Flash for Audio, Not Just Video

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TechCrunch is profiling a new startup called iJigg that is prettty much like Digg for music. Users can submit songs that they've created, vote on submitted songs, and listen to them right in their web browser. The site is yet another example of Flash and HTML working together. There are other examples of this as well, perhaps the best being the stock pages of Google and Yahoo finance.

Flash is an excellent tool to display online video, as YouTube has shown, but its equally good at playing audio in the browser. The new Flex podcast uses Odeo to play right on the Flex Show webpage, without having to launch a seperate application, like iTunes, to listen to it.

Now, what would be really cool is if Adobe created some sort of portable device that would allow you take all your Flash content on the road with you. You could listen to your podcasts from Odeo and watch videos from YouTube and all the other websites using Flash for video, without having to convert directly to the iPod formats. Even better would be to have Flash work on the iPod, but it doesn't look like that's going to be happening any time soon.