October
2007
Podcasts - Why get them transcribed?
Podcasts are an increasingly popular means of putting information across over the internet, but many people are missing out on an important aspect of this. Providing a text version too.
It may seem silly to go to all the trouble of recording and broadcasting an interview on your website, only to get it transcribed into a text version. However, there are a number of reasons for doing so. One important point is that hearing-impaired people may struggle to, or be completely unable to, follow a podcast. Another is searchability. This has two aspects. Firstly someone listening to a podcast will be unable to search for a particular point. They many want to do this because they’ve already listened to the podcast and they want to revisit a specific point, or because they’re familiar with the interviewee and want to know what he/she said about a particular point. Secondly, search engines, although they are working hard to be able to access video, can’t search through the speech itself to pick out words and match with key words in the same way that they do for text. This means that a podcast that’s really relevant to a particular point may be missed entirely by the search engines when bringing up results about that point – unless you have a text version available.
So, if you’re thinking about doing a podcast then think about getting it transcribed too! For advice on getting a good recording and a good transcription, see my top ten tips.