The future is here, and it’s boring as hell. Web sites used to be pages of text, linked to other pages of text. Then they added images, and that was cool. Before you knew it, we had web sites that weren’t ’static’ but ‘dynamic’. Changing, exciting, multimedia. Then the multimedia split into audio and video that were content pieces in their own right, ‘new media’ if you will, like a podcast. But if you cut through the hype, a podcast is no more dynamic than those first web pages full of text. Even worse, really, because they’re not linked to anything.
It’s a piece of audio that I can play on my home device, in my car, or while walking around with my portable player. Essentially, a cassette tape (a tiny, digital cassette tape). It doesn’t have any divisions, so you can’t do much more than basic fast-forwarding or rewinding. It has some basic labeling, but not much, and it barely has cover art. Is this really the best we can do? I think not, and below I’ll show you what we could do to break down this false, sham of a future and build something the digital age can be proud of.
Hyperlinking New Media
Social Strategist. You can say it all you want, but unless you make it a link, it won’t bring you here. You could search for it, or I could even tell you “social strategist dot comâ€. But what if I just said “the best new blog of 2007″? That’s the great thing about links; they’re not just directions or descriptions, they’re both. And podcasts don’t have them. They’re static files, and all of the potential the World Wide Web brought to text has been lost in this supposedly ‘rich’ content. Podcasts players must reach that potential by providing simple visual or audio cues that denote links included in a podcast.
Podcast creation software only needs to allow two things:
- A way to highlight a portion of the media, or otherwise define a beginning point and ending point.
- A place to type the link associated with the selected portion.
Podcast players can then:
- Visually distinguish these links, by changing the color of the visualization playing, the color of the title bar, an indicator made specifically for the purpose, a text field filled in by links as they appear, etc.
- Offer an ‘audio cue’ toggle, which enables a soft chime at the beginning and end of a linked portion, or another sound a user could select.
- Offer a ‘link alert’ toggle, which pops up an alert in the bottom-right or other area of the screen when a linked portion plays, then fades out after a few seconds (like instant messaging alerts).
Who/What are You? Where are You From?
MP3 metadata was made for music. ‘Artist’ and ‘Genre’ are great descriptors for a song, but not so much for an audio recording of this post, for instance. Podcasts should have much more flexible labeling, and it should be easily available to a viewer. Labeling options could range from the generic:
Generic Podcast Metadata Scheme
Creator: Jay Neely
Source: http://jayneely.com
Description: “Taking Podcasts Beyond Cassette Tapes†entry.
To the specific:
Blog Post Podcast Metadata Scheme
Post Title: Taking Podcasts Beyond Cassette Tapes
Post Author: Jay Neely
Post URL: http://jayneely.com/2007/07/23/Podcasts-are-Today’s-Cassette-Tapes/
Blog Title: Social Strategist – Innovation, Communication, Consulting
Blog URL: http://jayneely.com
Date Posted: July 23rd, 2007
Interview Podcast Metadata Scheme
Interview Title: Jay’s Interview With Bill Gates, Susan Decker, and John Chambers
Interviewer: Jay Neely
Interviewee 1: Bill Gates
Interviewee 2: Susan Decker
Interviewee 3: John Chambers
Interview Topics: Being rich, SocialStrategist.com, hiring Jay
And mixing both. Standardized metadata would greatly assist services and software trying to organize and search podcast content.
Bringing Back Text
Nuance, volume, emphasis, pronunciation, diversity, uniqueness, and many other aspects give audio many advantages compared text in its ability to present information. But text has many advantages of its own, including ease-of-understanding, editability, reproduceability, and reader-determined pacing. Some of us can read much faster than others speak, and some of us need more time to comprehend than a speaker gives.
Transcripts could solve this problem, but current podcast players don’t offer any way to display them. And while it’s a user experience challenge to decide how to present them(do they scroll? can they be synced to the audio? selectable or not? exportable or not? what if it’s only a partial transcript?), it’s one worth solving. There’s even potential in how the transcript is generated. One could be supplied by the author, of course. And speech-to-text is a fallible but improving option. But how about user-generated?
What if instead of supplying a transcript with the podcast, you supplied a link to where the transcript will be? A podcast player could check this link when the podcast is opened. This would have several benefits:
- Creators can record and distribute their podcast before they’ve made a transcript for it.
- Creators with active communities could let users submit full or partial transcripts, and make those available to listeners.
- Creators can update transcripts with new information, at the beginning or in-line.
Chapters and Tracks and Subtitles, oh my!
Some podcasts are 30 second clips, others are hour long shows. The longer it is, the less useful ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ are as the only navigation markers. Whether a podcast is a lesson or a story or an interview, navigation markers are one of the most useful features that could be added. Even better than the markers a creator adds are the markers a user could add. Bookmarks within a podcast could be used for everything from marking where you have to pause before going to work, to picking out your favorite moments of an interview, to making notes while doing research.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few of my thoughts regarding the potential of new media. We have new concepts, but we’re trying to fit them into old formats, and that’s a uninventive, lazy idea. Most of what I’ve written above applies not just to audio podcasts, but to video content as well. While digital representations of audio and video are more complex than text, that’s not an excuse for the web regressing back to static content. We must not fail to innovate and enhance, as we have done so well with text today.