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A few weeks ago I announced the ability to search YouTube material on PodZinger. Now I’m very happy to announce the creation of a new Poker channel within our Youtube content, joining the existing sports, anime, and entertainment channels. Now all of you poker fans out there can search all relevant poker material within our YouTube content.

Many of you may be wondering why we are grouping content into channels when tags already exist? The answer is simple really. Using our speech recognition and natural language technologies , PodZinger can actually take into account what was said and its context when determining a category to which it belongs. This often proves to be more specific and reliable than simply relying on a few creator submitted tags for classification (whom may be tempted to add erroneous tags to show up in more results). Full text search opens up a world of content like never before, and now we can offer more specific search results within channels that appeal to certain enthusiasts.

Stay tuned for more channels to come!

What did people Zing most in 2006? The list below shows PodZinger’s top queries this past year:

Top Search Terms of 2006

1) George Bush
2) Music Videos
3) Google
4) Red Sox
5) Leo Laporte
6) Iraq
7) Paris Hilton iPod
9) Fantasy Football
10) American Idol

While the politically-minded searched for video of George Bush’s speeches and news coverage of the Iraq war, sports fans looked for news of the much talked about Daisuke Matsuzaka deal. In 2006 people used PodZinger to search a broad array of topics. So, whether you are an American Idol devotee or an Apple fan looking for video clips of Steve Job’s newest products, PodZinger proves a highly valuable search tool. Try searching these top terms on www.podzinger.com to see what others are so eager to watch and listen to. Now you can also use the new YouTube search box with channels to further narrow your query. See the entire list here.

As we usher in a new year of opportunity in online video and online advertising, BlogZinger will have 3 new Contributing Zingers with fresh perspectives on this years happenings and buzz. Our goal is to provide more reasons for you to pause, ponder, and engage in the important topics of the day.

You will be hearing from Joe Finley, Julio Vaca, and Annelise Parham in the coming year. Check back with us weekly as they discuss, uncover, and dissect topics of note related to industry news, search, online video, new online advertising models, and of course, PodZinger.

This morning PodZinger announced its partnership with Thames Valley pod.tv to power search capabilities for its Web site . Thames Valley pod.tv is the UK’s fastest growing video podcast webTV site, providing original content across a wide range of topics including art, music, culture, cooking, gardening, business, legal, illustrated audio stories, families and parenting, and documentaries. This partnership is unique for PodZinger in that it’s our first venture outside of the U.S.

For more details, click here.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and while it is often one of the most festive holidays, it can also be one of the most stressful. Cooking an elaborate fest, deciding what wine to pair with which course, looking for quick time saving tips or finding that perfect pumpkin pie recipe can all be daunting tasks.

Podcasts and online videos provide a quick and simple way to get easy ideas for the holiday season, no matter what topic you’re seeking. PodZinger, the world’s most powerful audio and video search engine and online advertising network, also makes searching for podcasts and videos a simple task. Scanning each and every word, PodZinger lets users pinpoint exactly what they are searching for – taking them directly to the key word they are seeking and saving them the time of listening to the entire file. It also allows for immediate playback so if you miss an ingredient in a pecan pie recipe you’re listening too, you can easily replay that portion with just one click. Download any of these podcasts or online videos and have a portable, compact Thanksgiving lesson of your very own.

Eat Feed – The food and cooking podcast that looks at Thanksgiving’s historical significance and how you can bring those traditions into your own home. In a special Thanksgiving podcast, author Sandy Oliver is featured, discussing the history of Thanksgiving traditions from her new book, “Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History, from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie.”

Chronicle Podcasts: Food for Your Ears – Podcasts from The San Francisco Chronicle’s award-winning food department. Learn about their favorite places to eat, excerpts from interviews with celebrity chefs and other scrumptious content. Its Thanksgiving podcasts provide various tips for the holidays, including for baking your turkey and pairing wines with dinner.

WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show – Leonard Lopate hosts a diverse collection of great thinkers and talkers for smart, unpredictable interviews. For one of his Thanksgiving specials, Lopate hosts Gourmet Magazine’s editor, who discusses recipe swaps, as well as reveals some of her own specialties.

For more Thanksgiving podcast or online video suggestions, visit PodZinger.

PodZinger recently announced a unique partnership with the Cato Institute, which selected the company to power audio and video search capabilities on its Web site. Cato’s partnership with PodZinger will allow the renowned Washington, DC-based think tank to provide its audience with improved access to information contained in its Web site’s daily podcasts. Specifically, PodZinger will provide audio and video search capabilities for Cato’s Events Podcast, Daily Podcast and the entire library of archived podcasts, enabling users for the first time to easily search the contents of these files for specific topics of interest. Cato joins the growing, diverse network of content creators that are utilizing PodZinger’s innovative technology to increase their contents’ value by enabling users to perform in-depth research of audio and video content.

