Comparing Features in Podcast Search Engines

I just discovered Podzinger via Emily Chang’s eHub, itself a site you should make sure to check out if you haven’t. I was excited to look at a new podcast search engine, as the you never can have too many good options.

The things I look for in a podcast search engine are these:

  • RSS feeds for my search queries – this is by far most important to me.
  • Can I listen to excerpts where my search terms are used?
  • How big is the engine’s index, or is it able to find shows about my topics of interest?
  • Is it easy to submit a podcast for indexing?
  • Is it easy to download the podcasts from the search results page?
  • Are there any other features that I didn’t expect?

So what are our options and how do they compare?

Podzinger
RSS feeds are included, this is what interested my in this service. According to the search results page though, “RealPlayer and IE 5.0 or higher are required for audio playback.” You’ve got to be kidding. That means I won’t be listening to excerpts. At least the occurence of my search terms is time stamped. Podzinger has indexed is 20137 podcasts, seems to be growing and finds good results in my areas of interest (non-profit, social justice, ecology, etc.) It is very easy to submit a podcast to be indexed. Unexpected features? Check out the Podzinger registration page, where you can find code to insert a search for your own podcast into your web site. Nice, but does it rely on RealPlayer as well?

Conclusion: I’ll be subscribing to feeds from Podzinger and might consider recommending it to people who want to add a search function to their own podcast’s web page. I won’t be visiting the Podzinger site itself very often as I find its requirements to listen to excerpts frustrating.

Yahoo Podcast Search
Feeds? Nope, and that’s surprising given how well RSS is embraced generally at Yahoo. Can I listen to excerpts? Nope. Listening is through a proprietary Yahoo podcast listener thing that I don’t really trust, but worse than that – you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download the files! Once I do that even, I’m taken straight through to loading the audio file on my browser! I want to click a button and chose to download the file onto my hard drive, thank you. I don’t see how many files are indexed, though I imagine lots of people have figured out how to submit to this service. I am so upset by how dumbed-down and locked up this interface is that I don’t even want to look at Yahoo podcast search anymore! As for interesting features, the searches do separate podcast series that are described using your search terms vs. episodes in which your search terms are said. Additionally, there are listener reviews, tagging, etc. Yahoo has so much money and status that I’m sure you can probably find lots of interesting things with it, but the difficulty in downloading, the lack of an RSS feed and the requirement that I login with a Yahoo ID all make me so angry that I will probably never recomend this search engine to anyone.

Blinkx.com
I love Blinkx. They were the fist service I found that offered an RSS feed for searches, and their customer service has been incredibly helpful and engaged with problems I’ve had with them! I love them! Unfortunately, there are problems here too. Search results only deliver the episode title and not the source show or podcast series name. That’s strange. You can’t listen to excerpts around your search terms, that too is a real shame. But it is very easy to download the files in your search terms. I can’t tell how many podcasts they index, but it is very easy to submit podcasts for indexing. Innovative features include a slider to prioritize date or relevance in the order your search results appear in. I like Blinkx best of all of these options, though I wish some of the feature omissions weren’t an issue.

Podscope
I rarely use this service because there is no RSS feed for my searches! Executives from the company said in an interview I listened to that they would be supporting RSS soon…and that was months and months ago. Whoa, I take it back! Upon visiting the site again I see that they have added RSS. Yay! This is a new contender for my absolute favorite. The search results are displayed beautifully. You can easily listen to excerpts based on your search terms, it’s easy to download the files, there are great links to the podcast’s home page, the search-discovered episode’s permalink and the podcasts RSS feed. It is easy to submit a podcast for indexing and they too now offer a search box for your show’s site. Wow! This is great, go check it out and click on some Adsense.

Conclusion: I think that Podscope may be my new favorite. I am so excited to see the changes they’ve made.

Feedster Podcast Search
I love Feedster. They offer customer service almost 24-7 via IM! And it was really helpful customer service when I contacted them. They do, of course, offer feeds for searches. You cannot listen to excerpts around your search terms, you can select either series descriptions or episodes to search inside. Download is easy and you can chose either date or relevance as priority for display of your search results. I can’t tell how hard it is to submit or how big the index is. The front page says “Currently Indexing feeds from different podcasts.” Well isn’t that nice?

