The P&M Awards – a review of a preview
Posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 11:36am. #
Tonight, as a judge and trustee, I’m off to The Radio Academy’s Promotion & Marketing Awards. It’s at a place I’ve never been before in Great Portland Street, and I’m hoping to bump into a lot of old friends and have a good evening. While the Sony Radio Academy Awards are good, it’s always good to see some of the rest of the craft in radio in more specialised awards, and I’m looking forward to discovering some neat ideas.
However, this isn’t actually a blog posting about the P&M Awards. It’s a blog posting about a blog posting about the P&M Awards, a kind of recursive blog-will-eat-itself posting, much like the BBC’s inevitable Editor’s Blog posting about the BBC news coverage of the BBC Trust decision about whether the BBC Question Time discussion with the BNP’s Nick Griffin should go ahead. (Oooh, topical. Excellent. Come, Google spider, come.)
The blog posting I’m typing about is Steve Martin’s interview with Trevor Dann; and it’s very interesting for two reasons.
It’s out before the event.
It would have been easy for Steve to take an audio recorder to the P&Ms, and interview Trevor; publishing it the next day. However, it would have been lost in the noise of the award winners, and would have obviously included chats about the winners and nobody else. By publishing before the event, it builds excitement and buzz about the event, and will draw traffic because it clearly contains clues as to who has won and who hasn’t. Maybe. It’s probably no surprise, then, that radio news websites have picked up on it.
It has a transcript
This is the main brilliance of this post.
1. Google can’t index your audio. It can’t. Trevor’s mention of Radio City’s “Make My Day” feature would not have appeared on Google if Steve had only posted the audio. Yet, Google can index text. And does. And has.
2. I can read faster than real-time. So, I was able to flick through this interview without, bless him, listening to Trevor’s voice, discovering what he was talking about, in a much more efficient way than simply listening to the audio.
3. It’s surprisingly cheap to do. Transcribing a ten-minute interview in this way looks as if it might have cost around £20, judging from a quick Google search. If you want to put a little more work in, it could be even cheaper. This is not outside your price range; and it’s something that can easily be outsourced to India or similar areas.
What surprises me, therefore, is why more radio stations don’t transcribe their interviews. While I enjoyed the Chris Evans interview yesterday at Absolute Radio, or the programme called The Interview on the BBC World Service, why not transcribe these, too, to add to their Google-ability? And why do we treat our audience’s time so poorly, expecting them to sit through twenty minutes of audio instead of ten minutes of speed-reading? Is that good user-experience?
As ever, your thoughts are welcome. Incidentally, you’ll now see feedback from Twitter, Digg, and a few other places in my comments, courtesy of a new plugin I’ve discovered. Hopefully this’ll enable you to discover new people to follow on Twitter, too.
Tim Page
Steve Martin
gavin
Why don’t more sites use audio searches – ie actually crawling the recording phonetically for search terms?
Although it can never be foolproof and I guess might disappoint the non-techy user who’s used to Google, I’m always impressed by the Audionix system which works on the Beeb’s internal audio logging system AutoROT.
Given Google’s reasonable accuracy interpreting my search wishes on iPhone, it can’t be far off!