According to a story in the LA Times, News Corp is in talks to acquire multimedia (video and audio) search engine Blinkx. Stories about Mr. Murdoch’s rapidly growing interest in acquring Internet properties (not only Blinkx) have reached a fever pitch after conference call last week and his acquisition of MySpace a few weeks ago.
Blinkx celebrated its first anniversary last week and while it’s best kn own as a multimedia search tool that allows you to search metadata and/or mechanically generated transcripts (using speech recognition technology that they’ve developed in-house) and then view or listen to the content online, Blinkx also provides a search client (Blinkx 3.0) and “Smart Folders” technology that News Corp. would also be able to utilize.
Also worth noting, several weeks ago Blinkx began providing transcript search for podcast content. Podscope from TVEyes also offers this service. Both services are free.
We’ve chronicled what Blinkx has been up to since just about day one. Here’s a list of what we’ve posted in the past year.