A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

It must be "link to Leesa" week here on Biz Podcasting, but this is kind od relevant so I want to jump in.

Leesa is running a 31 day "tip of the day" type of series over on Podonomics Explored. On Friday, she put together a nice podcast transcription service roundup. All of these services are pay services, and rightly so. Sitting there with headphones on typing out what you're hearing is definitely something worth being paid for, but there are some automated free solutions out there.

The key to deciding which type of service is for you is the reason why you want a transcript of your show. If you actually need a paper copy of your show, then go with a transcription service. If, however, you just want a digital text transcript to post on the net so that search engines can find you, you may want to take a look at PodZinger.

PodZinger automatically transcribes your show into a searchable database. I signed up a couple of days ago (it takes a few days to crunch your feed into text) and then did a search for "linux starter kit" which I talked about on show #20. Bingo! Up it came and as the only match.

Now, it's nice for potential listeners to be able to identify podcasts that talk about a specific subject, but nobody wants to listen to an entire podcast to find the sentence or two that they're looking for. PodZinger purports to be able to play just the few minutes of the podcast surrounding the search term, but I can't get it to work yet.

I'm really pumped about this technology, but after a look at the transcription I have to admit that it's not very good. There's a lot of gibberish in there and I'm pretty sure we don't speak gibberish :)

The technology has promise, though!