castingWords.com is a service that sells transcription services for podcasts, and stores transcriptions in a public searchable database. The service is in its very early stages, currently charging 42 cents per minute. But I can imagine podcasts with a little income (ad or listener supported) might find this service valuable, as a way to attract listeners to the podcast, as a value-add to listeners, and as a contribution to the big pile of data that is the Internet.

What's especially cool about castingWords is that they plan to use Mechanical Turk, the get-paid-per-play work-from-home potentially-the-best-MMOG-ever from Amazon.com, to perform the transcriptions. If you want to get paid to transcribe podcasts, you will soon be able to do so on behalf of castingWords using Mechanical Turk. The Amazon Web Services blog has more information on how this will work.