Cory Doctorow posts today about Podzinger, the podcast aggregation service that also converts podcasts to text and allows users to search the entire text of a podcast. The technology allows you to find certain keywords and click on them to go directly to the relevant portion of the podcast.
I have talked about Podzinger before, and I list all of my RanchoCast podcasts there. Here is the RanchoCast podzinger page.
I really like Podzinger for a couple of reasons.
First, I like the design and layout of the page. You can skim down the page, read summaries of the episodes and immediately download or stream any podcast that grabs your attention.
Second, of course, is the searchable index of the converted podcasts. I wasn’t sure how well the service would handle my podcasts, since much of the content is songs with talking only at the beginning, in between and end. Surprisingly, it does a pretty good job.
It doesn’t get all of the words correct (I suspect my southern accent may have something to do with that), but it gets enough of them right to be useful. For example, I did a search for “Ray Wylie Hubbard” and it located that text in my introduction of one of Ray’s songs that I played in the last episode.
Again, it’s not perfect, but Podzinger does what other podcast aggregators do, plus the searchable text thing.
It’s a win win deal for podcast producers and listeners alike.
Newsome.Org 