Full Transcript:

Introducer: Technology Evangelist Podcast, for May 17, 2007. Search Thursday. Recorded live with audience participation.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is Search Thursday. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham, with me is Cariann Higginbotham.

Cariann Higginbotham: Howdy

Benjamin Higginbotham: Both from technologyevangelist.com, Search Thursday is my favorite kind of Thursday.

Cariann Higginbotham: As opposed to, all right look, I also think I need to get off my chest.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, go.

Cariann Higginbotham: OK, it is not really search, but I am just going to pretend like it is, OK.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right.

Cariann Higginbotham: I have been following Americas Next Top Model, I don’t even know how many seasons now, it is probably in their 30^th season and I have no idea. All I am saying is that I cannot believe that Jaslene won over Natasha that’s complete crap. They are just doing it for ratings and that sucks.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You mean they are "searching" for their next top model? Is that what they are doing?

Cariann Higginbotham: Yes, it is exactly they are doing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: On Thursday, possibly?

Cariann Higginbotham: Isn’t that what I said, I told you it was a stretch, but I don’t really care. My point is Natasha should have won and I can’t believe that they picked that, that…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am actually amazed that there are SMSs flying around the room. Now, you got in there like – it is just all these people are just doing this reality show thing and I don’t care.

Cariann Higginbotham: I know you don’t care, but I do and so it's off my chest now and I am OK, and I don’t care that Melinda went home.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, let’s start the show off. It is search Thursday, we have got Mocheeks who is on the Ustream chat room, he is also joining us live and talking about Opera’s search possibilities. Hey Mocheeks, how are you doing?

Mocheeks: Hi, how is it going?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Doing pretty good, am I pronouncing that right? I have never actually heard you pronounce it before, is that actually Mocheeks?

Mocheeks: Yeah, Mo is my nickname and Cheeks is my last name, it is Mocheeks.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Your last name is Cheeks.

Cariann Higginbotham: I am so, sorry.

Mocheeks: Yeah, Morice Cheeks, just like the basketball player.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, there you go. So, tell us a little bit about Opera’s search capabilities?

Mocheeks: Well, I actually just installed Opera last week or may be two weeks ago, just because I was sick of the new FireFox, I was really messing up my RAM and way over utilizing my my computer and I got bored of safari a while ago, so I thought Opera seem like a good choice and I am super impressed with the search capabilities of Opera. I don’t know if you are familiar, but in the URL bar, in FireFox you can just type something and then it will Google search it. Well, in Opera you can customize that, so you can tell it what search engine to search by default, as you type text in and you can also use key words or they are actually key letters, so if you type you can by default “y”, by defalut if Yahoo! so if you type “y” and then search something, it will do yahoo as, instead of Google or you can have other ones like “e” for eBay or “b” for bittorrent or I have one for YouTube and Wikipedia, all kind of stuff like that. I really like Opera, I think it is really slick browser and the search is one of the main features that I like about it now.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s pretty cool. I know that in FireFox and in Internet Explorer you are able to actually choose what search engine you want by default, by using little dropdown arrow, but I don’t think it isn’t what you just mentioned about. You type “y” for yahoo, it will actually let you do that. I think, I believe that’s strictly in Opera thing?

Mocheeks: Yeah, it is just an Opera thing and it saves a step, because I used to use that, I have a lot of different plugins for FireFox, so that I could search Wikipedia and search different places, but as opposed to having move my mouse and click that thing and change which one I am trying to search for, than I can just type a letter, one key and it will do that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is anything else about Opera that you really like it? What’s the compelling reason to use Opera over FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, OmniWeb or anything else?

Mocheeks: Well, if you really like for  web pages to not display properly all the time, that’s one thing it has going for it.

Cariann Higginbotham: One of my favorite features, it is like, gee let’s see how this works today?

