Earlier this evening, I was playing around with Loomia, which is a newish podcast search engine. My normal protocol when looking over new sites is to do some standard searches for "Open Stacks" and "library" or "librarian" and variations thereof.

Loomia led me to the Legislative Reference Bureau of the Wisconsin State Legislature website. Sure enough, this reference agency has a series of podcasts that covers aspects of Wisconsin law along as well as services the agency provides. You'll also find discussions of the library's new holdings and guidance on using the OPAC. Very nice! Here's the feed.

As for Loomia, it's OK, but not great. This is how I feel about pretty much all of these audio search tools at this point. Audio search has proven to be a real bear. And what they are calling podcast search isn't what I envision it to be. I want truly indexed audio content, not just indexed metadata about the podcast. I don't just want podcasts that use the word "library" in the show notes. (Well, actually sometimes I do, but work with me here.) I want to know what shows are using the word library in the context of the audio program itself.

Blinkx claims to do just that, but no search that I've done has provided any proof. Podscope does it just about right, even providing playable clips that include your search term. On the down side, they seem to be able to handle only so much speech-to-text processing, which leaves their database severely limited in terms of coverage of the podosphere. I have high hopes for their ability to provide true podcast search given better processing power. If Blinkx actually does what they claim, they will be providing a nice combination of metadata indexing and true audio indexing that will be extremely powerful.

That all said, Loomia does have potential. They are focused on personalized recommendations via tagging, ratings and a "similar users" engine akin to Audioscrobbler's musical neighbors. I do genuinely enjoy that aspect of the Audioscrobbler experience, but will I be providing enough about my podcasting experience to generate useful comparisons with other users? Somewhat difficult for me to picture.

Anyway, stay tuned as I hope to provide more evaluations of various tools for listening to, searching and producing podcasts.