Pluggd wants to bring podcasts to the masses -- a significant challenge given that Forrester Research just noted that only 1 percent of online households regularly download the audio programs.

But 31-year-old Pluggd founder Alexander Castro, a former Microsoft and Amazon.com developer, believes his 4-month-old startup has cracked the code with a new consumer podcasting service that he describes as a cross between "del.icio.us, iTunes and MySpace."

When Pluggd debuts next month, Castro says the free service will allow consumers to browse tens of thousands of podcasts, create their own Web pages around the audio programs and share their favorites with friends. Currently, in private tests, Pluggd is compiling 37,000 podcasts -- more than twice as many as competitor PodShow, Castro said. It does this by automatically "crawling" the Web for RSS feeds and then determining which ones relate to podcasts, unlike other services that require podcasters to submit their shows to an online directory.

There is plenty of noise in the Internet audio arena, with venture capitalist Baris Karadogan recently listing no less than 27 Web 2.0 companies in the space. Deep-pocketed venture capitalists have backed companies such as Seattle's Melodeo, San Francicso's PodShow and Menlo Park, Calif.-based PodTech Network.

As a former product and program manager for Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk Web service, Castro says the overall podcast experience has been "pretty bad." He said a number of podcasting startups have slapped together some code with community features, but none are really built to scale for millions of users.

Pluggd, with five people in the Ukraine and two in the United States, hopes to change that. And in the process it plans to make money through targeted advertisements that are embedded in the audio -- and eventually video -- programs.

Castro said the company's ad network -- similar to Google's AdSense -- could be "pretty dramatic." He added that Pluggd's "secret sauce" is placing relevant ads in online audio and video -- a difficult technological hurdle but one that plays into Castro's strengths in speech recognition and digital media.

Asked if he truly has solved that problem, Castro confidently responded: "I know I have." For example, he said someone listening to a podcast in Seattle about skiing could be served advertisements about Whistler or Crystal Mountain while the skier in Vermont could get an ad for Sugarbush Resort.

Castro just recently started looking for capital, with plans to present the Pluggd business plan at next week's Early Stage Investment Forum in Seattle. While the young startup has a noteworthy advisory board (including former Expedia Corporate Travel President Matt Hulett and RealNetworks Vice President Dave Richards), Castro admits that some VCs are turned off by the podcasting hype. Still, he looks at how RSS is changing the way people consume content and believes the opportunity is huge.

"With every big transition, there are always some big winners," said Castro. "I went into this thinking why can't we be the next Google or eBay or whatever. It is about time for Seattle to have another success story after Real and Amazon a few years ago. So everything I try to do in terms of figuring out the business model, the strategy and who I am pulling into the company is all around long-term huge sustainable success... We really want to swing for the fences."