Mocheeks: Yeah, Opera is like 2% of the market, something ridiculous like that, so lot of people don’t even test for Opera , usually if you can get it to work in Internet Explorer and FireFox then you're good to go, but one of the things that Opera has that I really like is, it is a new thing it is called “Speed Dial”. So, if you open a new tab or something like that, it shows you a preview of 9, just like your phone and it looks like a keypad, but nine of your favorite web pages and so you just click on one of those and it is like, just like a quick bookmark, it is a similar idea to having the bookmark tab thing at the top like Safari, but it is in image form and it looks like a phone, so I think it is cool.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Zeller from Ustream would like know, if you use the Opera widgets at all?

Mocheeks: I can’t imagine why in the world I would. Sorry Zeller, I didn’t catch you in the Ustream, but I have a Mac and I have got Dashboard and so I have great widgets, what in the world would; I tried to and I installed couple of them, but it didn’t add any value to me at all, so now I don’t.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, Zeller says that’s basically his experience as well. Do you Dashboard?

Mocheeks: Yes, I do. I use Dashboard all the time.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Really? I find myself never using it.

Mocheeks: Really? I have the weather, I have a couple of different clocks for just so I can instantly see the time in a few of my friends time zones.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That is a really great idea, because we are always talking in this podcast about what time does it start in my time zone, I could just have like a row of time zone widgets sitting up there.

Cariann Higginbotham: Didn't even think about, did you?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Didn’t even think about, that’s a brilliant idea, you get two bonus points.

Mocheeks: Thanks, I use the calculator frequently and also I have, I keep the stock thing open so I can see how Apple is doing, because that’s been rocking my world lately.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, you are really into the Opera scene. I tried it a couple of times, never really got into it. For the alternate browser, I went with OmniWeb from Omni Group. I enjoyed that because I had the Picon viewing of your tabs and whatnot and they have some pretty decent search as well, but they didn’t have what your were talking about. So, I'll definitely have to give Opera another shot.

Mocheeks: Yeah, I like it. There is some things about Opera that I just can’t use it, explicitly right now. I use StumbleUpon.com like mad and I really enjoy stumble upon and there is no solution for Opera and so I find myself opening FireFox, just use stumble and to the other.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are you going to move to Clipmarks or start using Clipmarks after the interview with the CEO yesterday?

Mocheeks: I tried Clipmarks last night and I like it, I had to give a little bit more time, I really do like it. I was giving him all the time in the chat only because I want to hear his defense of some of the things they were coming to mind.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, it was great.

Mocheeks: But, I really do like it. I think it is really cool idea, I think it is fairly revolutionary as far as taking something that’s as he described, you hand somebody the paper and it is a very common thing in the real world, but there is no solution for it on the Internet. So, I think it is pretty cool and I do anticipate trying it lot more and potentially using it as sort of solution or maybe even a replacement for some of the things that I do on the web right now, like I was saying, when I stumble for things I then often blog them on a tumble blog I have, which is really just Clipmarks and just Clipmarks of different cool things that I find on the web that I want to save in the future or share with my friends, seems like Clipmarks might solve that problem.

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, it is kind of nice, just to have all together in one package.

Mocheeks: Yeah, and be able to search other people’s like that like having a blog, like I have right now, it is very just for me and I don’t even have comments on it. So, there is really no interaction at all and I think Clipmarks having this sort of social search aspect like Del.icio.us as he was describing, I think adds something completely different.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I see you got a little bit of a traffic going on outside behind you, all right and Mocheeks I'd like to thank you so much for joining the show I know that you are a avid listener of the show. You constantly watch it, first time caller.

Mocheeks: First time caller, I love the show there.

Cariann Higginbotham: Long time listener.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining this, hope you will stick around into the Ustream char room and we will talk to you little bit more, later.

Mocheeks: All right, cheers.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Thanks. The next topic on the board is searching for audio podcasts using PodZinger. Neither one of us have actually used PodZinger before and searching for audio podcasts can be a little bit complex and difficult because – how do you get into the audio? How do you really know what you are searching for? And bringing in yet another Ustream listener, how cool is that two in one night. We are going to be bringing in Bad Ace.

