5. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer usable storage medium storing computer usable program code for speed podcasting, the computer program product comprising: computer usable program code for receiving a podcast of particular subject matter by a processor of a computer from over a computer communications network; computer usable program code for speech recognizing an audio portion of the received podcast into a transcript of both essential and non-essential words, the essential words comprising nouns and verbs directed to the particular subject matter, the non-essential words comprising articles, adverbs and adjectives not essential to the particular subject matter; computer usable program code for parsing the words of the transcript, filtering the transcript to exclude non-essential words leaving only essential words comprising nouns and verbs, and comparing the parsed words remaining in the filtered transcript with a set of essential words in a data store so as to identify each of the essential word speech recognized and present in the transcript; computer usable program code for processing each word parsed in the transcript and matched to an essential word in the data store to index a corresponding audio segment of the audio portion of the podcast; computer usable program code for selecting a playback speed for speed podcasting the received podcast; computer usable program code for determining a rating corresponding to the selected playback speed; and, computer usable program code for playing back each indexed audio segment corresponding to an essential word in the speech recognized transcript matched to a word in the data store and having a rating higher than the determined rating, while excluding from playback all audio segments not indexed to an essential word in the speech recognized transcript and all audio segments indexed to an essential word having a rating lower than the determined rating.
5. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer usable storage medium storing computer usable program code for speed podcasting, the computer program product comprising: computer usable program code for receiving a podcast of particular subject matter by a processor of a computer from over a computer communications network; computer usable program code for speech recognizing an audio portion of the received podcast into a transcript of both essential and non-essential words, the essential words comprising nouns and verbs directed to the particular subject matter, the non-essential words comprising articles, adverbs and adjectives not essential to the particular subject matter; computer usable program code for parsing the words of the transcript, filtering the transcript to exclude non-essential words leaving only essential words comprising nouns and verbs, and comparing the parsed words remaining in the filtered transcript with a set of essential words in a data store so as to identify each of the essential word speech recognized and present in the transcript; computer usable program code for processing each word parsed in the transcript and matched to an essential word in the data store to index a corresponding audio segment of the audio portion of the podcast; computer usable program code for selecting a playback speed for speed podcasting the received podcast; computer usable program code for determining a rating corresponding to the selected playback speed; and, computer usable program code for playing back each indexed audio segment corresponding to an essential word in the speech recognized transcript matched to a word in the data store and having a rating higher than the determined rating, while excluding from playback all audio segments not indexed to an essential word in the speech recognized transcript and all audio segments indexed to an essential word having a rating lower than the determined rating. 6. The computer program product of claim 5 , further comprising: computer usable program code for consulting a thesaurus to retrieve words synonymous with the matched word in the data store of essential words; and, computer usable program code for adding the synonymous words to the data store of essential words.