As more and more news organizations are producing podcasts and other kinds of content that include an audio component, it makes sense to make that content as findable as possible. So far, findability has been a challenge for audio content, unless you publish a text transcript or show notes that get indexed by the major search engines.
But now there's Podzinger -- a very cool free service. When you register the feed from your podcast in Podzinger, they grab your audio file from the feed soon after it's published. Then, behind the scenes, they use some ultra-sophisticated voice recognition software to create a rough transcript.
That transcript is rough -- definitely not good enough to publish, so it's a good thing Podzinger doesn't publish it. However, it is good enough to yield fairly accurate search results. So anyone searching for keywords at Podzinger turns up audio files which match that query.
So what? Well, this enables people who would have never heard of your audio content to find you via Google-type searches. This can vastly expand your audience, especially if your audio content is about timely or popular topics. And yes, you can generate a search feed for any query in Podzinger.
If you publish audio content that's not made available by RSS feed, or if you publish video content, you can still leverage Podzinger. First, create a feed and make sure that every time you produce an audio file, it gets added to that feed. For video, screencasts, etc., extract the audio in MP3 format, and then add those MP3 files to your feed. Then register that feed in Podzinger. You don't have to advertise this feed to the general audience, you can use it just for Podzinger if you want.
Make sure the link elements in your feed go to the appropriate landing page. For instance, if you extract audio from a video interview, the link associated with that audio file should go to the video page.
It just takes a few seconds to register your podcast feed in Podzinger, and it's free. A small investment of your time can help you vastly increase the audience for all that multimedia content you've worked hard to produce.
Learn more about Podzinger from this March 29, 2006 Inside the Net interview with founder Alex Laats.
Podzinger is not the only tool that offers this feature...
