Robert Scoble thinks that the reason why podcasting have not taken off more is because it’s hard to find new ones.

“You go to Podtech.net or Podshow.com and poke around. You have to download a file before you can listen. In that time you probably got bored and started watching Lost again. Or, even if you download something like “Dawn and Drew” you find out that they aren’t interesting to you, and think all podcasts are sex talk. If you’re over at Podtech you might get lucky and hit one of their great interviews, but a lot of their stuff is commercial and not that interesting.”

Congratulations, Robert! You identified the same problem with podcasts that we saw a year ago leading to the creation of PodZinger. With PodZinger, users like you do not have to listen to the content of podcasts to determine their relevancy, all you have to do is search on your favorite tune or podcast series and read the section or content you are interested in. From that point you can then click on any word in the podcast and listen to the podcast starting at the exact word you clicked. We make finding podcasts easy by crawling the Web daily, adding new podcasts to our index and allowing users to search every podcast in our index quickly and easily. Think of it as the “Google of podcast.”

If you are still having problems, Scoble, tell us a topic you are interested in and we can help you find something new!

This is a followup to my Exploding Maple Tree post.  The folks at EepyBird.com figured out that Menthos dropped into Diet Coke caused a large buildup of gas and caused small geysers. Check out the video!

Video bloggers will be camping out at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco this weekend (June 10 & 11) for Vloggercon 2006. The event promises two full days for video bloggers to meet and learn from one another and to discuss about the future of this new medium. The schedule shows sessions with very interesting topics including, Community Vlogs, Educators, Interactive Vlogging and Political Vlogging & Social Change. Speakers include Steve Garfield, JD Lasica, Amanda Congdon and many more… I’m sure we’ll get to see many interesting videos next week after the event!

While it seems there is no end to the amount of content that has found its way to the Web, there’s also a world of content that’s locked away. Media conglomerates, television networks, and news Web sites have a vast array of video and audio content that sits collecting digital dust, inaccessible to the millions of Internet users who peruse their respective Web sites daily.

We’ve partnered with some of the Web’s most popular video blogs, including Rocketboom, commandN and this week, Hak.5, to help their users access the increasing number of archived episodes. Seeing speech-to-text search work for this new breed of popular content providers in the vlogosphere should give special notice to those larger online publishers—and hundreds of major network affiliate sites across the Web—with millions of video and audio clips and little to no way of making the content within actually searchable.

Just imagine you catch the last few seconds of a segment on the 11 o’clock news. Assuming it’s not continuing coverage, the story gets cast into the great void of old content that is either placed online, or as is the case with many affiliates, sits in storage at the TV station. The latter scenario recently played itself out for us, as our president, Alex Laats, was interviewed by the local Boston FOX affiliate, FOX 25, for a great story on viral video. The station doesn’t make any of its videos available online, so we aren’t able to direct people who may be interested in viewing the piece to find it. But, if FOX did, speech-to-text search would enable a friend of Alex (and who isn’t?) to go to the Fox 25 site, type in his name, and immediately find him in the segment.

As more networks and publishers look to monetize their ever-growing archive of rich audio and video content, we imagine that speech-to-text will play an important role, just as it’s already playing out with our new friends at Rocketboom, commandN and Hak.5.

Forums and communities are the gathering space on the Internet for like-minded people to share ideas, ask questions, and possibly connect and make friends.

We decided to take a peek and observe some podcasting forums (which are abundant with chatter) to check out some of the popular topics being discussed on podcasts.

Here are just a few:

• Ways for podcasters to make money
• Promoting your podcasts
• Podcasting business models
• Podcast creation technology
• Recording phone calls on podcasts

If you are planning to do your own podcast, do check out some of these forums for some really good information. We found out a great get-together for podcasters in the Chicago area coming up in June. Check it out if you are in the area.

By the way, it seems like monetizing podcasts seems to be a hot topic in these forums. Many of these podcasters spend a lot of time and effort in producing their shows and they need to be rewarded in some way.