Cariann Higginbotham: That’s wild crazy stuff.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Bad Ace, how are you doing?

Bad Ace: Hey Ben.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And Cariann. Cariann is with me.

Bad Ace: Hi, Cariann.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, tell us a little bit about…

Cariann Higginbotham: It is all right, I get looked over quite often.

Bad Ace: May be should have Cariann sit in a more better position for camera, I noticed her not hiding behind her mic.

Cariann Higginbotham: I know and he keeps telling me to put in front of my face, it's totally not my fault.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, that’s the idea behind a microphone. We are an audio podcast first, if you could get the cameras at an angle that might work a little bit better, but right now they are directly behind us, so you see essentially the back of my head and like this giant microphone covering her face, it is pretty cool.

Cariann Higginbotham: I am just trying to stay anonymous.

Bad Ace: There you go.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, tell us a little bit about PodZinger?

Bad Ace: I ran into PodZinger, because me and my wife were doing a podcast and just to get into the community, they got mentioned and people were talking about, he has a type of search engine optimization stuff before the show and one of the things was, “oh, get on PodZinger", because they have these servers that will just download everything that’s in your RSS feed and they do sort of like an old drag and dictate kind of think that they convert the audio to text as if you were doing like speech to text.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s interesting.

Bad Ace: And they hold that text for search.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Can we use, human transcription service right now, to do all of that, because we have a hard; we want people to be able to search in our text and find it on Google. Is that something that I can just copy directly out of PodZinger and bring back into my website and just clean it up for any areas it missed?

Bad Ace: I don’t about cleaning it up, but they do miss a lot, if you go through in, like some of the ones I knew what we talked about and I go through them, like that weird, it does it is best it could, I am not sure how it compares to the service you guys are using, imagine you could, it doesn’t hurt, at best you should have yourself at least indexed with them, you have give them permission to search your content, because they are going to download it, hold it and there is some legal issues, but they might help search engine optimization, getting you guys to popup, may be a Google search or something.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s awesome, yeah, when humans do it, it of course going to be fairly accurate.

Bad Ace: Yeah, right.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Humans that are doing it are not techies and so we say something like …

Cariann Higginbotham: Every time we say “Treo” it is T-R-I-O.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, so…

Cariann Higginbotham: Silly little things like that, which why I go through that just to try and clean that up, quote enquote or Ray Kurzweil really, really threw them. It was really funny.

Bad Ace: That’s great, but you guys, were you guys planning on still talking, you are guys going to talk about video search?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well we are going to talk about how we make our videos more searchable, that’s absolutely on a docket, but this would be, if they did a video as well, this would be a great; or send them an audio stream of it that’s great way to…

Bad Ace: Right, PodZinger has just added us section for YouTube. Now, what they do is just strip the audio and do the same thing as they do with the podcasts and also search the tags and associated text to your posts.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think this is really, really nifty and this is all free correct?

Bad Ace: Yeah, PodZinger is free.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And I can just take, once I submit my RSS feed to them, it sounds like, they have the right to hold on to the audio file and possibly do with it as they please, is that what I am gathering.

Bad Ace: Right, you would relinquish control some of them, I am sure they do some creative commen stuff. Yeah, they are not going to do anything to malicious, like I am imaging that…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right.

Bad Ace: I think they are just trying to cover they butts and they are actually going out and downloading popular podcasts without permission and then waiting for a cease and desist of some kind.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s an interesting way of doing it.

Bad Ace: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, if I did that then I submit it to them, they come back with the text file of sorts, that is…

Bad Ace: Yeah, but it is not given to you, so much it is just posted on their website and then it becomes search able, it is not even posted on their site, it is in their data base now and users can go in there and search for topics and then things would come up may be podcast that once talked about it, in the middle of it will popup.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Can I search for my shows specifically?

Bad Ace: I tried too earlier and it didn’t come up that might be just because you guys haven’t submitted your RSS feed.

Cariann Higginbotham: Actually, I just did and I found us, no problem.

