Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
As of today, Podcasts on Pandora are now available for all users on the Pandora website and on its desktop app for Mac and Windows. The company first launched podcasts on its app last year, leveraging its Podcast Genome Project, an offshoot of Pandora’s Music Genome Project, which can personalize podcast recommendations down to an individual episode level.
Pandora is banking on this hyper-personalization, and says its system uses more than 1,500 attributes — from the show’s MPAA ratings to a user’s listening history — to drill down on shows it thinks you’d like to listen to, along with specific episodes. This is mostly done with the Podcast Genome Project’s algorithms, but there’s still a human curation component involved to help guide…