Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Discussion leader:
Harold Gilchrist, Audioblog-MobileBlogging News

Timeline of audioblogging content:
August, 2001: Jish creates an audioblog.
August, 2002: Adam Curry does some audioblogging.
July, 2003: Chris Lydon starts to interview members of the blogosphere.

Methods to audioblog:
Audblog, Voice Monkey, PhoneBlogger are phone-based tools. You speak your message into a phone, and they email it to you. Four-minute first post free, then ten a month for about $5.
Homebrewed systems: record audio using $60 SoundBlaster and a $20 microphone. Using a Java applet called Freedom. put audio on html page.

I (Betsy) asked, How does an audio “enclosure” in an RSS file work? Harold showed us onscreen: the RSS “enclosure” gives you a title, description, and the URL of the audio’s mp3. If you want to hear the audio, you click the link to go to the URL. My software saves audio in 3 formats: mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and wav.

Tool called “Enclosure Extractor” lets you look at your RSS fee and mark enclosures you want to download. Then it downloads just the enclosures you checked.

Chris Lydon: In advertising, the trick is to neutralize the eye, and to come in under the radar by using the human voice. We do interviews as mp3s, and if the wind is right the audio is excellent. The next step is to make audio interactive on the web. How?

Harold Gilchrist: It only takes 30 seconds to send an mp3 comment back to my server. If I had been going up to the panelists yesterday I could have been asking them questions and getting answers onto the web in essentially real time. The next step would be streaming audio.

Kevin Marks: In the audio-video world we have live stream, in real time, basically like IRC. We also have professionally produced stuff that takes a long time to create. What’s missing is the “just-in-time” audio, the equivalent of blogging. Kevin and Adam Curry are working an a gateway called “SyncPod” between RSS feeds and an iPod, so that you can automatically put stuff into an iTunes playlist to listen to on the iPod. This runs in the background while I’m doing other things, so I don’t have to do anything about it.

Bob Doyle: How Chris Lydon does interviews: see it online at http://media.skybuilders.com/lydon/studio.html. We’re building a tool as Skybuilders.com to put the mp3 directly up on his browser. We’re hoping to have a publishing process that lets you listen in your browser without all those popup ads you get from RealPlayers, Quicktime, and other “free” online players.

Bob Doyle: Also, check out Chris Lydon’s brand-new blogradio.org, launched on Friday. We also took the names blogvideo.org and blogaudio.org, and we look forward to working with people in this room and others to get this going.
Harold Gilchrist: If you look at school bandwidth use, they use bandwidth heavily for a block of hours, then basically shut down–just like a business. So you have all this unused bandwidth during the night, and you can use that time to download stuff from the net.