Transcribing podcasts?

One of the most frustrating things about podcasts, especially the long ones, is that it's hard to capture or cite interesting things that people say.

Listening, as I tend to, in the car just makes it worse. I'll listen to several podcasts in the two hour (3-4 if you hit the motorway at the wrong time) journey to and from work. With most of them, that's fine. They're vaguely interesting, and some ideas lodge in my brain that may pop back up later.

For some, though, I really want to grab numbers, or an exact quote, and end up having to remember which podcast the quotable snippet was in, so that I can listen again when I'm not driving in order to capture it.

In these cases, it would be so useful to have a searchable transcript.

Over on his new CrunchNotes blog, Michael Arrington writes about a conversation with Steve Gillmor (ofGillmor Gang fame, amongst other things);

“I asked [Steve] if he thought there was a business to be built around transcribing podcasts for publishers. The transcribing can be outsourced for about $10 an hour and can be turned around quite quickly. With an appropriate markup, it would still be quite reasonable to publishers. 

His answer 'Why would I transcribe my podcasts? People would stop listening.' I disagreed, arguing that he would increase his audience many times. His retort 'But they wouldn’t be listening to my podcast.' I thought about it for a while. And as often is the case with Mr. Gillmor, I realized that in a round about way, he’s right. If podcasters just wanted to maximize their audience, they’d be writing, not talking. 

I still think there is a business there. But Steve won’t be a customer.”

I agree with Michael. There is a business. I don't want to sit and read podcasts, though. I do, however, want to be able to find the gems that I heard people say in them, and transcription may be part of the answer to that.

We're looking at various solutions for Talking with Talis. The whole point of the conversations we're podcasting is that they're of a calibre that you'd often travel a very long way to hear at an expensive conference. If we're capturing thought and dialogue of that quality, we need to find ways to unlock it from the 20-40 minute audio stream.