Yodio unveiled its new audio publishing service and online marketplace, described as the Blogger of podcasting, at the DEMO 07 conference today.

Yodio hopes to define a new category of site, a Web community for anyone to create, publish, and buy/sell personal audio recordings. Yodio lets users record by phone using Yodio’s toll-free service or manually upload their prerecorded MP3 files.

“Yodio is to podcasting as Blogger was to blogging — an easy to use Web application that helped define a new application category,” said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO conference. “Yodio not only provides best-of-breed features that consumers will love to use, but Yodio has delivered a unique platform for easily creating, capturing and distributing rich media content.

Yodio lets users record audio tracks from any phone, mix with their digital images, and publish to the Web for purchase and download.

“For a majority of consumers, creating podcasts is too difficult. It requires new hardware, software and time. Also missing is an incentive to record and way for consumers to market and monetize their own content,” said Clay Loges, Yodio President and CEO. “Yodio’s goal is simple: we want everyone to share their cultural experiences, travel tips, business insight or entertainment (music, comedy, etc) in audio form and post it for others to benefit by saving time and money. Everyone can become a ‘citizen journalist’ by sharing their tips with the world. And, to someone, somewhere, those tips are worth a small fee.”

Features:

• 1-877-MY-YODIO – a proprietary toll-free recording system that uses speech recognition to recognize the caller, supports custom prompts, captures and converts the audio, and automatically uploads and arranges the recordings on www.yodio.com to be produced;
• Yodio Audio Products – a set of rich audio recordings that feature a custom player experience which can be distributed in different ways:
• Yodiocard – a free 2 minute audio greeting or profile that can be customized with a photo and either emailed or posted to any HTML-supported websites, such as www.myspace.com, www.ebay.com or www.craigslist.com;
• Yodiocast – an unlimited single-track audio recording and image that can be personalized, categorized and priced by the user for download;
• Yodiotour – an unlimited, multi-track audio album with synchronized images that is categorized and personalized by the user for download.
• Community Forum – a community for members to discuss, subscribe, and promote Yodio files to be published or new content topics;
• Marketplace – a stored-value system that lets users price and download Yodiocasts and Yodiotours via PayPal and through merchant banks; a micro-payment system handles paying royalty out to content creators.

Yodio doesn’t charge for its basic audio creation and publishing services. Yodio plans to rely on membership download and audio sponsorship fees.