Audio and Videoblogging II

In addition to the last post, I just found out Suw Charman will be audio-blogging for an entire week, to test it out. Or as she says, to find out if it gets less awkward after keeping it up for a longer period of time (more on awkwardness in my previous post on Personal Presence Portal)

Tony Goodson, although thinking it's an interesting experiment too, has his reservations: And then I see (hear!) my first genuine AudioBlog, which Suw Charman is trying out for a week via AudioBlog.com. Just one problem.....she sounds just like my first wife, which is freaking me out a bit!!
Maybe I've been away from Blighty for so long now, that all Poms sound the same!!
Yes the extension of context with voice like this, can create cognitive associations that might surprise you. :)

My initial reactions are mixed:
It's nice to hear someone's voice, as it adds context by way of use of language, iintonation, accents etc. It brings the person behind the blog more to the foreground, especially if you've already met face to face before. But it is also more time-consuming, at least on the consumption side, than reading a text.

My guess is that audioblogging, in this form at least, is less useful for reflection, but might serve very well for quickly recording thoughts. Especially if recording the messages can be done on the road, or in the shower: the places where ideas come to you. On the other hand I never really met someone who routinely used a portable dictaphone. (But that might be due to the fact that there never was an easy way to migrate the recordings to other media, not to the recording itself)

Another use might be giving impressions of places, e.g. by recording sounds with your phone, and then moblogging them. "Hey, hear how the crowd goes wild now this guy speaks about these new audioblogging tools" and the like. Or more creepy "the air alarms just sounded for the second time this night, as you can hear in the background". If immediacy (about which Lisbeth Klastrup spoke on BlogTalk) is a concern or an enhancement of the message's strength, than too audioblogging might well be the thing.

I don't see a role yet, funny enough, for audioblogging to create more f2f-like conversations. With texts we are used to a turn taking format, I write, you respond, maybe I write some more etc. The strength of f2f-conversation is that you can interrupt eachother, introducing new side-roads on the spot, creating a natural flow, and then it works out nicely. But it also means there is no real possibility to really explore all finer details. In texts we sort of sacrifice that for the advantage of being able to work out our thoughts in more detail, to build our argumentation more solidly. Trying to use audioblogging as a sort of middle road in my view does not combine the strengths of both conversation and texts, but sacrifices the strengths of both.

I will follow Suw experiments with interest in the coming days.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at August 7, 2004 12:14 PM)