tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Thursday, June 02, 2005 «
Minor podcasting thoughts
Matt talked about podcasting a few weeks back and I've had his page open in a tab since then because I'd been meaning to write down a couple of thoughts I'd been having about it.
First off: Matt's Quoteplay is a bloody good idea - a way of linking to particular bits of podcasts / audio files. If you're interested in this stuff, check it out. Go on, do it now, you can always come back here later.
(Welcome back...) Generally, a couple of other thoughts:
I put MP3s of our news / entertainment magazine on tape on our website when I worked for Brighton Society for the Blind five years ago (NB: the current design is nothing to do with me.) If I'd realised it could be seen as a revolutionary thing to do I might have made more fuss about it and managed to get it named after me, 'silvercasting' has such a nice ring to it ;-) However, it just seemed like an obvious thing to do at the time - an example of the service we provided for visually impaired people by members and volunteers. I find it odd that there's a bit of a fuss made about podcasting now, but then again not a lot of people had broadband back then, and no one had iPods.
And the other thing: I think the next good thing for podcasts is: a way to speed them up.
This I learnt whilst working for the Society. They had speech synethesiser that some people would use to read what was on the computer screen to them. When you got proficient in using them, you could turn the speed up, and up, and up. Like learning to read fast. One student had his up so high no one else could understand it at all, it was like a bag of rabid gerbils, but he could understand it fine.
This seems like a good thing for podcasts - a way of fast forwarding through the dross, without jumping through it in case you do miss the one gem in there. OK, it won't work for all 'casts, but it would mean you can get through a load of them much quicker.
First off: Matt's Quoteplay is a bloody good idea - a way of linking to particular bits of podcasts / audio files. If you're interested in this stuff, check it out. Go on, do it now, you can always come back here later.
(Welcome back...) Generally, a couple of other thoughts:
I put MP3s of our news / entertainment magazine on tape on our website when I worked for Brighton Society for the Blind five years ago (NB: the current design is nothing to do with me.) If I'd realised it could be seen as a revolutionary thing to do I might have made more fuss about it and managed to get it named after me, 'silvercasting' has such a nice ring to it ;-) However, it just seemed like an obvious thing to do at the time - an example of the service we provided for visually impaired people by members and volunteers. I find it odd that there's a bit of a fuss made about podcasting now, but then again not a lot of people had broadband back then, and no one had iPods.
And the other thing: I think the next good thing for podcasts is: a way to speed them up.
This I learnt whilst working for the Society. They had speech synethesiser that some people would use to read what was on the computer screen to them. When you got proficient in using them, you could turn the speed up, and up, and up. Like learning to read fast. One student had his up so high no one else could understand it at all, it was like a bag of rabid gerbils, but he could understand it fine.
This seems like a good thing for podcasts - a way of fast forwarding through the dross, without jumping through it in case you do miss the one gem in there. OK, it won't work for all 'casts, but it would mean you can get through a load of them much quicker.
