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Indexing the Audioblog (Manifesto?)

I actually recorded an audio blog post about a month ago on the topic of indexing and searching audio files, but due to an equipment malfunction, all was lost, and I didn’t feel like trying to record it again. So I’ll write up what I had. (Oh, it was somewhat in response to Maciej Ceglowski’s Audioblogging Manifesto.)

Let’s go forward my friends. Forward, into the future! Imagine Google in 2019. I know, Google will be long gone by then, but as to not totally blow your mind, we’ll use Google as an example. Google has these different operators to use when searching, which might allow you to look in the url, or the title, or whatever, now imagine something like ‘inaudio’ or ‘invideo’ where you could found words contained within audio or video files? But how would Google (or it’s replacement) index words in audio files? Well, with some massive cluster of Linux computers of course, and some really smart software by really smart people. (Insert bit about advanced speech recognition here.)

While Maciej probably wrote up his manifesto, and then recorded it, most people will go the other way, first recording something, and then not typing it up. Yes, I said not typing it up. You shouldn’t have to, right? So that gives us these audio blobs (blobs, not blogs – ever notice how similar those words are?) that are these containers into which we can’t quite see into. Give it time. I’m saying 15 years because it’s a total guess, and if I look back at the world of computing and the internet of 15 years ago, I think we’ve come a long way.

Oh here’s another idea, what if the software or device you used to record yourself was able to do the speech recognition, and embed that in the file? Or able to recognize the background music or sounds and make note of them? Or add links based off of your mentioning web sites/urls?

Today’s MP3‘s hold metadata about the audio, but tomorrow’s format may hold the audio, video, and hypertext versions of something, all combined into one blob, fully indexable, and readable even on an old 2010 PowerMac G9.

So while rich media search is happening today (see Singingfish) the world of indexing the actual content, not just the metadata, is going to happen. I’m sure of it. It’s all just a matter of time.

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Podcasting’s Past

I know Adam has said he’s been trying to tie the bootstrap of podcasting for the last 5 years, and I’m pleased to see the knot being formed, but I’d like to take you back a bit, to the year 1997…

Streaming media was there, and so were we! Well, we were on dialup, and there were no really affordable “portable audio players” at the time that could connect to your computer and transfer files. It was all foreign in concept. What we did have was a handheld recorder, the same one we’d been using since the 1980’s mind you. So, we would play some streaming file and capture it via the tape recorder, and listen to it later. We had timeshifted audio, that was portable. Yeehaw…

I know, I could have fed the output into a stereo and done it right, but we’re hackers of the quick-n-dirty variety sometimes… We didn’t do this a lot, but we did do it.

Fast forward into 1998. (I think 1998, my memory is fuzzy…) My commute changed from being 15 minutes per day to close to 2 hours per day. I needed some audio. I needed… more cowbell! At the time you could still read slashdot and find value in the comments. I ended up writing code to convert text files to more phonetically correct words (like changing “Mac OS X” to “Mac Oh Ess Ten”) and then would have my Mac read those text files while my recorder recorded it all to audio tape. I did this almost daily, as long as I remembered to start the script before I went to sleep. Oh, I didn’t just listen to slashdot, but that’s one of the memorable ones.

Around the end of 1999 Geeks In Space appeared, and good gosh, doesn’t it look like what people are doing today, minus the automated delivery via RSS?

Ok, let’s move ahead to 2003, when I finally decide I can get an MP3 player for cheap, as I’m sick of making audio tapes of Your Mac Life and other internet radio-type shows. By now I’m getting sick of hitting web pages and downloading files, so I whip up some perl to grab the new files each week. Usually the shows did a weekly broadcast, so it was just a cron job and date calculation to get the file. It worked, and for a geek, it was alright.

Meanwhile the RSS 2.0 enclosure thing happens, and we start to see things change. Things get easier. Things are brewing. Sure, I have to email Doug Kaye and ask him to fix his feed, and ask the LugRadio guys to create a feed (which either broke, or they stopped updating) but it was working.

Along comes Adam with his iPodder thingy and manages to get others involved until we have this new thing called “podcasting” to deal with…

And it’s good…

Oh, just one more thing, Doc has been noticing the number of results for “podcasting” that Google gives, and how it’s growing. That’s a good thing, but I think what will really be cool is the day when Google stops putting: Did you mean: broadcasting on the page. ;)

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More Podcasting Ideas…

Since I spend almost all of my time shucking it for the man, aka working for a living, I have little time to implement all of my ideas, so I give them away for others to use, learn about, profit from, etc… Here we go again!

