It's pretty clear we need better tools to make podcasts searchable and indexable. I'd also like auto-tagging (Riya for podcasts?), but that's another story. There's no shortage of startups rapidly filling this space, but a company called Podzinger is getting a lot of ink at the moment, so I think they're worth a mention. From the Wired article, Podcast Chaos Be Gone:
Podzinger, in beta until mid-December, lets users jump to the spot in a podcast where their search term appears, rather than forcing them to scan an entire program for pertinent parts as blinkx does. Its minimalist design has an uncluttered search page, à la Google. And Podcasters can link to a searchable index of their content in order to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.
Podzinger is a nice offering, but irritatingly it requires IE 5.0 and Realplayer for audio playback. A nice touch: you can subscribe to searches - if a podcast turns up with a search term you've subscribed to, it'll get downloaded to your reader automatically.
[img src="http://www.blinkx.com/blinkx_search.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""]