This morning I was all about social networking. I threw a couple of status messages at facebook. Over the course of the day I probably assaulted twitter two or three dozen times with assorted minutae. This blog got a post. I was reading other people’s blogs, twitters, and facebook. Basically, I spent the day enjoying the sights and sounds of our mirror, digitized, society. I should probably be writing, but, hey, my story is set in the future. I have to have a healthy grasp of the current…
Anyway, via twitter, I was informed of Audioboo. (Specially via StephenFry. (Yep, of Jeeves and Wooster fame, among other things.))
AudioBoo is an application for the iphone that lets you record short messages and post them to audioboo. It’s a form of audioblogging, similar to twitter for recorded voice. It seems to be a happy medium between the lillipution delivery of twitter, increasingly commercialized facebook, and vain absurdly of videoblogging.
Already, audioblogging seems to be a positive direction for authors and people in general to communicate. StephenFry has his AudioBoo. Michael Stackpole has The Secrets Podcast and some other things.
Web 2.0 has been the catch all cliche for new technology, but…it’s exciting. I’m all about democratizing media. The days of New York Times and the Evening News have ended and a new world of open communication is taking place. The worst critics of social media deplore the overall quality of the writing. A valid criticism, one I fall under, but social media also solves its own problem. There are pieces of quality out there to be found. Compare: the number of tv channels with uninteresting content vs. the number of websites with uninteresting content. By percentage tv might win (5 channels out of 50, 10%, 100 websites: billions <1%), but by sheer number the internet wins handily. It’s not the medium, internet carries video just fine, but the openess. WordPress, twitter, myspace, facebook, xanga, now audioboo are all opening up the available mediums that can be utilized. The popularity of forums and newsgroups, even in the early days of the internet, show the general desire for open communication, regardless of ‘quality,’ and these new technologies are only giving greater means to an already present market.
Sadly, I don’t have an iphone, but Servusamanu might dabble with audioblogging in the future. I’ll be on the look out for other interesting programs that might pop up.
