Could this (found through John Naughton) be an actually useful Web 2.0 app? I can't see the use, if you have learned to read and write, of private podcasting, which is the main selling point -- essentially, this service is a kind of Flickr for voice recordings; but then the world is obviously full of people to whom reading and writing remain unnatural skills, and who far prefer sound and preferably moving pictures.

There is one useful service here for the command line types. The company does transcriptions, at 80¢ a minute, of any recordings sent in and promises to have them back within 48 hours. (Note how literacy here becomes a skill to be outsourced to the poor). I reckon that works out at about £30 an hour, which is a sum that I and others might well pay for decent transcriptions -- they do, after all, take maybe five times as long to transcribe as they do to listen to. The only question is the quality of the results. I am spoiled now by the excellent BBC transcription service, but I have known some frightful typos and brainos appear when ordinary audio secretaries transcribe interviews.