Audio blogging

gnat on 2003-03-23T11:33:13

I think audio blogging is a wank. For those of you who don't keep up with the /.*blog.*/ flavour of the week, audio blogging is where you don't type up your message, you record it and give people an MP3. The deficiencies are obvious: you lose all the interop of text--now your audience needs to have an mp3 player and broadband. Never mind that you're giving the finger to the deaf.

That said, I'm thinking of doing a little of it. I've been listening to the Dr Dobbs Technetcast archives as I drive back and forth from Auckland, and really enjoying it. I've been contemplating recording a few Perl Cookbook recipes or bits of Perl advice every day, so that people with long drives could have something to listen to. I guess this is more a book on tape than an audioblog, so it escapes immediate wankness.

What do you think? Stupid idea? Good idea? Shut up and write the second edition? :-)

--Nat

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Not to mention...

clintp on 2003-03-23T14:17:43

You're forced to endure the "umm.."s and "uhhh..."s that are naturally edited out of text.

Audio is sequentially accessed so you can't just skip down by paragraphs because someone is prattling on about something you're not interested in.

The visual cues from even decent writers are missed. Paragraphs to separate related ideas, bullet lists for lists of gripes... True that some cues can be transmitted through audio, but to me those are much more vague without an accompanying face.

Audio is of inconsistant quality (loud, soft, unintelligible, accented) that you've got little control over. (Nevermind the *content* quality...)

And if the purpose was to free you to multitask a bit more, that doesn't hold up. Driving while listening to talk is one thing. Reading a web page, writing, programming while keeping an honest attentive ear is quite another.

Natural Language

chromatic on 2003-03-23T16:21:31

Just because Perl is designed with natural language principles in mind does not make it a beautiful spoken language. :)

shut up...

gizmo_mathboy on 2003-03-23T16:23:09

and finish writing the damn book. ;-)

I would rather read than listen.

Audioblogging would be ok if it was edited and otherwise munged. With written blogging there is a little a minimum level of editing that occurs between brain and fingers. Heck, there might even be some editing done after the fingers have done their work. How much editing is down in audioblogging after it is spoken?

Text, Audio and Video

ziggy on 2003-03-23T16:33:24

Keep in mind that audio (and video) is quite literally a much more noisy medium than text. The difference between someone posting a dictation to the web for the world to ignore (audio blogging) and something of value and substance that's worth listening to on your iPod (audio publishing) is that the latter is planned, produced and focused. It may be interesting and useful, but it would probably be rehearsed (to get rid of the, uh, meaningless, um, pauses), and "professionally" recorded (to get rid of the background distractions).

You can get around the finger-to-the-deaf by posting a transcription. That's not a killer issue.

If you really wanted to do something interesting, then doing a Quicktime movie of a brief Keynote presentation with a commentary track would be quite nice as well. But now we're really entering the realm where there's a lot of prep work necessary, and not something you just ramble into an iMic on the spot for the rest of the world to ignore.

just because it's hip and popular...

hfb on 2003-03-23T20:13:38

doesn't mean that everyone wants to listen to the cheeky kiwi wanker who should be writing instead of yammering a stream of consciousness onto the net about his huge pr0n collection and secret lust for wearing women's lingerie :) Don't add more noise to the noise of the net.

Re:just because it's hip and popular...

gnat on 2003-03-23T22:24:53

I'm sorry, your ambiguity is confusing me. Are you for or against the idea? :-)

--Nat

Re:just because it's hip and popular...

pudge on 2003-03-26T04:10:08

There is no such thing as too much noise on the web. The problem is being able to find your way through it. And audio is difficult to index. :)

Rating required

delegatrix on 2003-03-23T22:44:46

I'd be too afraid to play your audio blog at work. You'd have to provide a rating system.

Re:Rating required

MattB on 2006-02-21T02:24:21

Makes life a little easier: http://www.phoneblogz.com/