PodJournals has announced the beta release of its social podcasting service, as well as client software for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher.

According to the company, their service is designed to make the podcast the new center of the social networking experience.

“Podcasting has traditionally been a static, top-down medium, but we see that it will be a dynamic social experience,” said PodJournals President Steven Schuldt, “We let you do more than just easily create and subscribe to podcasts, we let you create dynamic public and private ‘friendcasts’ which give you the audio and video you’re most interested in via a single podcast.”

The PodJournals beta release is free and lets members create up to 10 journals and podcasts. Each podcast can be collaboratively managed and includes full privacy-scoping to allow only identified family and friends access to individual pieces of audio and video content.

“We think Apple Computer’s forthcoming iTV device is going to be game-changing, and we believe that going forward people are going to be doing more social networking and video on their televisions, iPods and mobile phones and less on the web,” said Mr. Schuldt, “we’ve built PodJournals to make this transition simple.”