Bad Ace: Oh great.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Really?

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, I didn’t space out Technology Evangelist, I don’t know if maybe that was something, it is kind of one of those silly stupid things, but I do found us, no problem, we have a really ugly picture to look at while you listen to us, but we are there.

Bad Ace: That’s great.

Benjamin Higginbotham: This is a very important thing for podcasters and videocasters to do and actually some people has given us a hard time for doing this, because we transcribe everything, every video, every audio, everything is transcribed and it goes through a two step process. First is transcribed by humans off in, I think we use e24 Transcription for that, then Cariann gets that transcription and cleans it up and makes sure that everything was said was actually correct and makes sure, the technical words are added back in and the all the technology is correct and then we take that transcription and post it in the "more" area of that posts. You have to click to view more, you go into the details of that post, but the reason that so important is that now Google can actually index that page and knows what we were talking about, because Google cannot rip apart an audio file, Google cannot rip apart a video file, they have no idea what we said in the podcast. So, if we were talking about podzinger.com, they don’t know that and so if I am searching for PodZinger, my Google results ranking are going to be substantially lower if I don’t transcribe that.

Bad Ace: I think it’s a great idea. There has been a lot of times where I've listened to a podcast and they might even gone off topic from their “show notes” and I wanted to get more information about that. So, I go on their website and they just have their show notes posted, you know what I mean, so I don’t really know which episode it was I was listening to it, I got to pull upon iTunes on my iPod and after a certain point it is just not worth it. What you guys are doing is a great idea.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but unfortunately it takes a substantial amount of time and money, because, we'll call it 50 cents a minute, that’s not what the real price, I don’t remember what the actual price is, but 50 cents a minute x 30 minutes a day x 7 days a week, that adds up pretty quick. Especially for podcasters who many of them are just doing this for fun, they don’t necessarily want to, we call that $200 a month, I don’t know what they really comes out to, but $200 a month.

Bad Ace: Sure, so I guess for the podcasters who don’t have $200 a month, and they don’t mind the occasional, more than occasional mistake they could go to PodZinger.

Benjamin Higginbotham: How often are the mistakes? How good is their speech to text?

Bad Ace: I don’t know, may be 80% or something, it's not really that good, but it is better than nothing, if you've got a podcast and you're on a budget.

Cariann Higginbotham: For sure.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, but at least you can take. So, you do that, you get that 80%, then all you have to really do is listen to your podcast again, you can probably really quickly get that last 20%. I don’t know if you have to really get a 100%, we will call that last 19% yourself, only take 30 minutes a day, clean it up make sure it is nice and neat, post inside of the post that has the audio with it. What a great way to just really simply increase your Google rankings for your video and your audio.

Bad Ace: Ben, if you got time, I will give you the way, one of the ways I use PodZinger for my listeners.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely.

Bad Ace: I had a German guy email me and he said “you refered to something in your show, it was this word, I don’t know what this word means”, but since he didn’t know what the word mean, he also didn’t spell it out for me, because I would have just shot an email back and I said well, he said “it was in this episode” and it was like four or five episodes ago and you how you get so busy with the podcasts, you don’t have the time for one listener to go and listen to entire episode from beginning to end, to try may be find out what this word was. So, he was talking about what we are talking about before the word that he didn’t know was, so I used PodZinger and I plugged in those key words and it came up and it was “WarDriving”, I mentioned WarDriving.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, yeah.

Cariann Higginbotham: I love it, funny.

Bad Ace: And they missed, they didn’t do woardriving PodZinger missed that, but reading from the text, I got what we were talking about.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, if you are doing WarDriving, I have to assume you have a technology based podcast then?

Bad Ace: No, oddly enough we had; Me and my wife did a podcast which is now pod faded about the Glamour Girls. The Glamour Girls Podcast and on one of the shows, one of the characters was “war walking” and so a lot of people were emailing, they didn’t understand what he was doing, what that meant, so I explained war ames and wardialing and wardriving and stuff.

