Voice Blogging

I tried out gabcast.com and posted a 15 minute segment on nothing much in particular. The concept of blogging by voice is interesting in that it allows more or less anyone to effectively have their own radio station. I'm not sure if this truly warrants a separate tool/service. I already have a blog and can post my audio clips there for the two people who might want to listen to them. Of course, if you are a famous scientist/politician/game writer/author/actress/etc I can see the attraction of potentially getting your message out 'in person' to millions of people - assuming those people know to visit gabcast.com and dig around for the keywords you inserted in your voice clip.

In terms of storage it's obviously not very efficient when compared to posting some text but storage keeps getting cheaper and there are plenty of cases where the actual person's voice (or voices if it was a conference call) has real value. A lot can be inferred by the intonation of a speaker's voice not to mention that you can provide pronunciation guides that do not require you to be a librarian to understand.

I found the implementation at gabcast.com to be a bit weak. There is no way that I can see to move a clip from one channel to another. It also refused to upload a file as either a Windows .wav format or as an MP3. They do have their own recording tool but I have multiple input devices and could find no way to tell it which one I wanted to use. I think that this is the simplicity vs. flexibility problem that we run into all the time with web tools. If you make them simple enough for the masses, the geeks get annoyed because they can't configure them the way they would like to. There was also no way to test if my input device was working other than to attempt a recording and then play it back. A simple green/red light would have been enough. A level indicator would also be nice - I'm assuming they have not implemented compression/limiting in the tool.

I do not see the business model. If this is the audio version of UTube, then I think they are a bit hopeful. gabcast does have the ability to record a conference call which could be very useful. You could use this to record an interview with your favorite famous person - assuming you can corner them for a while.

The concept of recording from my cell phone intrigued me and I was tempted to make a recording of my drive to work (yes, I do have a hands-free device to use) but I find it hard to think about what I'm saying and do almost anything else at the same time - a limited CPU bandwidth problem. So I don’t really approve of (me) driving whilst on the phone. There is also the issue that a recording of my drive to work would have no value at all unless I happened to see a crime being committed which is pretty unlikely out where we are in the boonies.

Overall, I like the idea that there is a simple way to record a voice blog and post it. I'm just not sure what I'd do with it.

In case you are bored enough to want to sample what I posted, the channel numbers are 21662 and 21664 and I'm registered as NigelT.