Conclusion amongst conclusions: When I have multi-media research needs for myself or a client, I am most likely to subscribe to feeds for my queries from Blinkx, Feedster and now Podscope and Podzinger. If I am doing a one time search for audio content, I am going to search inside Podscope so that I can listen to excerpts around my search terms. If I’m looking for shows about a certain subject, as opposed to particular episodes that mention my search term…I might begrudgingly use Yahoo.

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Old Media Can Survive in New Media Landscape

Robin Miller, editor in chief at OSTG.com| Open Source Technology Group, has written a long and interesting article on Slashdot about changes he recommends that newspapers make in order to stop the bleeding of readership losses in the face of the web’s growth in importance. Both the article and the 232 comments at posting time are worth a look, but here’s a summary via some of my favorite parts:

  • Include web-readers in readership numbers and lighten up already about declining print subscribers!
  • Embrace the two-way web by giving reader comments a prominent place and reduced barriers to entry (e.g. multiple logins required before posting).
  • Utilize one of the many established moderation protocols to keep those reader comments as pertinent as possible. The author points out that Slashdot has a battle tested and freely usable, if complex, moderation system available.
  • High-quality events calenders, print-it-yourself coupons and local classified ads are all features that a newspaper’s web site is in the best position to offer of any media.
  • A strong local focus can be a paper’s competitive edge whether in print or online. Few newspapers offer anything uniquely compelling in terms of international news. The internet at large is just too effective in this area.

“Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become “snapshots” of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

“Senior citizens and others who can’t afford (or don’t want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those — a substantial part of the population — who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they’d get on the Web.”

These are just a few of my favorite parts of the article itself. As is typical of Slashdot postings, the comments make up another large and valuable part of the info. This is just the kind of discussion that needs to happen. I think that if MSM were to be disappearing (unlikely) we’d really lose out on some things they can do well. But it is very important that old-school organizations make use of the Web 2.0 world to augment what they are already doing. In as much as Web2.0 is about extending participation, honest and open communication and fostering creativity then it’s not just good for business, it’s good for humanity.

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Podcasting’s Ascent Continues: Podshow, the Mommy Cast and IBM

According to an article in the Mercury News, there’s big developments in the podosphere. The great network of shows and services over at Podshow is adding 30 more shows to its roster, up from 6 or 7. If the quality of these new shows approaches the quality of the old ones, we’re in for a real treat. I have long enjoyed Podshow’s Gilmour Gang and Yeast Radio. The new shows look very good too.

In related news, I didn’t know that The Mommycast, a podcast about raising kids, just got a $100,00+ sponsorship from Dixie paper products. It’s a cool show, with no political pretense, so good for them!

Podcasts for broadcast have really enriched my life, and I know they have the lives of others as well. They don’t have to be just for public consumption, though. I wrote an article earlier today over at the blog of RSS Applied about IBM’s use of podcasts for internal communication. That’s a very exciting concept. One resource I did not know about when I wrote that article was a podcast just uploaded today! It’s at over at John Furrier’s site and is titled Inside IBM. I’m going to go walk the dog and listen to it right now!

Update: That IBM podcast is pretty boring until 10 minutes in. You can get the gist of who the interview subject is by visiting the link above, but the first 10 minutes are largely about entertainment podcasts. The whole interview is 16 mins long and the last 6 minutes I found worth listening to.

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Teaching RSS: A Discussion

Of all of the Web2.0 tools I know of, I think that RSS is one of the most difficult to explain to new users. I’ve been doing a lot of explaining lately – in trainings, blog posts and work proposals. I thought I’d put my current thinking down in text and see if others are interested in contributing their thoughts as well.

Here’s some observations I’ve made lately and teaching practices I’ve been employing:

  • An actual demonstration goes a long way. That’s why I’ve set up a demonstration account with online feed reader Newsgator, my favorite RSS reader. I tell people they can log in and see what a reader seeded with a variety of types of feeds looks like. The username is “marshalldemo” and the password is “welcome” The account contains basic mainstream media feeds, government feeds, blog feeds, search feeds, multi-media search feeds, scraped feeds (via Feedfire.com), podcast subscriptions and others. I think that gives visitors a good idea of what sorts of information is receivable via RSS.
  • My medium-lengthed RSS definition is currently as follows: “Many web sites now publish their content not just in HTML as your browser views them, but also in a format called XML. You can subscribe to the XML content of any web site to receive any changed content into a special inbox for feeds. So a new article in the New York Times international business section, a new post to a blog you like, a new email in your email inbox or even a new result in a web search you’ve subscribed to…any time that new content is available from any of those sources it will automatically be delivered to your feed reader inbox. So that means that you don’t have to go to a site more than once – if you like it you can just subscribe to its updates in the future. You don’t have to go to sites to check for updates only to find that a site is unchanged, or even remember what all the sites you’re interested in are. Lots of different information streams are all delivered to one place, set up like a personal news desk. It saves a lot of time, increases the amount of information you can absorb and can make you one of the first people to get that information.”