Cariann Higginbotham: There is a question, what your podcast is? People are questioning.

Bad Ace: People can go and checkout, if they want to, it is glamourgirlspodcast.com, but it is pod faded, so I feel really bad even mentioning it. We just got so busy with school and stuff, I am still in school and my wife is working on her masters and then they changed the writers of this show and so we weren’t really into it so much and then, once it became not fun for the wife to do, it is was like “I guess we really can’t do it anymore”.

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, for sure. No, I understand.

Bad Ace: If are going to do a podcast, you've got to love doing it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, especially if you do it. Did you do once a week? Once a night or often, probably once a week, I assume that was a weekly show.

Bad Ace: Once a week with the show, right.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely. It is a lot of work and effort, we basically there is so much work, we built this entire studio around doing it, because we got sick of having to rip it down and set it back up every time, just to get something that sounded decent something bringing the callers and whatnot. So, we might have…

Bad Ace: Ben, your setup is great looking on your cameras here, but also that the ease of use and I joined Ustream for the first time today, I was guest number 681 or whatever and within a few minutes, I have joined Ustream, you invited me to your skype, piped me in and now we are in business, I mean you've got it all figured out, it's great.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, speaking of search, just out of curiosity, how did you find us on Ustream? How did you find us initially?

Bad Ace: One of the; I love; again text, I was into Leo Laporte’s podcast. He mentioned it, I came on here to see what kind of video they had and you guys popped up as being one of those shows live right now and I was really interested in watching a live show. So, I just sort of stumbled across you guys.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We were stumbled upon.

Cariann Higginbotham: We were stumbled upon, that’s awesome.

Benjamin Higginbotham: A tech joke. All right, hey thank you so much Bad Ace for joining us.

Bad Ace: Sure Ben and nice to talk to you Cariann.

Cariann Higginbotham: Thank you, you as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You have a great night. How awesome is that, two callers in one night.

Cariann Higginbotham: Do you think technically we could say that somebody found us because of Leo Laporte?

Benjamin Higginbotham: You know, I don’t know, but I am going to say yes.

Cariann Higginbotham: Because for a  split second I was like “wait, Leo Laporte talked about us?!?”, no he talked about Ustream, but if you just can take that slightly out of context, "How did you find us?" “Well, Leo Laporte talked about it”. Sweet! That’s awesome!

Benjamin Higginbotham: That works for me, we will latch on to that for a little while.

Cariann Higginbotham: I will put that on the back of my shirt “Leo Laporte talked about us”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Before you know, it will snowball out of control and be like, Leo Laporte’s favorite podcast is TechnologyEvangelist.

Cariann Higginbotham: And Scoble will be like “what the hell? I've never even heard of these fools,".

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh no, he has heard of us.

Cariann Higginbotham: Now, I know, I was just kidding.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Where is that radio interview? He was not too happy. The next topic is how to find e-books online? For those who don’t know, I have the Sony Reader, I keep trying to call it the Sony e-Reader, it is actually the Sony Reader and finding e-books is a little bit of a battle and it is gripe, I don’t actually, the topic isn’t here is what you should do because, I don’t know yet what I should do.

Cariann Higginbotham: The topic is more, can you help me?

Benjamin Higginbotham: To the point, the problem with this Sony Reader or with any e-paper solution is that you have got this proprietary file format that only the Reader supports. So, Sony has their format and they kind ofsupport PDF and text and whatnot, but only on encrypted PDF’s and you can’t buy it off Reader Show, it is a mess. So, when you are trying to find content you have to use just their store, well the Sony store doesn’t have a lot of content in it, so I try to go out and find…

Cariann Higginbotham: You could only use our store, but there is nothing here “ha, ha”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Cariann Higginbotham: Interesting.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And so you try to go out and find e-books and lot of the e-books, I find most the e-books I want to read, but they are available in the format that doesn’t work.

