The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Advantages of Text Blogs Over Audio Blogging

Dave Winer has begun an experiment in audio weblogging. Various other experiments in Audio Blogging have been tried and I haven’t liked a single one. Now that Dave has seemingly revived this movement, I figure it’s worth commenting on.

While the future of the web will most certainly include ever increasing amounts of multimedia content, I don’t believe that run of the mill ’spoken word’ blogs are the likely or appropriate successor to today’s text blogs.

In the blogging context, text content has a number of advantages over audio content:

First, text is searchable. If, six months from now, I’m curious as to Dave’s thoughts on audio blogging or the series of events that ultimately inspired this morning’s recording, I can’t find it with a search engine. I can’t use a few, well placed key words.

Second, text can contain hyperlinks. We get an inkling of the audio’s limitations here at the end of Dave’s message this morning as he explains his e-mail address.

One of the great things about blogs is that we can provide additional meaning to the text content by linking to the names of people, places, and articles involved in our discussion. With audio, this kind of contextualization is far more difficult. It either requires assumed knowledge on the part of the reader OR it requires the ‘performer’ to waste time explaining the context, potentially distracting the listener and breaking the flow of the thought. This is somewhat well illustrated when Dave tries to explain who Steve Gillmor is.

Additionally, Dave’s description of his address is probably only useful to somewhat strong speakers of English. While this may not bother Dave, it does speak to the limited usefulness of audio blogs in more linguistically heterogeneous settings. Which leads us to…

Third, text content is easily translated. O.K., sometimes it reads a little funny when using babelfish to translate things, but usually it’s enough to get the point across. This isn’t currently available for audio content.

Fourth: text content is far more easily edited. While some people seem to think that editing weblog posts is a bad thing, it usually isn’t. While spelling edits would no longer be necessary, adding content and/or reworking audio content would require significantly greater amounts of effort than equivalent text.

Fifth: I can process text content at my own pace. Fast readers often implore a scanning technique to skip extraneous portions of a given paragraph or page. Audio doesn’t allow this. In fact, it actually forces the audience to listen and process at the speaker’s pace. With a blog, I can read it as fast or as slowly as I choose. Not to mention the fact that we are subjected to the various sniffs, coughs and other potentially annoying vocal tendencies that text protects us from.

Sixth: Text is more easily quoted accurately. Copy. Paste. With audio, this process is a much bigger pain. I’m either forced to transcribe the portion I wish to quote or I am likely to paraphrase, which can be a slippery slope.

Well, there’s six to chew on for now. I’ve left out the obvious accessibility issues, which I’ll leave to someone else.

Does this all mean that audio content in blogs is useless? Definitely not. However, it remains to be seen what types of content it is appropriate for. I would say that it would need to be content that needed to be audio. For instance, audio that contains something that otherwise cannot be represented by text (and no, a plane flying by doesn’t strike me as being that significant). Musical content. Quoting an original item for which the format was audio (television, movies, a speech or presentation). Things like that. The random thoughts of Joe Geek are better expressed in text.

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