Tell me a little about blinkx.tv. How does one search it?
We launched about six months ago as a video search engine. The significant thing we’ve added to the video search engine world is that we index video not only by reading descriptions that are provided by broadcasters but also by using speech recognition to listen to the audio content in the video. We literally listen to what they talk about and index it word for word.
Searching blinkx.tv is very simple. You go to the website and what you see is the search box. You type in anything you are interested in. What you will get is a number of relevant results. These results come from many different video sources. If you want to fine tune these results, you will see some checkboxes on the left. You can check those to select specific content providers, including narrowing your results to only podcasts.
What is podcasting?
Podcasting is very simply a system and standard by which people can create online content which is typically audio and have it delivered to people on a timely basis. Podcasters are a little bit like a radio broadcaster. They create interesting content which people can listen to. Like when you and I flick to a particular television channel, we can in a similar way be interested in a particular show created by a person. You can be subscribed to it via software which will go and get it for you to transfer to a music player. You can then take it with you.
Why did you choose to incorporate podcasts into blinkx.tv search results?
Mainly because of user demand. As more MP3 player owners become aware of podcasts, they want to easily find what is most relevant to them. Our users were asking if we could help find relevant podcasts more quickly. Because of our technology we can help do that.
How are podcasts incorporated into the blinkx.tv search engine?
Through a two part process. The first part is the same as any other search engine. A computer program known as a spider crawls the Internet, looking for content. It’s like something on Google but it instead watches television and listens to audio. If it finds something new, voice recognition software listens to the content and creates a transcript of what is being said. When you do a text search on blinkx.tv, it looks through a list of the transcripts and finds what is relevant.
How can one take podcast search results they are happy with from blinkx.tv and load them onto their favorite MP3 player?
There are two ways. You can take a single podcast you like and download it to your player. The other thing to do is to subscribe to channel. When you get a podcast result in blinkx.tv, two links appear. One is a link to the individual file of the podcast. The other link is to the feed, which is basically that podcast overtime. It’s a link to a series if you will. If you interested to subscribing, you drag and drop that link onto your podcast receiving software, such as iPodder or iTunes. Each time a new episode is posted, the software will pull it down when you are online and transfer it to your player.
What topics of podcasts does blinkx.tv index?
We index everything we find. We don’t really have any limitations or restrictions. We have mainstream and very esoteric music podcasts. We also have lots of talk podcasts, political to sports. Lifestyle content as well – it’s a very broad range.
What are the most popular podcasts?
We’ve been live for about two weeks, so we don’t have exact numbers yet. However, music podcasts seem to be the most popular. People are looking for cool new music from both the U.S. and Europe.
What are your favorite podcasts?
I have two favorites. Grape Radio has turned out to be a great place to learn about California wine. The other is the Today program and it is created by the BBC. It’s hard hitting political news and interviews, which I used to listen to on the radio when I lived in England. I missed it, but now I can listen to it as I walk into my office in San Francisco. Podcasts makes it possible to listen when it is convenient for me.
