We here at Kwote.Me have been working.  As pretty and informative as this blog is, it’s not the reason Kwote.Me was brought into existence.  No, we’ve been sneaky.

As we’ve mentioned before, Kwote.Me is interested not only in exploring the bleeding edge of podcasting technology, but also in creating the bleeding edge.  What fun would it be if we just wrote about stuff we should do?  Well this time, we did it.

Before I go spilling the beans, allow me to set up the suspense.

Houston, we have a problem.

Podcasting has been around in it’s current form for years, but it’s popularity has plateaued over the past couple.  We explored one of the reasons for this in our Transcription post, and it’s significant:

Unless looking for a podcast in particular, a typical Googler will not download a 20mb – 60mb file to find the information they were looking for.  Likewise, they’re not going to listen to 20 – 60 minutes of content to find the information.

We’ve been limiting our audience only to those who were willing to download large files and invest the length of the podcast looking for their answer.  Imagine if Google required up to a 60 minute wait time before your results came back.  That’s what we’re doing with our podcasts.  In today’s information age, quickly finding information is key, and it’s been a major disadvantage to podcasting.

What We’re Up To

Advantage, Podcasters.

Imagine if Google required up to a 60 minute wait time before your results came back.  That’s what we’re doing with our podcasts.

Now, imagine if we had a way to dynamically extract as little as 10 seconds, and as much as 5 minutes out of a podcast.  Imagine finding a bit in a podcast you thought should be shared, and you could share only that bit.  Imagine immediate access to specific parts of your podcast without the listener having to download the entire podcast, and most importantly, without them having to wait.

This is what we’re up to.

We’ve created a tool that will allow anyone to extract up to 5 minutes from a podcast and create a new file from it.  Sounds simple, yes, but consider the possibilities.  Any of your listeners can create a small bit (or Kwote) of a podcast they found interesting.  Kwote.Me would extract the Kwote from the full podcast, generate the new file, and provide a tinyURL-esque url for it to be shared.  For instance, if you pulled a 30-second Kwote out of a podcast, it would be found at a small url such as http://kwote.me/H4s2.  It could be tweeted, emailed, shared any way you want, and the users would have instantaneous access to just the part of your podcast that contains the juicy information they’re looking for.  No more listening for half an hour to find what everybody’s talking about.

“But what about Copyrights?”

No more listening for half an hour to find what everybody’s talking about.

Techically, when you create a Kwote, it alter’s the file.  Of course that breaks most (if not all) copyright laws, which means we can only offer the Kwote.Me tool to those podcast owners who allow us to alter their podcasts.  Is this a problem?  No, in fact it’s a solution.  Podcasters will benefit most from these tools, and if they choose not to participate, they won’t benefit.  The tool works just as well with one podcast as it does with thousands (we already have 2).  If your podcast is included in the Kwote.Me tool, your listeners will be able to share the best parts of your podcast.  If you don’t, they don’t.  No skin off our backs.

“I have to spend the time extracting the Kwotes to get this to work?”

You have listeners, don’t you?  This is the beauty of the tool.  Anyone who wants to share a Kwote from your podcast can.  This isn’t a tool for you.  This is a tool for everybody.  If somebody likes a bit from your podcast, they can create a Kwote with zero interaction from you.  Zero interaction means zero work.

“But they can listen to my podcast without the download being recorded”

No, they can listen to part of the podcast without the download being recorded.  Besides, we’ll be tracking how many times your Kwote has been listened to, and anyone listening to a Kwote from your podcast will have the opportunity to download your podcast while listening to the Kwote.  We’ll have a link to both the podcast page, as well as the file itself right above the Kwote player.

“Does this work with .ogg files?”

No.

“Will this work with .ogg files?”

No.  Get over it.

So there you have it.  What we’ve been spending our time on the last few weeks.  The Kwote.Me tool isn’t public yet, but I can assure you it works.  Stay tuned to this blog as we slowly release functionality and keep up with bugs.  Soon, we’ll have the full version Kwote.Me tool available for your podcast.

You can’t play with it just yet, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities with this.  How do you think this could be used to benefit podcasting?

Podcasting is a funny animal.  As much as we’ve heard about how audio (and video for that matter) will dominate content on the net, it isn’t happening.  Text is still king, even though talk podcasts consist of that same text just in speech format.  So why aren’t we seeing podcasting making it to mainstream?  There’s one commanding reason:  searchability.

Finding information inside a podcast is, for the most part, impossible.  We do have ways of compensating, typically by adding a human element with show notes or tags.  For some this is sufficient in that, if done perfectly, the show notes should hit every key word in the podcast.  The tags would then be picked up by Google and the other search engines leading listeners to that podcast.

But there are two major flaws with this ideology.

• You cannot tag every possible key word. If you did, you wouldn’t be tagging, you’d be transcribing.  As a result it is inevitible that somebody will search for a key word in your podcast that they will not find.
• The information is too difficult to get to. Unless looking for a podcast in particular, a typical Googler will not download a 20mb – 60mb file to find the information they were looking for.  Likewise, they’re not going to listen to 20 – 60 minutes of content to find the information.  They may have tagged the podcast appropriately, but the searcher would still have to download the entire podcast and find the part where they talked about the subject they were looking for.

Audio information simply requires too large of a time investment to reach the masses.

Audio information simply requires too large of a time investment to reach the masses.  The answer that’s been floated around for quite some time is transcription.  But is it really an answer?  Some say no, and their arguments are valid.  Consider the benefits:

• Transcription takes time.  If you have a 60 minute podcast, it will take you at least 60 minutes to transcribe it, and that’s considering you can type at the speed of speech.

and/or

• Transcription costs money. There are transciption services out there such as Casting Words that will charge anywhere between $0.75 and $2.50 per minute, depending on how quickly you need it.  Consider that 75 cents per minute still costs $45 for a 60 minute episode and could still take over two weeks for it to be completed!  If you’re willing to manage the transcription directly, you can find plenty of willing transcriptors at Amazon’s mturk which could save you considerable amounts of money.

How do you provide the user exactly what they’re looking for without forcing them to download the entire podcast?

However, this argument makes one large assumption.  It assumes that the transcription will only be completed if you initiate the action.  With the progress that’s been made in online collaboration and crowdsourcing, podcasters have at their disposal an army of volunteers eager to help in any way they can, often short of giving money.  Several podcasts have toyed with the idea of setting up a wiki to have their listeners transcribe the podcast for them.  While promising and likely the preferred method of podcast transcription in the future, it still doesn’t solve the entire problem.  How do you provide the user exactly what they’re looking for without forcing them to download the entire podcast?  How do you aggregate podcast transcripts into a coherent repository from which to search?  How do you protect the transcripts to keep them from being used in blogs across the internet?

And that’s where I’ll leave this post.  The question whether or not to transcribe a podcast is an open one.  I agree with most when they say they don’t see the benefit of transcription compared to the effort and cost it requires.  There are several new projects we’re working on to solve these problems, but until we can decide whether or not they are even viable, the problems remain.