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"I'm not sure how long it will last as a business, but CastingWords is remarkable for a simple reason - it's build upon both Amazon's Mechanical Turk and their new Simple Storage Service (S3).  The podcasting transcription service sends your MP3 over to MTurk  for the transcription, and the 'casts are seemingly hosted with S3.  This slightly-outdated quote from founder Nathan McFarland (via Business 2.0) sums it up nicely:\nThe idea is to sell search ads against the keywords in the transcriptions, which we generate using Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk and some whizzy software. But we need capital to pay all those MTurk workers, so in the next few weeks we\u2019ll be opening a store. It will allow Podcasters to purchase transcriptions of their shows. We\u2019ll do the transcriptions and give them a full transcription - not just chunks pulled back by the search engine if it happens to index their show. Of course they automatically get listed in the engine, so this arrangement should drive traffic to them, get them transcripts, and get us the cash needed to keep on transcribing.\nI'm not quite sold on that business model, but I do think any use of Mechanical Turk is fascinating (and CastingWords is one of the few services that actually employs Turkers on a regular basis).  A related service, von Kempelen, offers text translations and text-to-voice services through MTurk - they'll also help you to build apps that take advantage of the service (something I'll bear in mind).  This is peer production at its most interesting - and scary.  In the global economy, a large number of jobs can be outsourced for a fraction of the price.  Mechanical Turk hasn't turned out to be the killer app for outsourcing yet, but I can't help feeling that open source, peer production, social software and collaborative web-based tools are - ironically - chipping away at the earnings of those very Westerners that built them."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/03/14/castingwords-podcast-transcriptions/>