Have you seen PodZinger?

Last night a non-librarian friend of mine was telling me about a project involving streaming video of live music concerts. I asked him what the company plans to do with the concert library. Would customers be able to search for old concerts to view? Had they hired a librarian to create the metadata? “Metadata? Who needs it when you have PodZinger?” he said.

I disabused him of that notion.

But PodZinger, which uses speech recognition technology to “create a text index of the words in audio and video and to categorize content” is nonetheless exciting, because much of what it is indexing wouldn’t otherwise have any sort of index at all.