Webmonkey Radio Podcast: Videoblogging
On Webmonkey radio, we get the Web’s most interesting and influential people to talk about who they are, what they do, and what they think. In this podcast, Michael Calore explores videoblogging.
Real Stern Shocker: No Podcast
Satellite radio is a pretty good technology that’s attracting a respectable audience primarily through excellent programming. But let’s be clear — satellite doesn’t hold a candle to podcasting, and not even Howard Stern can change that.
Sirius signed Stern for $500 million, a deal that’s helped it attract nearly 3.5 million subscribers. (If the brokers who drove me around Brooklyn apartment shopping last week are any indication, a high percentage of Stern fans bought satellite radio receivers in anticipation of his show’s Jan. 9 debut.)
It’s hard to argue with a half billion incentives. But — aside from cash — it’s hard to see what satellite could do for Stern that podcasting couldn’t do better. If his primary motivation for ditching traditional radio wasn’t money but escape from the FCC’s censors, as I believe it was, the internet would have been a better choice, hands down.
Podcast Chaos Be Gone
By Kim Zetter
Two new search engines offer to do for podcasting what Technorati does for blogs by letting users search podcasts by keyword to single out audio that suits their interests.
Podzinger and blinkx scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching. It’s a significant step above traditional search engines that identify only keywords in a podcast’s metadata, such as the headline and introductory notes describing the audio file’s general content.
Podzinger, in beta until mid-December, lets users jump to the spot in a podcast where their search term appears, rather than forcing them to scan an entire program for pertinent parts as blinkx does. Its minimalist design has an uncluttered search page, à la Google. And Podcasters can link to a searchable index of their content in order to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.
Both Podzinger and blinkx include information about the source of the podcast and excerpts of text translated from the podcast with the relevant search terms highlighted. But Podzinger’s information is more extensive and the results include a counter indicating where in the podcast the snippet is located. And Podzinger allows users to click on the Play button to hear the excerpt and determine its relevancy before clicking on a link to download the entire podcast.
A third search engine, launched last spring by TVEyes and called Podscope, searches podcasts but scans only for the sounds of syllables rather than full words. AOL recently announced plans to integrate Podscope into the portal’s search page.
“The (podcast) world is exploding,” said Alex Laats, president of the business division of BBN Technologies that created Podzinger. “The problem, though, is that … it’s very difficult to find what you want to find in podcasts…. Google proved that relevance of results means almost everything. But our view is that without the words you can’t get the relevant results.”