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"San Francisco-based Houndbite, which appears to have launched stealthily in November, is a new audio site founded by former StubHub VP of Sales Noah Shanok, with a team that includes comedian Sammy Wegent, biz dev guy Tom O'Brien, sound engineer Kennet Manuel and computer scientist Ian Spiro.  \nThe founder has described the service in passing as \"YouTube for Audio\", but really the model is slightly different: users submit interesting or amusing soundbites, the users vote for their favorites and the winning clips are packaged up into a weekly podcast called \"Houndcast\".  You can upload clips you've recorded, record live on the site or submit clips by phone.  As a result, it feels more like a collaborative podcast than a clip-sharing site.  To motivate users, Houndbite also gives out prizes - for the first few weeks, the top user received an iPod Nano, but now the prizes are a little less upmarket: tee shirts, coffee mugs, stickers and other Houndbites schwag. \nIt's tempting to say this would have worked better as a literal \"YouTube for Audio\", but that's already been tried.  Evoca allows users to create audio recordings, share them and post them to blogs and MySpace via the Evoca widget.  It's a good idea and the feature that lets you collect voice comments on blogs is fairly useful.  That said, audio just seems to lack the wide appeal of video clips and photos - it's mainly used to fill in time when people don't have access to a computer, meaning there's more demand for long-form iPod downloads and radio show replacements.  The \"YouTube for Audio\", if it's ever built, would probably be more like ZapZap's \"Digg for Podcasts\" than a YouTube clone.  In short, Houndcast could be a success on the podcast charts if they can find some interesting clips, but I doubt many people will drop by to find the gems among the user-submitted audio.\nPS. To protect Houndbite's innocent founders, this post is not part of the Insulting Comments Contest - look out for another post in that category later today.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/12/27/houndbite-youtube-for-audio-clips/>