{fray} is all about storytelling. People write their stories, and they sometimes have events where they get together and speak/read their stories, obviously the site should offer an RSS feed with enclosures so you can hear the authors reading their stories in their own words…

We all love Woz, and why? Well, I know he had something to do with some fruit company, but we really love Woz because of his old “Dial-A-Joke” service. Bring it back with an RSS feed featuring a new joke everyday!

As for sponsorship, obviously the makers of hard drives will want to sponsor your podcast, I mean, you’ll be filling up those hard drives in no time! We can also look to the manufacturers of audio gear, speaker systems, Slim Devices, as well as software producers who make those great audio apps!

Sponsorship eh? I mean, if I ever go to Prince Edward Island then you know I’ll stop by the Formosa Tea House. The Formosa Tea house should sponsor the Live at the Formosa Tea House show, just look at the Google juice! Try searching for Formosa Tea House…

Speaking of those Silver Orange and Reinvented guys, they were discussing asterisk (phone dork!) an open-source PBX system, and how they use it… Since it can save your voice mail as an MP3, it should be dead simple to create an RSS feed with enclosures of all of your voice mail… So, what do to with that? Well, set up a phone number, and allow people to phone in, and say something, then feed that out to the net via RSS. Whammo! You do your audioblog, set up a phone number, people call in and leave comments, and you then provide those comments via an RSS feed…. I think I got that right, makes my head spin a bit…

Ok, so you set up your asterisk system to do comments in audio for your audioblog, with the feed to get the comments, and this all costs money right? Well, you could force the people who call in to listen to an ad before they leave a comment, but should you? Maybe you should just add in some advertisements (in audio) to the feed itself, or at the end of people’s comments… I don’t know, I’m a geek not a salesman…

Hmmm, that’s all I got right now… I just wish I had the resources to implement some of these ideas!

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The Podcasting Revolution

I have not really written much about this podcasting thing, and believe me, I could write volumes… I’ve been experimenting with the concept for years and years now. It’s nice that the tools to make it easy are starting to show up…

Adam has got iPodder.org as sort of a hub for this “iPodder platform” and podcasting stuff, which is really starting to catch on. Many of my old scripts to automagically download content are no longer needed as RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures are starting to appear.

This is all just the beginning. Sure, I’ve got my “little” stuff over in the Audio section, but I’m not really pushing it, I’m more of a kickstarter, and things have been sufficiently kicked…

Just today I was discussing VoIP with someone and they said that their office phone system, which uses VoIP, sends you your voicemail as an email with a wav file attached. Sounds nice, but why not provide an RSS feed of your voicemail with enclosures, so you could sync your iPod as you run out the door, and listen to all of your voicemail on the go. Crazy idea? Maybe…. The point is, there are many applications we might not have thought of yet.

There’s getting to be more daily shows/audioblogs now, and my time is being stretched. (I currently drive about 90 minutes a day and really don’t want that to increase!) I wonder how this will work. Will there be just a few well known shows? Will people shorten their shows? I mean, in 1997 there were a handful of weblogs, and you could read them all during your lunch break, but now we use aggregators to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and we always have new content, and we rely on being pointed to the good stuff. Perhaps as more people listen we’ll just get into the mode of hitting the episodes that interest us. It’s an interesting problem. I won’t get into the audio/search/metadata thingy right now, as that’s something for another time.

Thank you, and goodnight…

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Own Your Data

A while back we asked Who Owns Your Data? and since then DataLibre has appeared to tell you that you should own your data.

As I revisited the Groundspeak forum on Buxley’s use of Geocaching.com’s data, I started to notice that people were concerned about the ownership of their data, and there are a few interesting ideas, and the discussion of the Waypoint Licensing Agreement we discussed recently comes to the surface as well.

My quick take away is this: Always read those agreements, as you really should know what you are agreeing to. (And for the agreement makers, create a way to provide feedback on these agreements if people are uncomfortable with them or have questions.) Second, publish your data first. Get a web site, post your data there before you post it elsewhere, even if you don’t promote it or make it public, put it out there, so that when the data you gave away turns sour, you still have your original copy with a permanent home on the web that you control…