In My Experience... | Audio blogging is a two way street. (1869)

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Audio blogging is a two way street.
[ Posted by Dan on March 05, 2003 | 2 Comments ]

Blogger wants to make it possible for webloggers to call it in, so you could push your material out as MP3's. That's pretty cool, and I think opens up the possibility for Blogger peeps to become on-the-scene reporters. Now, if you wanted to create a system where you have your normal blog outputted in HTML, and RSS and now in audio, you could do that. If you did, would you put an index.mp3 file in your web root directory, and edit your httpd.conf file to hand that out? (after index.html, and index.shtml, and index.php, etc.)

If so, do you need a <link> tag to point to this alternate presentation layer? We have this tag for pointing to our RSS files...

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://inmyexperience.com/index.xml">

Why not make one that looks like this...

<link rel="alternate" type="audio/mpeg" title="MP3" href="http://inmyexperience.com/index.mp3">

Now you may ask, how do I easily make an MP3 out of my little bloglets? Thankfully someone already asked the LazyWeb and there were several answers (one is nearly perfect). But they cover how to take in an RSS feed and turn that into an MP3, not making the MP3 at the time of your posting. That's no big deal really, after (before?) you post your blog item, you could turn around and run your MP3-ification routine (and assuming you use Mac OSX, you could automate a lot of that, including the upload).

If someone made all of this work, and wrote it all up, I'm guessing it would probably qualify for Ben's Weblog Hacks book.

They should make a sync utility so people can download blog posts to nomad/ipods automagically and listen on the way to work.

-Posted by Eric on March 5, 2003 10:37 PM

Hmm. Flash Communication Server would be a very cool way to do audio blogging. Video, even. It ships with (among other things) a demo FlashCom guestbook that allows text, audio, and video.

$500 bucks for the personal edition (100 for students, find one), and it'll be available on Linux as well as Windows servers probably by the end of the month.

If you haven't tried it, even right off the bat, version 1.0 was extremely cool and worked very well; version 1.5, even in the very first beta, worked like a dream.

Jeremy Allaire built a demo audioblogging tool for his Macromedia blog, (http://bilbo.macromedia.com/audioblog/) but I never got a copy of the source code. I plan eventually to build an add-on to phpBB with it so people can voice post... although hopefully someone with more flash experience will beat me to it. :-)

-Posted by JC on March 6, 2003 09:58 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).