Over on David Kaye’s (the ITConversations guy) Blogarithms, David recently wrote about Podscope. Podscope is a search engine that allows you to textually search the audio content of podcasts.

For example, if you search on the term China, Podscope will search the podcasts that it has indexed for mentions of the word China. It also creates an audio snippet that contains the word you are searching on. You can play the snippet directly from the browser. The snippet is also labeled with the time the mention occurred during the podcast.

Although the service is a little rough (hey, it’s in beta) and not perfect, it’s far better than nothing.