Last night's Tech Meetup was great for journos

Two interesting demos and one important announcement that came last night during the monthly New York Tech Meetup stood out to me as things other NYC journos would like to know about.

Drop.io gave the meetup a sneak peek at PressLift, a project that's supposed to allow PR professionals to embed video, audio, etc. into press releases. The official launch isn't until Social Media Week. Watch the drop.io team explain.

WNYC news director John Keefe asked the New York tech community to collaborate on new tools for public media — sponsored by the Knight Foundation and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And I got to see a demo for SpeakerText, a service through which you pay a crowd to transcribe the YouTube video of your choice and log timecodes on the transcript. (An hour-long video would run you $20, and the transcripts come with a 30-day guarantee, SpeakerText founder Matt Mireles said.) This is a cool idea, especially for online journalists and, well ... everybody else who knows what YouTube is. It would be cooler if a machine could do the transcription, and I missed it if Mireles said about how long it took to get a video logged and transcribed. But the point of Mireles showing it off was to prove that it existed and it works — to be kind, he's got plenty of time to hash out those kinds of details. One clutch feature is a function of the timecodes: You can create links that send your followers directly to the moment in the video that you want to talk about.

Full disclosure: I go to the meetup in part because my boss, Andrew Rasiej, believes so much in this event and the organization that has grown up around it that he now sits on the New York Tech Meetup's board of directors. That doesn't mean I don't have to fork over the $10 cost of admission, though — I do, and did last night.

That's just what came out of the meetup for reporters and media pros; there was a lot more for techies and your average New Yorker, who might want to check out several city-specific apps demonstrated last night. Two of those apps came out of the NYC BigApps competition, which I wrote about for techPresident. The entire evening was streamed live and archived here.