March 4th, 2010, 3 Comments »
If you’re suffering from Olympics withdrawal (as opposed to me, who’s suffering from a bit of a Olympic hangover), this might please you. It’s a video of False Creek shot while Sidney Crosby scored the overtime winner last Sunday. It’s the audio you’re interested in–you can safely fast-forward to the one-minute mark:
Pretty great, eh? Truly a climactic moment.
October 31st, 2008, 17 Comments »
For one of our clients, we’re doing an informal series of audio interviews with tech gurus and web geeks about how they manage and back up their digital life. There are various marketing angles on this little project, but one is search engine optimization.
The first interview was with man-about-the-web Chris Pirillo. We talked for about 15 minutes over a dodgy Skype line. I had it transcribed by one of our contractors, and it turned into 2500 words of text.
That’s 2500 words of relevant text that’s reasonably rich with keywords. Assuming a going low-end rate of $25 per blog post, and 250 words a post, that’s $250 of text for the price of transcription and, all-in, about an hour of my time.
Yesterday I did the second interview in the series with the incomparable Vanessa Fox. I figured I could get the transcription done for less money, and I didn’t want to torture our contractor. I started shopping around for options. I also asked on Twitter, and these were the options that I came up with. The interview is 18 minutes, so I’ll include the pricing for that duration where available (all amounts, presumably, are in US dollars):
Then Avi reminded me of Andy Baio’s experiments in transcription with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project. Andy has written up thorough instructions on how to outsource your transcription in chunks to workers in the system.
I decided to give Turk a try. It’s a little more work than just sending off the file to one of the aforementioned services, but I’ve always been charmed by Turk’s micro-task model. I divided the transcription into three six-minute chunks and posted the job. I offered $6 per chunk, or $1 per minute. I’m sure I could have gotten it done for less, but I’m looking for inexpensive, not cheap as humanly possible.
It was mostly a success. The turn-around time was ridiculously quick. Despite my specifying a turnaround of a week being acceptable, I got all three transcriptions back in less than six hours. The quality seems excellent, though I don’t have a ton of experience with transcription to compare.
Despite my best efforts to ensure it didn’t happen, two workers transcribed the same section. Thus, I had to re-post a section to get complete results. And, of course, I have to paste the three chunks of text together and do some proofing. After Amazon’s fees, I paid $19.80 for 18 minutes of transcription.
Next time, I may just give CastingWords a try, as it would save me time and the difference in price is pretty marginal. There’s some interesting discussion on Andy’s blog about the ethics of pricing jobs on Turk. I was interested to learn that 75% of Turk workers are American, and that they have a variety of motivations for working on the service.
I wondered on Twitter why more people don’t have their podcasts transcribed. The general response was that, for the hobbyist, it was too expensive. I guess it depends on if and how podcasters are monetizing their sites.
If you can get reasonably good transcription for $0.75 per minute, then you’ve got about 3700 words (my two transcriptions average out to 185 words a minute) to post on one or more pages for $15. Can you generate more than $15 from advertising on those pages over, say, two years? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s worth considering if you’re relying on advertising (and particular Google AdWords and the like) for revenue.
In any case, if they care one iota about SEO, a company has no excuses for not posting transcriptions of audio and video content. It’s not world-changing, but it’s another few steps in the marathon that is marketing.
UPDATE: Speaking of Mechanical Turk, Andy’s fruitful link blog points to the Turker’s Gospel, where Turk workers (‘Turkers’) rewrite Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in their own words.
August 29th, 2007, 4 Comments »
When I was in Vancouver, I bought a pair of Panasonic RP-HC500 noise canceling headphones. I’m doing a lot of traveling this fall, and my old headphones had pretty much died. A while back I’d read a group review of noise canceling headphones by David Pogue (here’s some related video), and was pleased to read that Bose no longer had the market cornered.
Wikipedia explains how noise canceling headphones work:
Noise-cancelling headphones reduce unwanted ambient sounds (i.e., acoustic noise) by means of active noise control. Essentially, this involves using a microphone, placed near the ear, and electronic circuitry which generates an “antinoise” sound wave with the opposite polarity of the sound wave arriving at the microphone.
I paid CAN $200 plus GST for mine, and was very happy with them. The earcups are soft, pliable and very comfortable. The whole headset is very light, and fits snugly around my enormous head. There’s even a convenient carrying case which can hold my iPod as well.
The actual noise reduction was pretty extraordinary–it really improved the experience of listening to music or audio books on my plane ride home. I no longer had to crank the volume up to 11 to compensate for the omnipresent background noise of the plane.
I brought them home to Malta, happy with my new purchase. A week later, for no particular reason (there was no, uh, trauma or anything), when I switched on the noise canceling functionality, the right earcup started generating this whistling, wind sound. It’s like the headphones are ‘hearing’ background noise that isn’t there, and trying to cancel it.
This is an extraordinary pain in the ass, as it’s kind of tricky for me to return them to the Best Buy on Cambie Street from rural Gozo. I guess I’m going to have to box them up and ship them home to some kind relative who will exchange them, and then send them back to me. Oy.