tools, as well as premium content.

Finally, Mr. Hayashi stressed the importance of the podcasting community to stay open (in terms of standards) and not to lose their passion!