Ideas: faster podcast listening

Podcasts are a great alternative way of taking in information, but the flexibility of being able to listen to whatever you want whenever you want is balanced with the practical limitation that it takes 30 minutes to listen to a 30 minute post.

But this needn’t be an immovable constraint. A number of readily available applications including Audacity will allow you to take an audio file and change the tempo without altering the pitch. So you can take a 60 minute blog and reduce it to 45 minutes of faster speech or even down to 30 minutes if your brain is up to it, or the speaker is slow enough.

I’ve had a try at doing this as part a Podcasting experiment with a local Church, using SoX (a command line audio utility) to change the tempo before posting both a long and a short version of a podcast. The speech does sound a little like a Dalek, but it is perfectly useable and really does save time.

What would really make this useful would be if sound players, both desktop and portable, provided a playback tempo control for speech playback. The ability to change the tempo on the fly would allow you to adjust it in line with your level of concentration. But having podcast clients automatically change the tempo of podcasts as they are downloaded could be useful to.

Moving from Blogger to TypePad whilst considering WordPress

Blogger has served me well for the short time I’ve been there, but it has it’s limitations and so I’ve moved to TypePad. But WordPress looks worth considering in the future.

One of the main limitations of Blogger is its lack of support for trackbacks - which provide a key ingredient for real blog to blog conversations. The other significant missing feature is blog categories - the facility to identify blog posts under category names so that readers can pinpoint entries covering relevant topics.

TypePad is a commercial service built around the Moveable Type blog hosting software. It provides the crucial trackbacks and categories and quite a few other features whilst providing a fairly easy to use interface.

WordPress however, looks well worth a thought. It’s free and open source which are good qualities in my book. it also appears (from a brief scan) to support dynamic generation of pages so there’s no need for the whole process or ‘republishing’ a site when a changes is made to the overall look.

The reason’s I’m currently holding back on WordPress are:

1. I would probably have to set up my own hosting and install the software, and that’s a longer job which requires a bit of time.

2. WordPress doesn’t currently support multiple blogs unless you install it multiple times. The facility to host multiple blogs from a single installation is down on the agenda for the 1.6 release of WordPress.

My searches looking at this are encompassed in the following mindmap:

An incomplete thought on blogging

What is the point of a blog?

It’s an interesting question to which I can personally think of too many answers to consider writing about, but a few short ideas have permeated recently which seem worth noting and provide an amusingly recursive entry, if you get what I mean…

1. Blogs are about sharing useful information with like minded people

I read blogs because they inform me, so blogs are often about informing people. How do they inform? They inform because they share knowledge, and often they share a learning process. The writer moves from point A to point B in their understanding of a subject area, and the reader, who reads the blog because they feel an affinity for the writer, is also given a stepping stone to move from A to B without having to do all the work involved in discovering the step.

So, whilst a blog can be anything, in this understanding, a blog is about sharing what you are learning rather than attempting to write some creative or editorial masterpiece.

This being the case, a blog of this kind is not something that should take a long time to compose, because it doesn’t need too much thought, it just requires the thoughts to be composed on the screen and it doesn’t need to take long for another reason…

2. Blogs are about progressing knowledge not completing it

Normally writing is constrained by the need to complete things… the need to make something into a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end. From the perspective of a bit of prose this is probably still true if you want your blog to read well, but it doesn’t matter with regard to the thoughts it communicates.

Forget etiquette, forget the norms of old, blogging is about a conversation separated from time. I blog something and someone blogs a response somewhere else in the world at some time later. Perhaps I never hear the response, but someone else does, and it takes thoughts forward and builds on them.

What’s the point of completing a thought and wrapping it up in a parcel. For one thing it hits the old 80/20 rule that applied here says that wrapping up a thought takes 80% of the time and probably contributes 20% or less of the substance. It’s perhaps hard to admit that a thought isn’t complete and that we don’t have the final answer, but I know as a reader of blogs that I would be sorely disappointed if all the blogs I read had censored by the ‘completed thought’ police.

Funnily enough a blog could be described as agile publishing. Perhaps I should register that definition. Anyway, I could go on but…