So, what is this? About two, three weeks ago the Intetnet radio host Leo Laporte started preparations to go to a trip to China. What he did is try some iPhone software called AudioBoo, which is basically an application for the iPhone where you record your voice, attach a photo, a title and/or your GPS location and it automatically gets uploaded to their web site. So it's kind of like an audio blog posting tool for dummies, meaning that there's is no set up (by default it's an anonymous account). What's interesting though is that you don't need to sit down and type on a computer or the iPhone to be able to send another post, which is closer to some kind of audio-based Twitter, meaning that the posts are short compared to big blogging articles and you can basically download all the audio posts from a lot of people you subscribe to, and listen to them on your iPod, your iPhone, an MP3 player in your car or wherever. So it's pretty practical.
When I listened to that I realized that this was a potential solution to my blog post procrastination problem (sitting down in front of a computer and typing it up, and not only that but also spell-checking, putting all the links in there...). It's a good excuse to just "speak it out", mainly because it's instant.
Eventually what I should do once the audio is "up", later on, is write down below the post an actual transcription of the audio data, plus with the links that (of course) with my voice I can't say, and removing all the "uh" sounds, pauses like that, mistakes, whatever. But if you don't want to wait for the text version then you can right away listen to the audio version, and subscribe to it as some kind of podcast. So this becomes a kind of podcast of my own, or a really cheap version of it.
I didn't want to use the AudioBoo software because it's instant. The moment you press send it's sent and that's it. There's no editing, no "offline" mode (so it has to be done on 3G or WiFi). There's not a lot of other options. Now the iPhone software has some audio recorder software built-in that let's you send the audio by email. There's only a very few services that let's you host audio messages by email. There's drop.io, that I talked about in an earlier post, that for every drop has an email address to where you can send the audio file as an attachment. That would work, and it even has an RSS feed for podcasting and 100MB account storage. The downside is that the audio file stays in your drop. I'm saying that because there's another service called Posterous, which not only lets you make a blog post by email (you don't need to create an account: you just post to their email address "post@posterous.com" and you'll now have a blog), but also they do the hosting for you for up to around 1GB, audio posts become a kind of podcast, and it's kind of the opposite of tumblr. Whereas tumblr aggregates information from other web sites about you, posterous "autoposts" your posts, attachment, text, whatever to all your other social services, including Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal (which is what I'm using). That was pretty much the "instant posting" I was looking for. Because one way or another I'll have to do the transcription, so if the service doesn't let me post instantly from my phone (when I'm online) to my blog and on top of that to twitter (which has a link to my posterous account which eventually gets forwarded to my Livejournal account), what's the point? You'd get all of that instantly with posterous, as soon as you want to listen to it (or within a minute or two). So it has the instant posting effect of AudioBoo but without having to install any software of any kind: you just send the attachment by email, which is one of the features of the built-in audio recorder of the iPhone. Which by the way has multiple options to name your recording, including "Podcast", so I guess they predicted that.
It's easy to set up. You still need to set up an account on posterous, to be able to put your account information for your other blogging sites and Twitter and Facebook, but once that's done it's all automatic. And there's still a lot of options on how you can post. The one thing I don't like about posterous is the lack of encryption or SSL. It's based on email, and email is not that secure. They say they have a way of detecting when someone is faking a post. Authentication is based on the sender and some properties of what is now used to detect spam. One way of another what I'm posting is open to the public, so in a way I don't care that much about encryption. But it's something I'll have to think about because I really insist on using encrypted connections to email services (for example MobileMe), yet the contents is still not encrypted... I don't know of any service that supports decrypting the email contents, so I'm pretty much stuck with that for now.
I'll have to figure out what I'll have to do in the future about transcription. I could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking (which I get for free for work, because I work at Nuance), but for now I'll just type it up. If I play the audio file in QuickTime or the iPhone there are options to play at half speed the audio file without changing the pitch, which is what I'm going to use to listen and transcribe fast enough. I'll see if that's OK. Or maybe I'll just want to change the pitch, because, damn, my voice is really high-pitched... That, and if there's any kind of software on the iPhone that let's you edit the audio file. I don't even think that's even possible... If there's any crazy noise or something interrupting me I could just pause the recording, but not remove the noise. So it's very "live" and "raw". You know, what you would expect from an instant-audio-live-blogging-thing... See, that's the kind of stuff I can edit easily when I transcribe later on, that is not knowing what word to say... And of course I wouldn't g get that at all with automatic transcription (with Dragon). For now I'll manually transcribe it myself. I suspect it's still going to take more time than actually sitting down in front of a computer and doing a text post in the first place, but then it's one less excuse for procrastination.
So that's it for now. Hopefully, I should be able to come up with audio posts faster than I can transcribe them, and faster than the procrastination I've done for the past 6 months.
Post recording notes:
Well, I just noticed that the recording app doesn't let you send by email an audio note longer than 8 minutes. Weird. Weirder is the fact that I didn't noticed that I recorded 9 minutes in one shot. Well, at least the application lets me send a section of a note without changing the original recording, hence the "part x of y" thing you see in the post titles. I still missed the last minute or so for the second part...
Oh, and it's "posterous", not "posterious".
Also, I'll need to find a way to have some notes displayed on screen while I record. Right now, it's all memory-based, so surely I forgot to say some things.
Finally, the audio is not great, but acceptable. The headphone microphone picks up too much noise, and there are not many places downtown that are quiet.
Published on July 19, 2009 at 18:02 EDT
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