Cariann Higginbotham: Nice…

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what I am trying to figure out as if what I really would love to have happen is have a – not even a Sony Reader, but just a website that had e-books in PDF uncompressed, unDRM format, that you could get access to and that’s finding e-books online, that would be really handy and I think that the popularity of the e-books is going to start to climb as e-paper becomes more and more prevalent in society and I realize it bleeding edge right now. Hardly anyone has one, I get that, I know that. I got one as soon as I could, I love it, it is great, but most people don’t have it. So, most people don’t care, but the reason they don’t care because you can’t find e-books online.

Cariann Higginbotham: Right, so what good is it?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely. So, I would love to - it is short topic and whatnot, but I would love see if anyone knows, this is going out as my plea, if you are a coder or if you just want to do something interesting, find a way to make it easily searchable.

Cariann Higginbotham: Looks like Jeff wants to buy it from you.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, I am not selling my e-reader. Absolutely not, I love that thing, it is the coolest. I wish I had it in here, it is one of the coolest devices ever. If you are a tech geek, you've got that one toy; the one toy to rule them all.

Cariann Higginbotham: Or if you are a nerd, apparently.

Benjamin Higginbotham: One toy to rule them all. The one that you show off, when everyone else is showing off like “Oo will look at my cool digital camera”, “Oo, look at my cool dit da dah”, you whip out your Sony Reader no one can top that, Mark Cuban might be would have top that, but no one else. He will be like “Oh hey, that’s cool, Sony Reader, here is my Red Camera” and I say like “Ah….ah no…”

Cariann Higginbotham: Oh, Cuban is it though, that’s funny.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, yes.

Cariann Higginbotham: Our guest 596 would like to know, who makes e-books?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Who makes e-books? A bunch of different people make e-books. For example if you go to amazon.com, I believe they have a service that will turn your book into an e-book for you, they will help you with that. Sony has their own publishing system and they make their own e-books which has their own encrypted format that only works with Sony stuff, which is a little bit annoying us, it's riddled with DRM as in anything with Sony makes and there is a third party service providers that do PDF e-books, because the idea then is, you just read it right on your computer, there is no need for anything else, that’s kind of handy, but I really like the feel of the Sony Reader. Now that’s interesting thing is the Sony Reader will read PDF’s, absolutely, but it will not read them if they have DRM inside of it. So, if you require a password to unlock your PDF, that won’t work, because there is no way to enter that password in the Sony Reader. If they have turned off things like printing, so you can’t print your PDF and things like saving that’s OK, because the reader doesn’t care. You can’t print or save on the reader anyhow, it can read the file, but you have to be able to read the file without entering any sort of key coding. If you can do that then you can move it over to your Sony Reader. So, the Sony Reader supports bunch of different formats, it also supports text files and I believe it supports rich text files as well, I use those a lot also when we are doing an interview, instead of having show notes, I will just have them all in my Sony Reader and just I will go from page to page and you can make the fun really big. So, I just look down my Sony Reader and the best part is looks really cool.

Cariann Higginbotham: It does actually look really cool, I am impressed with that. I have heard from people who read lots and lots and lots of books such as my mother, for instance, seriously I think she goes through like a book every day or two days, something like that. It is nice, it is easy on their eyes, it is a really slick looking thing, but that there is just nothing, nothing that can replace having that book in your hand.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I disagree whole heartedly. I don’t like having that book in my hand, because every book is different, may be some people like this. Every book is different, every binding is different…

Cariann Higginbotham: Well, if you only read paper bags from a certain author, then they are all going to be the same.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, that’s true, but how many people do that?

Cariann Higginbotham: I know, I am just kidding.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, so the binding is different, the feel of the book is different and even then, even if the paper back from the same author, the age of the book and how much is been read of it will alter, not the chemistry, but alter the feel of the book. So, when you are reading and you are part way through, if you are half way through the book, how you are sitting and reading the book is different than if you are, just in the very beginning, because you got the cover pushing back, with the Sony Reader, every page is the same, which makes it really easy to figure out what positions are best to read the book and so you can just sit-down and instead of concentrating on the paper in your hand, you can concentrate on the words on the screen. The thing is books are art, the paper book is a work of art, not just a words, but just the cover and how they do everything around it. So, and just a clarity of the text on the page that’s it is all part of the feel of the book and I understand that. That’s part of why I like the Sony Reader, because the text is so clear and it does mimic a book very, very closely. It is not a computer gadget, it is e-paper and that’s why I like it so much, because you don’t lose the art with the Sony Reader.

