An audio blog for the CM community in Australia

This blog began as an online documentary on community and professional forums, for my class at RMIT with Jenny Weight (Semester one, 2006). With the blog and audio I sought to keep is simple. By simple I meant minimum html, and formatting. I chose to use a blog to test the idea of blogs as a suitable venue for publish audio content on the Web. From an ease of use perspective I find that a blog like WordPress 2.0 is not really well set up to create simple interlinked page of content, though it has easy to use ‘categories’ and it’s simple to post entries with basic html.

I enjoyed getting the recordings into the public domain! I suspect audio content (e.g. mp3 format) is well produced, could play a similar role to content in a well produced newsletter, say that of a professional associations. Both, however, may be equally resource intensive.

In part my motivation was to use simple technologies to experiment with the two ideas of hypertext and audio. As a user I had had little experience of using the two together.

Constraints in making audio for and about communities

Getting people to share their thoughts is not trivial feat. Recording interviews can be relatively straight forward, if you have decent equipment, a quiet space, and can get the interviewer and interviewee in the same place at the same time. Editing audio is time consuming to say the least.

Do blogging and MP3 audio work as a community publishing media?

So far, I’m not convinced they do. I suspect it depends on how community members perceived the role (and influence) of the blogger. When James Robertson links to an interview from his blog (e.g. hear James’ interview with Rahel Bailie), the content probably has some status, not least because in James is famous content management circles. Warren is, by comparison, less well known.

However if a community began to discuss the interviews, or their source among themselve, then the audio content could then begin to be seen as relevant to the of the community members’ interests . Maybe there is a model for ‘niche publishing’ with ‘blogs + audio’. And perhaps we could borrow some ideas from niche broadcasters like 3CR, Triple R and 3PBS (all in Melbourne).

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have an interest in communities, content management, or producing audio content for professional associations, or the like.

regards
Warren Crosbie
mailto: wcrosbie@yahoo.com.au
RMIT University
June 2006