Business2 posts about a podcasting transcription service: CastingWords:
There are hardly any podcast transcripts in its search engine so
far, and its own site isn't even operational yet. But the idea is so
interesting (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch would agree)
that I contacted the company to find out more. It turns out to be even
more whacky than I originally thought because the company wants to use
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
service to get people to do the transcribing. One of the founders,
Nathan McFarland, explains what the company is hoping to do:
We're a super early stage startup - the idea is to
sell search ads against the keywords in the transcriptions, which we
generate using Amazon's Mechanical Turk ( http://mturk.com)
and some whizzy software. But we need capital to pay all those MTurk
workers, so in the next few weeks we'll be opening a store. It will
allow Podcasters to purchase transcriptions of their shows. We'll do
the transcriptions and give them a full transcription - not just chunks
pulled back by the search engine if it happens to index their show. Of
course they automatically get listed in the engine, so this
arrangement should drive traffic to them, get them transcripts, and get
us the cash needed to keep on transcribing...
The post is worth a read.