Powerhouse panel on media search is going on right not in front of me. Names on the panel: Molly Wood, CNET, Jeff Karnes, Yahoo! Search, Karen Howe, AOL Singingfish, David Ives - TVEyes | Podscope, Suranga Chandratillake - Blinkx.

The discussion has moved into Metadata inclusion in media files. The issue of metadata spam has come up and it is a valid point. We saw this happen with metatags in webpages in the early days on the web. It is an issue that will cover most areas of media related textual support data.

One pain point is ID3v2 standards and the media search engines should set some best practices for populating metadata fields. Companies like AOL Singingfish and Yahoo Media Search should set some standards that could lead the industry and help media creators to do them correctly.

My thought is that these same search engines need to push on the media format standards groups to establish better and more appropriate metadata fields for podcasters and video podcasters.

How important are taqging to help index media. It is also possible to bias the tags and create incomplete way of indexing. It will just be part of the mix.

Presenting a better user interface for media search. Karen Howe thinks that media search results should be blended with other media types search results. The blending of text, photo’s, audio and video in one search result.

Media search on mobile devices is on the roadmap for AOL’s Singingfish.

I am sitting in the main ballroom in Ontario, California at the Portable Media and Podcast Expo. I am listening to Yahoo present on Podcasting and then up next is NPR Online.

Yahoo’ Joe Hayashi, Sr. Dir of Product Management said that podcasting is just at the beginning stages of building listeners and that we will see business and money come to podcasting. They are also going after distribution to the mobile phone platform. They see big things coming down the line and are investing as it fits with Yahoo’s overall mission online.

I have just now started listening to Robert Spier from NPR and he is sharing the vast content they are publishing as podcasts. They are not podcasting full length programs, they are still researching whether they will ever publish full length programs. They are concerned that they would spend too much in bandwidth and undermine affiliate relations on the broadcast side. They are focusing on 10 minute long content. They are trying to create a faster content pipeline to get new content to the listener.

The expo seems to be well attended and is in a very good quality convention center. The expo portion of the event is rather small, but a good indication of how the the business side of podcasting is just beginning.

I will be speaking on a panel discussion on Saturday about the future of downloadable digital media. It is a very large topic and could go in a lot of directions. I will write about the session and will try and bring you the highlights.

Rob Greenlee