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, I see what you are saying. I personally pretty much don’t read anything ever. So, it doesn’t make any difference to me, but…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Mocheeks brings up another interesting point “With an e-reader, I can bring thousands of books with me in the palm of my hand”. Now, let’s say you are moving from apartment to apartment and you have thousands of books, that’s sucks so much. We have a friend that does that and we always get stuck moving his stuff.

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, we need to talk to him about that, I think we have moved in like four times now.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Actually, he has moved us more, we owe him a move still. The problem is he has tons of books, shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves of books. If we were to convert that all into e-books, it would be so much nicer.

Cariann Higginbotham: Like three e-books.

Benjamin Higginbotham: My back would be so happy.

Cariann Higginbotham: Of course, then there is the solid oak entertainment system.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, that’s the e-books, how to find them online, this is not the exactly the easiest thing to do right now. I would love for some one in the chat room or someone listening to this podcast on-demand: Build the search engine for e-books, build one that’s designed for e-readers and whatnot. It is the DRM free version of the books, it is really easy to buy the books, because I'll pay for the book, it is not that I don’t want to pay, I just need to be able to find in a format that I can read on my e-reader and make that go. There is a pretty big gap in the market today for that and once that gap is filled, I think the market is going to start to take off, it is still a little new, I don’t think it is going to be like an overnight success type thing, but if you are a coder and you are board and you want to do something in your off time, what a great project that would be?

Cariann Higginbotham: Zeller actually has a quick question, How do images look on the reader?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, the reader is black and white, so you are not going to get beautiful color images.

Cariann Higginbotham: So,they look black and white.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, but there is anime type, it is like comic book type and it comes with the reader just to show off and it looks really good actually.

Cariann Higginbotham: Now, you said there is a, I am calling in an e-reader, there is a Sony Reader that is color, no?

Benjamin Higginbotham: There is not a Sony one, no. They do have e-paper that’s in color, but Sony at this time doesn’t make one that’s in color. The question is, are iBooks like iTunes, sort of yeah, actually if you think about it iTunes would be the perfect store to add books to it. So, now you got your video, your audio and your text all which can be downloaded to your associated Apple device, of course Apple doesn’t have an e-reader right now, but how awesome would that be? Actually Scoble did an April fools joke on this and I loved the idea in the April fools joke, turn it in to a real idea, where it is a e-paper mechanism, it is got beautiful Sony UI, so it is very simple to use. Just a few buttons, so it is still focus of the product is the content in the book, not the product itself, like the iPod, focus of the product is music, not the iPod. Do the same kind of thing, but add wireless WAN technology, EVDO, 1xRTT, EDGE, HSTP, pick an acronym.

Cariann Higginbotham: That’s exactly, it is all those little acronyms that screw up the e24 guys, when they are transcribing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I am going actually put more acronyms into the show from now on.

Cariann Higginbotham: Well, the thing is you say them so quickly and you mumble over them, that they just go like “Be it be, be to be”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I will try, but take that WAN technology added into the e-reader now, take a version of Google reader add it into the e-reader as well, so you can get your Google reader, you get your blogs directly on to this e-paper, anywhere that you have got bandwidth in the US, Canada or whatever country you are in: awesometacular! And then it can sync automatically with iTunes, it can also play some music in the background, so you can listen to music and read. How awesome of a device would that be?

Cariann Higginbotham: That would be cool.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely I'd love that.

Cariann Higginbotham: Zeller just has a clarification on the question, how does it actually look? Is it legible, I think it is what the question was.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Like a picture or the...?

