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Loomia, a Podcast and Videocast Search Engine

By Wendy Boswell, About.com

Loomia

What is Loomia?

Loomia is a relatively smallish audio and video search engine that focuses mostly on podcasts and videos. What I liked most about Loomia was the home page; clean, uncluttered, with a focus on a lot of "most popular" lists that were fun to browse.

How to Use Loomia

Loomia is not only an audio and video search engine, it's also a community where you can tag and share your favorite podcasts and video productions. You'll get more out of Loomia if you sign up (it's free), because you'll get personalized video and audio recommendations as well as the opportunity to rate your favorites and share them with the Loomia community; not to mention downloading all the fun audio and video content you find to your media player.

Searching on Loomia is completely basic; just type in what you're looking for and go. There does not seem to be much in the way of special search tricks that you can use; Loomia didn't recognize much of what I threw it's way as far as search syntax. However, if you type in a simple phrase, Loomia can retrieve what you're looking for most of the time. I would love to see more searching options in the future to give more power to the serious audio and videophile.

What I Like About Loomia

I'm a sucker for lists, and Loomia has these in spades all over the home page. All kinds of good stuff here: most popular audio today, most active users, most popular tags, recently updated channels, etc. I spent more time checking out what was on the home page than I did actually searching; and I believe that this might be more of Loomia's strength, actually - a hub of user-generated popular audio and video content ala Digg or del.icio.us.

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