Cato is a great site for anyone interested in public policy and we encourage people to visit the site and search for the issue that matters the most to them.

With the introduction of he PodZinger Advertising Platform, we are encouraging all podcasters to sign up to participate…. and it’s Free. this is a great way to get your podcast found and make money.

If you have already registered your content with PodZinger, expect an email in the next week or two letting you know the email under which you’re registered. You’ll need this to sign in. If you haven’t registered your content yet, just register here. In both cases, check the “opt-in” box for the advertising program, it’s that easy.

Online content is revolutionizing the consumers consumption of media and advertising has begun to adapt to this new environment. Get in the ground floor with us. We’re looking forward to it!

Week after week I’ve noticed articles about the continued craze of online video. Amazon now offers movie downloads from its Web site, Apple has a new technology that allows consumers to play a video from their computers directly onto their TVs, Google replaced its Froogle tab on its toolbar with Google Video in early August, Blinkx announced on Monday a partnership with Microsoft to power video search capabilities for some sites on MSN and Live.com, and most recently, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars, making it Google’s largest acquisition since the company’s inception eight years ago.

The increase of online video content has simultaneously caused a soar in online advertising. A recent article by Brian Morrissey in AdWeek noted that net video advertisements are becoming more expensive than advertising space on TV. Ad agency executives said that the cost to play an ad before video content now costs anywhere from $25 to $40 per 1,000 plays, which is a 25 percent increase just in the past year. Media execs say that that is comparable to the price to run a similar ad on network television.

Catherine Holahan wrote an article today for BusinessWeek discussing the recent YouTube acquisition and citing that in addition to expanding Google’s user base, the purchase gives a hefty boost to Google’s online video library, searchable content and potential advertiser base, as 65,000 new videos are currently uploaded to YouTube every 24 hours. Holahan also interviewed our CEO, Alex Laats, who discussed our new advertising platform with her and how it relates to search. We were very excited to see that we were the only company referenced in the article in regards to video advertising!

It seems the timing of the release of our advertising platform could not have been more ideal. I think now that we’ve introduced such an innovate option for advertisers, we are going to start seeing similar ones pop up among other search engines. At least we’ll still be able to say we were the “first of our kind!”

In recent BlogZinger postings, I’ve been hinting that PodZinger would soon be announcing an advertising platform that was unlike any other out there and provided more benefits to the consumers, content creators and advertisers. Well…today, we officially launched our first-of-its-kind online video advertising platform, enabling advertisers to serve relevant ads in audio and video content!With the new ad platform, podcasters are able to monetize their content and receive half of all generated revenue. Using content classification technology and algorithms for analyzing consumer intent and aggregate consumer usage, PodZinger solves the problem of connecting consumers with relevant advertising in online audio and video content. The new service goes far beyond traditional text and click-through advertising services that advertisers are dependant on today, providing enhanced online experiences for content creators, advertisers and consumers.

We’ve already gotten some great feedback from the media, and I’ve included some of the highlights below from Red Herring, The Boston Herald, Adotas, ClickZ and more. Feel free to let us know what you think of our new platform, or if you’d like to become involved in the program yourself!

Red Herring, PodZinger Targets Ads, October 5, 2006

Boston Herald, Video podcast ads on tap, October 5, 2006

Adotas, PodZinger Opens Podcast Advertising Search Network, October 5, 2006

ClickZ, PodZinger to Offer Targeted Video Ads, October 5, 2006

MediaPost, Podzinger Rolls Out Ad Network, October 5, 2006

CNET, PodZinger to share ad revenue with podcasters, October 5, 2006

TechCrunch, Podzinger to listen for ad opportunities, October 5, 2006

In the Wall Street Journal today, editor William Bulkeley wrote an article entitled, “Surfing the Internet for Spoken Words:  New Technology Allows Searchers to Scour Online Audio, Video to Target Advertising,” and included PodZinger as one of the leading industry experts.  The article explores how online audio and video search engines are becoming a tapped resource for targeted advertising. 

“Audio and video have been a black space that cannot be discovered by traditional search engines,” Bulkeley quotes our CEO Alex Laats saying.    

Bulkeley discusses that, similar to targeted advertising with text-based searches such as Google and Yahoo!, PodZinger is utilizing viewers’ key word searches to enable advertisers to create relevant ads that are specifically tied to those queries.

Watching television as a little girl, I remember thinking how cool it was that no matter what show I watched, there were always commercials for my favorite toys.  It took me a few years to realize that that was just targeted advertising.  Boy, it’s amazing how far technology and advertising have come since then!