A lot of talk today on Podcast searching – see Steve and Shel’s links

I had meant to post something today on this topic – was listening to Neville and Shel earlier

Disclosure – I’ve quite a bit of experience in the audio search space, so i know a little bit

Some facts - no product is 100% accurate - the better ones are phonetic based, and use Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM) - these products can be trained to be better – costly exercise to get right - this technology is expensive - work reasonably ok with “BBC type voices” - the best one is Softsound - Softsound is owned by Autonomy, which in turn is involved (see press release) in Blinx

Also check out some cheaper alternatives - Sphinx – open source - HP Labs SpeechBot

BTWresearch, tools – for free.

Some community help needed

At present within our service, we support enclosures, which in turn is what drives podcasting, vlogging and flashcasting

podcasting – audio files for download through RSS vlogging – video files for download through RSS flashcasting – flash/swf files for download through RSS

what do people want ?

create a feed as a “podcast feed” up front ? this would help when pinging podcast related directories and services…

what about a flashcast ?

Enclosures is an awful term for the average user who wants to “create a podcast or flashcast” – need to come up with something more user friendly

thoughts welcome….

Podcasting has caught a lot of attention over the last few months – Personally I enjoy listening to podcasts from the likes of Neville and Shel at ForImmediateRelease and the Chris Pirillo show

Your head then lifts when you hear that Blogger creator Evan Williams has just launched a new startup in the podcasting space – Odeo

Anyway 2 intersting podcasting business scenarios I’ve came accross in the last few days

- broacast monitoring – by the guys at Infosential

- Pepsi Max and Podcasting – see piece here