Kjellquist Blog

Now that podcasting has gained a real foothold on the Internet (somewhere approaching 1 million podcasts), the immediate question is how do I find a particular podcast that includes a subject I’m interested in? Or, how can I keep up with a particular topic without subscribing to every podcast feed that might discuss the topic occasionally?

I heard about the solution to these questions on a podcast as I was driving back from Manassas in today’s snow storm. Enter Podzinger! Podzinger is a web service search engine that allows you to search the CONTENT of podcasts! It does this by first finding RSS feeds for existing podcasts. These feeds are submitted by the authors or they find them out on the web. Podzinger then runs the podcast through a voice-to-text processor to create a text file of the podcast. They then use natural language processing to extract the key meanings of the text and create a metadata file for the podcast that represents an index.

When their search returns a positive response it identifies the podcast, its source, date and an overall description (generally provided by the author for the feed). The actual content text is excerpted along with a time tag. If you click on the podcast link you can, of course, hear the podcast. A marker on the player shows you exactly where the reference occured in the feed. Thus, you can advance rapidly to that spot rather than waiting through a long podcast.

As great as the search is, it is only the beginning. Suppose now you have a search term(s) that have gotten you some good results. Podzinger also provides a custom RSS feed from their site that will be updated every time a podcast contains your search term!

So now you can easily keep up with every podcast that mentions your favorite author, celebrity, sport, or anything else! Good hunting.