Cariann Higginbotham: Yeah, the image itself.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The image, yes and no. I would say that images are not the Sony Reader strong point. So, if you are buying it for the sole use of viewing images, I would not do that. If you are looking at a cartoon on there, that’s pretty much a black and white drawing with a little bit of shading here and there, those actually look pretty good, lot better than you think they would look. If you are looking at a what was once a color picture, those get destroyed by the Sony Reader. Basically, it turns into a blob of goo, right? So that’s not going to happen too much, but if there just black text, if there is jpeg image of text, that actually doesn’t look too bad, that’s actually is rendered very well.

Cariann Higginbotham: OK, cool.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The last topic is how to better make your video searchable? We actually talked about that little bit with Bad Ace and that was having the text, having that transcript attached to your video, so I think we already pretty much covered that topic.

Cariann Higginbotham: OK, did you want to just reiterate that really quickly, because you said “and our next topic is, we already did that”…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I probably should have just removed it from my Google Docs, so I didn’t cover, but ultimately it comes down to that same thing you want to do with podcasts. You need to make sure that you have got a text transcript of your entire video available to you and if you really want to take it to next level and I do suggest doing this. You are going to want time code that transcript for video and then upload that time coded transcript back to Google video, if you are uploading to Google video and that does a couple of things for you. First, now Google video can search for that and jump right to that point, but second now you have got close caption data. Well that’s pretty cool, actually.

Cariann Higginbotham: I agree.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, so that’s very, very important to do in your videos, always make sure you have got that transcript. If you are doing a podcast or a videocast or you got a video and you don’t have a transcript, you are missing 80% of the potential audience you could get. You can’t search for it now, you can’t find that content, it is just as important to have that text version of your podcast as it, is to have the actual podcast itself.

Cariann Higginbotham: It's like having a thought, but not writing it down.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, exactly. I'd love to have search engine get speech to text built into them and even if it is only 80% accurate, so what…

Cariann Higginbotham: On you will be like 60%...

Benjamin Higginbotham: 1%, 2% accurate, it would be like "zygote?, what’s that", but…

Cariann Higginbotham: Actually gnomes is the last one they relay through them?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Gnomes or G-Note?

Cariann Higginbotham: Gnome, we were talking about genes and Gnomes the other day…

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, speech to text in search engines will be handy-dandy, it doesn’t really exist too much. Mocheeks has blinks uses speech to text search videos from all over the web. I am thinking we are going to see a couple of more search engines actually starting to implement this, but ultimately, it is got to be the big players like the Google, the Yahoo, the Microsft Live, I am sorry, I said big players, so that would be Google. Actually…

Cariann Higginbotham: Google and Google.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Google, Google and Google that implement this into their system where they can get the speech and actually I would love to see image recognition as well, so if I have got a white horse that suddenly walks in the door, I can search for in the video white horse and it would actually be like, this one has a white horse in it, but I am way far out now. We can’t even get speech to text going, how we are going to get the image recognition going, that’s going to be... Seriously we could have it any moment in time, a white horse, learn how to use a door handle and walk through the door, it could happen.

Cariann Higginbotham: Have you seen that commercial where they are talking about, your dad is not a horse’s butt or something along those lines, it is the idea that the camera would have a little bit more of a face detection, so when you are taking a picture of your dad, next to a horse’s butt, the camera would know, that your dad is not the horse’s butt and it just always makes me laugh. I am sure they don’t say butt, but it just made me laugh.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, I like to thank everyone for joining us today for Search Thursday, I need to alliterate that some how, I can’t remember Search Thursday, we will find it, Thurch Thursday…thank you everyone for joining us for Thurch Thursday, we will be doing Freestyle Friday tomorrow, we do this live on Ustream that’s going to be at 9 o’clock central, 7 o’clock pacific, I did it out of order , it is 10 o’clock eastern. We would love to chat with you live, we will bring you into the conversation, so make sure to join us on Ustream.tv, you can also join us on technologyevangelist.com. Thanks so much for listening, see you tomorrow.