Inside View

I Decided to Use My Audioboo Voice

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Logo from Audioboo  

ONE OF THE BIGGEST changes in blogging during the past 10 years is the emergence of ways to use multimedia technologies when extending thoughts to different communities. I give a lot of credit to Audioboo for adding a new dimension to blogging.

Audio blogging on Audioboo is simpler than taking a phone call because you don't need to talk to anyone while you're recording a Boo. However, some of the best Audioboos in my news flow are conversational. I listen to a core group of people in the Audioboo community because they either record conversations or they create Audioboos in response to on-going threads.

After six months of consistently listening to other people, I've started making and sharing three minute audio clips every other day. A lot of the time, I write information in the ID3 tags of those Audioboos and sometimes include hashtags along with related hyperlinks. It's rather easy to copy the descriptions I create for those Audioboos and paste them into the "compose" portion of my blogging software.

And I've started doing that already, wondering if my practice of doing that means I am part of an evolutionary movement in blogging.

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Posted from my iPad via the Typepad app and saved as part of my audio links.

Watching Our Four Year Old Audio Blogger

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Screenshot from Audioboo  

IF I HAD a speech-to-text conversion running on my Audioboo account, our four year old would have a full-fledged blog.

As it is, she already knows how to find the purple Audioboo icon on the iPod Touch and the Motorola Xoom and she has shown her after-school activities co-ordinator how to use the program. In some parts of the Audioboo community, that makes her an audio blogger. She's already part of a playlist.

I think Mia's ease of audio journaling marks an important evolution of blogging. As the vloggers have said all along, blogging isn't just for texters. Syndicated story-telling across audio channels also deserves to be given full recognition as part of the blogging movement. But it is probably too emergent a communications channel to be noticed by web awards organizers.

Miaboo

Nine Years Ago I Followed @eirepreneur

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Logo from Typepad  

NINE YEARS AGO, I followed James Corbett onto Typepad. It marked an evolution in the way I share and write.

Since 1997, I've dabbled in different forms of journaling online. I lurked on LiveJournal, posted 100 things on Blogger, spent four years with Radio UserLand and hung Movable Type scripts on an Irish server for three active years. Then in mid-2003, I started pushing text onto Typepad's servers.

I like Typepad because it's so simple. I like Typepad because it costs me less than EUR 150 annually for unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and really good webstats. I know I need to get back into hand-rolling clever CSS. I also want to show that I can set up and execute JQuery with photosets that will probably appear in the side bar of InsideView.ie.

Blogging has evolved since 2003 with the most notable facet being the number of Irish people who no longer use blogs as their main watering holes. Instead, the voices I used to read in the 2003-2008 time frame now express themselves in 140 characters on Twitter. They've very clever smartphones that allow them to avoid typing on a laptop. Some of them might read this blog post as a short headline on Twitter or they might get it as a newsfeed through an app. But my audience will never return to 1000 page views a day, like it was prior to 2009. However, a combination of views on all the other networks I inhabit (Google Plus, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Audioboo, Feedburner) keep the reach of my ideas well into four digits every day.

But so much of all that other activity starts here on my blog, like it has nearly every day since mid-2003.

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Previously: The Typepad Medium", July 10, 2003.

Bernie Goldbach likes blogging.

Auditing Trends for Growth

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Screenshot from Typepad 

IT'S TIME TO REALIGN some of the properties I have online to give them a more sustainable foundation.

David Armano proposes a starting point.

11890 With Helpful Maps

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Image of Lumia

WHEN I ASK 11890 directory assistance for a phone number, it's a 30 second transaction that now includes a map.

I've rang a few times from my mobile phone (in the photo) to see cross-check a few things, like the name of our college (it's recently changed) or the new phone numbers of businesses we like to use. The service is always fast, always accurate. I normally say something like, "Maura, could you text me a business phone number for Beva in Glanmire, County Cork?" The reaction is as fast as a person can type and rarely longer than 20 seconds. That's 20 seconds from the time I start to ask to the time a text arrives on my phone. And now, the text comes with a map that's more accurate than I get with Foursquare.

Learn #howtobeirish via Twitter

YOU'RE INVITED to tweet along with a half-hour interview @rickoshea is doing on #howtobeirish by simply listening to the hashtag starting at 4:30pm Dublin time on 15 March. I'm planning to learn a lot.

