What would hyperaudio look – er – sound like?

I was listening to a Topaz brothers PR podcast on my non-iPod the other day, and the term ‘astroturfing’ came up. I had heard of it before and did once know, but wasn’t sure. So I thought to myself “I wish I could find that out now. If I were reading this, and it were hyperlinked, or I could get onto Google, I could find it.” But I couldn’t because this was a podcast, not a textual page, and in any case I was offline. Then suddenly I realised: if you can have hypertext, why not hyperaudio?

Hyperaudio would be the equivalent of hotlinks in text. Hyperaudio would be non-linear, just like hypertext. In the same way you can jump around links in text, you could jump around links in audio.

So you could have an entire parallel hyperaudiosphere to complement the web and blogosphere. It would be a whole new area for PR to use, when promoting interviews or speeches, or linking into social media press releases.

How could this work? Well, one way could be to embed tags into the audio stream so that, as the podcast progresses, a menu could display the hotlinked items. So when the word astroturfing is mentioned, up pops a link in the playback application entitled ‘astroturfing’. As soon as you reference that item – by pressing, say, buttons 1 to 9 on your mobile phone - the podcast is paused, and you’re taken to an audio resource explaining that item. At first this could simply be to a Wikipedia entry read out by a text-to-speech application but as more and more audio resources go online, it could eventually grab a full audio document explaining the term, itself containing tags. You could audio-surf.

Let’s take this further. There’s a beautiful Greek Orthodox church near where I work and I’d love to find out more about it. So how about, while I’m walking past it, my mobile phone hooks up to GPS, and grabs hyperaudio items of interest from the hyperaudiosphere and presents them to me? So, my hyperaudio menu – either spoken, or as a menu on my mobile phone – tells me there are items about the church, about the demographics of the road, about the general area? We could use even use Google Earth as a platform for this, and audiotag the world. As you walk from one audiohotspot to another, your speaking companion simply chatters away to you about where you’re at.

One snag: this wouldn’t work on the Tube because you can’t access the Internet there. But my bet is that this will change in a few years.

So, a quick look to see if other people have thought about this too. Of course they have. Here are some attempts:

• http://labs.ixopusada.com/hyperaudio/: “Proposal for a system to store and use Synchronized MetaData in Audio Files. To be expanded upon: Here I will write a proposal for a ‘wrapper’ file format, in which different kinds of xml metadata files can be stored along with the original audio file. “
• http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/201884.html: “The HyperAudio system aims at better supporting a user while visiting a museum by combining location awareness and information adaptation. This mixing of information delivery and physical space proposes new challenges for an effective human-computer-environment interaction. The HyperAudio solution interprets the visitor’s behavior (i.e. physical and interactive) to create on the fly object presentations on the basis of the user model, the physical context and the history of interaction.”
• http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/intpost/Sawhney/ns_txt.htm: “Espace 2 is a prototype system for navigation of hyper-linked audio information in an immersive audio-only environment. In this paper, we propose several essential design concepts for audio-only computing environments. We will describe a hyperaudio system based on the prior design principles and discuss an evaluation of the preliminary prototype.”

(Regular readers of this blog will know that the last of these three paragraphs makes me want to throw things at the cat. It’s a prime example of stuffy academic cleverness that could be expressed much more clearly and succinctly.)

Speaking dispassionately, I think this is a cool idea. If anyone wants to make lots of money on it, contact me.

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Would this be cheating at ‘playing podcast’?

I’ve been very, very, very, very, very, very tentatively looking into the possibility of doing a podcast recently. This is mainly since setting up my podcast feed, I’ve really enjoyed spending some time on the journey into work listening to what amounts to ‘Radio PR’ available anywhere. It’s like reading a blog but you can do other stuff too, such as pick your nose and gaze mindlessly at the ads on the Tube. I also have a fair amount of recording equipment lying around from home music production days so I’d be able to put that to good use.

Given that content is King, I’m not sure I would have enough to say for myself week in week out. So, I’ve had an idea. I’ve been sharing items recently through Google Reader and whereas I used to put that on this blog – you can see the feed here – I removed it simply because it didn’t change frequently enough and put pressure on me to share items simply to provide good new content. However, I think I shared sufficient items to then form the contents of a podcast. So, I would go through my shared items, give a quick summary of them and explain why I think they’re good, and that’s my podcast. Sure, you could do the same yourself simply by visiting the blogs online and reading them, but not while you’re riding a bike. And the shared feed is effectively my show notes.

Part of me wonders whether this is laziness and cheating, but another thinks it might have value. Given that I don’t have the contacts of Shel Holtz or Neville Hobson, and therefore can’t interview people for a podcast or comment on the latest exciting conference I’m hosting, I guess this might be the next best thing.

Also, given that it would purely be an interesting insight into podcasting and that I might actually learn something – which is why I started this blog in the first place – then isn’t that justification enough?

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Would this be cheating at ‘playing podcast’?

I’ve been very, very, very, very, very, very tentatively looking into the possibility of doing a podcast recently. This is mainly since setting up my podcast feed, I’ve really enjoyed spending some time on the journey into work listening to what amounts to ‘Radio PR’ available anywhere. It’s like reading a blog but you can do other stuff too, such as pick your nose and gaze mindlessly at the ads on the Tube. I also have a fair amount of recording equipment lying around from home music production days so I’d be able to put that to good use.

Given that content is King, I’m not sure I would have enough to say for myself week in week out. So, I’ve had an idea. I’ve been sharing items recently through Google Reader and whereas I used to put that on this blog – you can see the feed here – I removed it simply because it didn’t change frequently enough and put pressure on me to share items simply to provide good new content. However, I think I shared sufficient items to then form the contents of a podcast. So, I would go through my shared items, give a quick summary of them and explain why I think they’re good, and that’s my podcast. Sure, you could do the same yourself simply by visiting the blogs online and reading them, but not while you’re riding a bike. And the shared feed is effectively my show notes.

Part of me wonders whether this is laziness and cheating, but another thinks it might have value. Given that I don’t have the contacts of Shel Holtz or Neville Hobson, and therefore can’t interview people for a podcast or comment on the latest exciting conference I’m hosting, I guess this might be the next best thing.

Also, given that it would purely be an interesting insight into podcasting and that I might actually learn something – which is why I started this blog in the first place – then isn’t that justification enough?

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(Another) new social media metric?

Hot on the heels of Advertising Age’s adoption of the Power150 and Edelman’s Social Media Index, