BeigeJournal

I am a major IT Conversations fan and have become a regular listener of Dave Slusher’s audio entries. I believe it was Slusher’s blog that pointed me to Maciej Ceglowski’s Audio Blog Manifesto, available as audio and as a text transcript. I have to say, I think it is one of the funniest things I’ve listened to recently. The background music really does it for me, I guess. Joi Ito’s audioblogger smashup is pretty good, too.

It’s not clear how seriously to take some people in this debate, and I think the angry people and the funny people are getting confused.

I have started thinking about what sorts of thing audio is particularly good at. The IT Conversations recordings of conference talks make perfect sense, of course. The interviews seem to work well, too. It’s not altogether easy to make an interview work well in text. A conversation really needs a great deal of editing to work as text, which may not be easy to coordinate among the participants. Monologues, in contrast, are easier to edit, and thus easier to render as readable text, though there are times when audio can be valuable.

I seem to have more audio, mainly from IT Conversations, than I have time for, but since audio can be listened to with partial attention while doing other things, it is nice to have. I’ve been working on scanned slides of my vacations in the Gimp while listening to audio.