How PR and communication pros can benefit from making podcasts easier to find

Most of us have heard the philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Today, we might ask, “If a podcast exists online and no text is around to optimize it, does it get shared?” Because audio resources lack text, audio content is virtually invisible to traditional searches, creating a black hole of sorts for knowledge building and content amplification.

There are few stories sweeter than when technology is harnessed to solve a challenge, and that’s what cofounders Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith of Pop Up Archive, and now Audiosear.ch, have been up to. They’ve shined a light on the black hole of audio search, and plowed a chaotic field of audio content into neat, user-friendly rows to enhance discovery, accessibility and shareability.

Pop Up Archive transcribes and tags audio material to make it more discoverable on the web, and Audiosear.ch (beta version) gives developers the tools to make thousands of podcasts and radio shows searchable by show, episode, category, network, tags, related audio, relevancy, or recentness.