Doug Kaye came by the odeo office to day to chat. One of the things he mentioned was the new podcast search engine, podscope. When i first heard of it, i was like, oh, ok, another directory / search engine, and didn't even bother to click on the link. See, what i hadn't realized is that podscope uses speech to text technology to make a transcript which it then lets you search, and hear a clip of audio with that word. It works pretty well, and is quite amazing technology. It appears to only know words which are in a preset dictionary, it had no knowledge of such as odoe, uruguay, or indymedia. Sometimes it confused words, breasts for breath, but in general it's quite good. It's one of those, wait, i didn't think the world worked like that moments.
The tech is build by a company, tveyes, which has a tv and radio clipping service which searches for words. It's mostly used by company PR departments and political campaigns who want to know what's being said about them. They pay TVeyes to clip and present all the audio and video mentioning the company. This is the kind of thing which i generally categorize as 'evil' in the same way that satellite photos used by major corporations and secret government agencies is evil. On the other hand there are groups like Media Matters are doing interesting and good progressive causes with video clipping. In someways it's similar to the whole google maps satellite photos == no privacy debate last week.