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June 26, 2006
Podcasting; 'skip intro'
Podcasting; 'skip intro' Robert Scoble's at this link, responding to musings from Peter Davis about the time costs of listening to casual audio streams. (The word "podcasting" was stylish among techbloggers awhile back, but we're really talking about linear audio as a communication medium, differing from MP3 downloads by easy automation of distribution to your pocket audio device. I use "casual video" to distinguish from "professional video"; I'd probably use "casual text" for weblogs if it didn't sound so pompous. ;-) I think there's a big problem here for all of us to figure out: how can we use varied media types to best engage the audience, and actually convey our messages as we intend? I really like audio captures for showing the interactions among the speakers, the context of how the speakers develop an idea together. But to make the decision to listen to that audio, I have to be able to convince myself that choosing to spend my limited time on this particular audio stream will be worthwhile -- there's *lots* of stuff I want to listen to. Look at the nice way Wade Lu put the interview questions at the top of the text transcript of an audio stream... this approach lets the audience spend only a little of their precious time to figure out if they personally want to invest more time in the richer representations. In the World Wide Web of the late 1990s people exploring SWF work were derided for the "Skip Intro" button, and in the early 2000s we discovered the same thing applied to overlong weblog writing, or verbose photo galleries, or other media work. Rephrased: If you've got twelve hours of audio choice per week, how will you choose how to spend it? I think that, with all media, we've got to focus on audience needs first, then figure out how to convey our message within those demand-side constraints. As it gets easier to distribute all media types, we've got to focus even more fiercely on how to be effective with them....
Posted by John Dowdell at June 26, 2006 07:30 PM
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