Friday, July 27, 2007
Locating Podcasts
Finding podcasts intrigues me mainly because I'm curious as to what the search engines are actually searching. Image search engines focus on the text around the image, but podcasts--since they are produced in audio format--lack keywords unless metatags are used to tag their content. I have yet to find a podcast search engine that indexes the entire content of a podcast. It appears that the technology has not yet been able to translate audio directly into text (e.g., a transcript of a lecture). Furthermore, as podcasts gain more attraction--especially in the academic world--it will be interesting to see how they are to be cited in research papers.
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1 comment:
Interesting observation. Never thought about that before.
Usually, podcasts are linked to a blog entry that would contain the meta tags describing the contents of the podcast. As you noted, however, there's no systemic way to index all the keywords in a given podcast (which can contain up to an hour's worth speaking) for searching.
What some people have done, though, (and it's a bit ironic) is to type up transcripts for podcasts. Sort of like captions for the hearing impaired for movies.
I find it amusing that although the Net generation treat podcasts like a revolution, old-timers probably see it as no more than an extention of the world of radio, only on a smaller, personal scale. The older generation has always valued radio, since there's something magical (or nostalgic) about receiving information on an exclusively auditory basis.
And unlike TV, podcasts/radio allow the user to do something else at the same time, whether it is jogging, knitting, or driving.
I sometimes use my mp3 player to store podcasts so I can listen to something when I'm on a plane (or waiting at the airport).
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