    Ok, so that’s no elevator pitch. How about: “RSS is a system you can use to set up a special inbox to receive automatic notification of any new information available from a wide variety of sources: news sites, blogs and even searches. Just subscribe once and you’ll get updates from whatever sources you chose automatically.”

  • Subscribing to a feed URL is not very intuitive to people who are used to being passive web consumers. If you’re used to copying and pasting a URL after things like a href, then it’s probably no big deal to you. But I know that I want to teach people who focus on things other than the internet how to use the internet. So it really does take some talking through with people to help them either “copy shortcut” or to go to an XML filled page, stop screaming with horror and copy the URL into their feedreader.
  • Before I show some one how to use RSS, I like to ask them what some of their favorite news sites and blogs are. I set up an online feed reader account (Newsgator or Bloglines) for them, seed it with feeds from their favorite sources and some search feeds, and give it a basic password they can change later. That way they can see RSS in action and relevant to them right away.
  • I usually use feeds from Google Blogsearch and Technorati for blog intro blogsearch, Topix.net for US news search or Yahoo News for domestic and international news, MSN Search for web search and Blinkx.com for podcast search.
  • If I’m really feeling able to spend some time on it, I’ll create a metafeed channel by splicing all the tag search feeds from Tagcentral.net into one feed via Feed Digest. That delivers items tagged in del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming.org social calendar and other tag-supporting services.
  • In an account filled with feeds, there has to be some way to differentiate between high-value feeds and lower-value feeds. I advise people to place feeds with lots of items in them, where any single feed is less likely to be essential to read, in folders together by theme. On the other hand, feeds with fewer results or from which each result is essential to read (like inbound links to their own site or blog), can be placed outside of any folders so that new items will be immediately visible and won’t get lost in a torrent of feed items.
  • Finally I always teach feed reading in conjunction with tagging. Let’s be honest, though RSS does enable greater information absorption with increased efficiency – it also has the potential to deliver far more information than a person could possibly absorb. I tell people, you’ve just got to let a lot of it zip by and when something looks interesting – open it in another tab. If it is interesting, tag it into Del.icio.us (or sometimes Spurl.net if the pared down UI might be intimidating, or if a cached copy is key).
  • Finally, after finally, I always contact people some time afterwords and see how their feed reading is going. I ask them to let me log into their feed reader account to see if I can advise them how better to organize the feeds, what else they might want to subscribe to, etc.

Well, that’s a lot of information – but describing, much less teaching RSS is a complicated thing to do. This discussion leaves out the use of RSS for attention streams, RSS to HTML, RSS to IM (something I hope Immedi.at can help me make work ASAP), analytics, security and countless other possibilities. They don’t call it a separate language for nothing!

Your thoughts on explaining, teaching or using RSS are more than welcome. I hope we can share our knowledge so that all of us will be more effective in our efforts to extend adoption of this fantastic technology.

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I’m Joining the Corante Network!

I couldn’t be much more excited, starting tomorow morning my writing here is going to be syndicated by the Corante network in their new “web hub.” Looking at the bios of the other contributors, I’m super honored to have gotten the gig. Huge thanks to Pete Cashmore at Mashable blog, whose blog roll got me the intro to the Corante editors. Now I have to get back to writing the good stuff that got me the gig in the first place!

Technorati Tag Indexing: Is There a Problem?

My last post was made 24 hours ago:

Title:
“Tagging Museums Sounds Like Fun”

Google Blogsearch: Indexed in in the search results
Icerocket: Indexed, including the “Technorati Tags”
Technorati: Got it
Technorati Tag searches: Nope. Not for museums, not under folksonomy, not under the tag “tags”.

You want to know something funny, though? This post of mine Video Sharing With YouTube does appear in the tag search results for the tag “tag” – even though I didn’t tag it with the tag tag in the actual post!

And yes, I am pinging them, via Feedburner’s Pingshot service.

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