I've Irish genes (proof at left in the offspring) and am sincerely interested in some of the inside story behind the user-generated documentary airing this Saturday night at 7:30 on RTE One TV. If anyone knows the inside story about people sharing their secret hints about being Irish, it's Rick O'Shea. He has a special way of integrating radio, television and Twitter. I'm joining Rick on the #howtobeirish hashtag while tweeting this week from the @ireland account on Twitter.

I already know the RTÉ show  features submissions from Columbia, Finland, New York, London, Guatamala, New Zealand. According to the programme guide, it captures random feelings, images, songs, observations, jokes and special moments that sum up, in the minds of the contributors, what it means to be Irish."

The Applied Communications students taking LIT's BSc in Creative Multimedia will be participating in the process, learning how Rick sourced and vetted material was shot on a variety of stills cameras, webcams, video cameras, camcorders and mobile phones.

I really like Rick O'Shea's work and I'm looking forward to seeing via Saorview a lot of "funny, touching, awe-inspiring and strange responses" that make me proud to be part of the Irish gene pool.

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RTE Television -- How to be Irish

ireland

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• St. Patrick's Day playlist essentials (justmommatters.wordpress.com)

Blogs Need to Evolve as Social Objects

THE DEVELOPER WHO figures out how to encapsulate individual blog posts as social objects will have the next big thing. Getting that capability means returning juice to blogs.

If this blog post was a social object, you could embed the whole thing wherever you desired. Any comment you made would follow you or could embed into your Twitterstream, refreshing with a follow-up comment if you dialed that into your preferences. If this little post was a social object, people would be more likely to share it, like it, upvote it, and paste it onto their Facebook wall where they could continue babbling about it. And magically, the babbling would percolate back to this original blog post.  This is something Google Plus is trying to do but the API isn't sorted yet.

The image embedded in this blog post is a social object, pulled from Flickr. But it's not a two-way social interaction because what I'm writing here doesn't attach itself to the image on Flickr.

I'm patient so I'll wait. Based on what I'm seeing inside G+, I think Google has figured out the most primal thing people do on the internet is not search, it's share. We're humans. We like looking at things and telling friends what we saw. We like spreading gossip. And if we could write on our own space and expose what we wrote as social objects, the world would observe a blogging renaissance.

Perhaps as early as this year. Stay tuned for blogs that get christened as social objects.

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Image of Transmedia from my Flickr photostream, illustrated by TheCarbonado.

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Related articles

• When Objects Go Social (socialmediaclub.org)
• Why We Share (slideshare.net)
• Flickr Co-Founder Wants To Help Mark Your Memories With New Startup (bub.blicio.us)

Losing 30,000 Visitors Annually

YEAR-END STATS from three sources confirm something I've know for several years--I'm shedding around 30,000 annual visitors to my blog.

At the current rate of decline, I wonder how strong the long tail of my blog actually is. I know that if I don't post anything for one week, I'll attract an average of 88 visitors per day. If I let the blog idle for more than a month, I doubt more than 20 visitors would stop by every day. I wonder what might boost the annual visitor count back to the 100,000 mark. I've put this blog post up on Google Plus where I expect to read the opinion of some clever commentators.

Ten Years Blogging

I REMEMBER BLOGGING ABOUT surgical masks on September 23, 2001 but at the time I didn't think my writing about the masks would start my adventure in blogging.

The masks were part of a kit given to the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity on the upper east side of Manhattan. Several of the Trinitarian nuns had stood on the top of their convent and watched the twin towers fall. My aunt was one of them. The fire department gave the convent several dozen surgical masks to ward off the ill effects of the dust in the air from the collapse of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, the masks are still in the convent. I've a local copy of that blog post and I'm going to replant it on Inside View because my first post deserves a relook--along with several of the high points of my adventure in blogging.

Page Views as Drawn Activity

I'M WITHIN A WEEK of observing my tenth anniversary of blogging and noticed that the pattern of declining page views imitates a "drawn activity" curve for the search term "photoshop download".

This means that fewer people want to download Photoshop the program or fewer are looking for Photoshop files to revise on their own computers. I don't know why interest in Photoshop downloads is declining across the web but I know the reasons for my own blog's demise: Facebook and Twitter. I push out my blog posts to both of those services and I can see a steady flow of people coming into my blog from both of those networks. The headline from each of my blog posts goes to Twitter and the first paragraph of my new blog posts often automatically publishes on Facebook. I imagine that's enough content for people so they don't click back to the source. The result is the downward progression of the bell curve illustrated in this blog post.

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analytics