David Siegel's book Pull outlines a semantic future that is equally Orwellian and utopian.

I’ve been wrestling with the semantic web for a while, trying to figure out specifically what it meant for Mightybytes and what it could do for our customers. Focal Press suggested I include information on semantic search in Return on Engagement and that provided the impetus for me to really wrap my head around its admittedly sometimes esoteric concepts. As part of this process, I purchased numerous books on the topic, many of which read like a dissertation and typically put me to sleep after just a few pages (admittedly, most of them were never finished). None put semantic web concepts into as much relevant context as Pull by David Siegel.

I like trilogies. Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Legally Blonde…

Yeah. I know. Crazy but true. They really made three Legally Blonde movies. Look it up. And before you go telling me there are four Indiana Jones movies, let me tell you that fourth one doesn’t even EXIST as far as I’m concerned. C’mon, Inca cosmonauts? Seriously? What the heck ever.

Anyhoo, trilogies are awesome.  And therefore I add this, a third entry into my newly named “Adobe Soundbooth CS4 Metadata Transcription Trilogy!!!”

In all seriousness, my boss Tim pointed out that I never got round to fully explaining how this wacky and fun transcription business fully relates to SEO. That Tim’s a clever fella. It’s like he’s written about this himself or something (shameless book plug #1).

Now that we’ve had a preview of robot metadata transcribers in part one of this brief blog series, let’s grab some popcorn and enjoy the show!

When it came time for me to try out Adobe Soundbooth’s nifty transcribing technology, I launched the program and grabbed a clip of audio that I find entertaining. I happen to have a lot of short audio clips from the terrible-and-hilarious 1966 Sci-fi flop “Zontar, the Thing from Venus” all pre-clipped and ready to go for just this kind of thing. Doesn’t everybody?

If you do video work, you’re going to bump into times when you need everything transcribed into a text file.

If you have somehow avoided this thus far, it’s only a matter of time before a client requests it, or you end up demanding it for yourself. Now that metadata has become the quiet king of the internet search, you’re going to have to write it all out if you want your work to be found.

At first I was only moderately impressed with the speech-to-text transcription feature offered in Premiere CS4. It seemed cool but not something I thought we would use with any regularity. As was evidenced by some of the sessions I attended at MAX, my thinking about the possibilities this feature has to offer was a bit short-sighted.