Looking for the lastest celebrity gossip? Who is George hooking up with… again? What about that name for the TomCat baby… what are they thinking? And Paris… more videos, Mischa bashing, pleeeese.

You gotta try the Preston and Steve show. See what they’re saying… just click on one of these… pretty funny.

Or just for fun try them all!

PodZinger rejects Jesus is the title of a blog entry by University of Pennsylvania Professor Mark Liberman, who is in both the Linguistics and Computer Science departments.  Prof. Liberman is very knowledgable about the techniques we use to generate our speech-to-text index of podcasts, and wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of our state-of-the-art speech recognition technology.

We use a statistical model of word and n-gram sequences in order to  produce a sequence of words that we think was the most probable word sequence matching the phoneme sequence that we recognized.  If the type of input (like entertainment vs news) is a good match to our corpus or training material, then our word error rates are likely to be quite low.

While we specifically haven’t trained on a corpus of religious texts, we have indexed a tremendous amount of sermons.  The largest podcast series I know of is “Sermon Audio” of which we have indexed 3,860 episodes at this writing, many of which appear to no longer be accessible. 

In total so far, Sermon Audio has 18.8 million words, and total 2706 hours worth of sermons.  So in fact PodZinger has listened to more sermons than anyone I know.

We ran a search today for a demo, and I thought that this result snippet from MSNBC’s “The Situation with Tucker Carlson” was a bit humorous:

More outrage over the bush administration’s decision to allow an arab owned company to manage six of america’s largest sports

So, which are the six: baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, and um, curling?   Of course, this story is about ports, but I found the sports gaffe by our recognizer to be quite funny.  Hm, well, maybe it was funnier at the time.

About 70% of the time that we talk to reporters about PodZinger and podcasts, they assume that podcasts are all about news and technology. So we ask them, “what are you interested in?”.

For the San Francisco music critic it was “electronic music”,
For the mid-west search engine journalist, it was “bass fishing”,
For the Boston-based new technology reporter, it was “Buffy the vampire slayer”,
And for the New York business columnist, transplanted from Chicago, it was “Chicago Cubs Spring training”.

Go ahead, click on any of the links above and see for yourself. Getting information that we are passionate about or need right now is easier then ever without having to wade through the other stuff in broadcasts that we just don’t care about.

Podcasting today represents the early days of the new radio for the “now consumer” and will change the way we consume the information “we want”. Remember what it was like before the iPod changed the way we listen to music and TiVo changed the way we watch television. A recent article from “Parents get together via iPod ‘radio’” from Feb 14th, captured it all with the following quote:

“When my husband described podcasts to me, I immediately thought, ‘Well, that would be really good for moms because we can’t be in a certain place at a certain time to listen to a radio show — and even if we were, our kids would be constantly interrupting us,”

Gretchen Vogelzang, a co-host of the parenting podcast “Mommycast”.

Well put!

I have been watching the Olympics on my Media Center PC, but got an Xbox 360 yesterday so now I am watching on my TV rather than my PC.  I am basically recording every show with the word “Olympic” in the title, which comes out to be something like 20 hours/day.  Lest you think I am a couch potato (well, OK, maybe I am), I am scanning through most of the Olympic coverage late at night after my kids go to sleep - 2 hour curling matches watched in 15 minutes, 60 minutes of ski jumping down to 10 minutes, but ice skating is hard to compress.  And I would have never watched curling without the ability to skip through it easily.

The networks have to be really concerned about how to pay for programming in the future, as most DVR’ers have basically eliminated all commercial watching.  NBC has paid the IOC $613 million for the right to broadcast the 2006 Winter Olympics, $820 for the 2010 games, and $1.18 billion for the 2012 summer games.  Production expenses for these games are estimated to exceed $100 million.  The LA Times estimated that NBC is shelling out over $58 million each day to cover these games.  And yet, the February 14 ratings got trounced by American Idol, which must cost a hundred times less to produce.

How will the networks make money in the world where people can so easily skip over the commercials?  This must strike fear into their hearts.

Woohoo!  I actually did get an Xbox 360 yesterday.  As I was writing yesterday’s blog article, I revisited many of the links I had for Xbox inventory tracking.  Using the “Guide to finding an Xbox 360” I found that our local Best Buy had stock on the premium version. 

But…ugh…I had several hours of meetings before lunch when I could get over there.  My heart dropped when the person at the front door said that there were no Xbox 360s.  But, I found the guy in the know in the gaming department, and he walked me to the storeroom where he handed me a premium.

It was quite easy to hook everything up, sign up for an Xbox Live account, and network it to my Media Center PC.  In fact, as I was upstairs just finishing installing the extender on my PC, my 6 year old son figured out how to get his favorite music video started on the Xbox and watched it before I got back downstairs.

Also, check out my gamertag:  PodZinger