Journal: News & Comment

Bringing audio and video into the conversation

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Bob Cringely (not his real name) has been documenting the world of personal computer technology and general geekiness for a couple of decades now. In a couple of months, he will start podcasting and video blogging too—after first planning to do that in 2002, at least a couple of years before podcasting even existed:

Figuring that people will grab video clips and send them to their friends as e-mail attachments, we're even trying to make that easier by offering two clips of our own from every show. These will be called "The Juicy Bit" (Bill Joy explaining how he was fired from the International House of Pancakes), and "The Nerdy Bit" (how Don Knuth asked for a copy of the MacPaint source code so Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson had to essentially recreate it because you don't say no to Don Knuth).

If one of these stories sounds interesting and the other doesn't, then you already know whether or not you are a nerd.

I'm looking forward to it. A recent Gillmor Gang show had interesting notes from John Udell about how he has set up a system to excerpt clips (like Bob's, but you can create your own) from online audio files, then bookmark and annotate them into an audio-summary RSS feed that includes introductions created automatically with text-to-speech software, via del.icio.us. It's all very confusing, but points toward how we might be able to bring audio and video into the blog conversation, along with written text and images.

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