AN AUDIOBLOGGING MANIFESTO

    Transcribed from http://www.idlewords.com/audio/manifesto.mp3

    As broadband expands and as blogging tools become easier to use, a world
    of temptations has opened up to the online writer.  The latest of these has
    been audioblogging, or posting snippets of speech.   Videoblogging is
    following on its heels.

    At first blush, audioblogging sounds like a natural extension of online
    writing.    What better way to convey your own ideas than through your
    own words, spoken in your own voice?  Bloggers like Halley Suitt
    (http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com), Dave Winer
    (http://www.scripting.com), and Adam Curry (http://live.curry.com) have
    taken this idea and run with it, mixing frequent audio posts with their
    text content.  In the highest-profile audio blog post to date, Winer
    even announced the cancellation of a blog hosting service - affecting 
    hundreds of users - in a ten minute audio file (you can hear it at
    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/crimson1/aboutWeblogsComHosting.mp3).

    But before you jump on the audioblogging bandwagon, remember this - the
    power of the Web is the power to choose.  You make your own trails, and
    your own links.  You read what you like and skip the boring bits.   And
    audioblogging takes that power of choice away.  Your listeners become a
    passive audience - they have no power to skim, they can't skip the
    boring parts, they can't link or excerpt your post effectively.   Your
    post becomes invisible to Google and other search engines.  And anyone
    who has a hearing problem, or a dialup account, or doesn't speak your
    language too well, anyone who is trying to surf your site from the office,
    or from an Internet cafe - well, they're just plain out of luck.

    Consider also this - the average person speaks at one hundred, perhaps
    one hundred fifty words per minute.  Meanwhile, an accomplished reader
    can read ten times faster - up to a thousand words a minute, and that's
    straight-up reading, not even skimming.  You're forcing people to listen
    to you at a speed that's barely faster than the speed at which they can
    type.   Why are you wasting their time?  Is your voice really that
    beautiful?

    From the invention of the alphabet, to movable metal type, to the advent of
    cheap paper, universal mandatory public education, universal literacy,
    the Internet - the modern world has built on the back of text!  This is
    not by accident!  This is not a mistake!

    Ask yourself - is the key to making your site more interesting really to
    add rich media?  Or is it possible that if you took more care in your
    writing, said something passionate, grammatical, interesting, and pleasant to
    read, it would actually make more of a difference?

    Henry David Thoreau said "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which
    distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means
    to an unimproved end... We are in great haste to construct a magnetic
    telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have
    nothing important to communicate"

    So what do you have to communicate?

    Thoreau may not have been a big fan of technology, but we can still read
    him one and a half centuries later and be pulled in by his beautiful
    prose style.  Is your audio post going to stand the test of time?

    Brothers and sisters, we deserve better than this, and those whom we write for
    deserve better.  This is not what we built the web for! For the first
    time in human history, you can have anything you write read by millions
    of people, whether within days or within hours, and all it takes is
    talent, imagination and the discipline to put up something worth
    reading.  There are no obstacles anymore - so why must we create new
    ones?   Just because you're going to be able to do a real-time three
    dimensional high-definition interactive virtual reality fly-through of
    the inside of your cat - does that mean you should?  Does that mean it
    belongs on your website? This is not the legacy we want to leave!  
    So stop the ridiculous self indulgence, and shut up and write. 

    And if you want a copy of this without having to listen through it, by God 
    you can find one at http://www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt.

    August 31, 2004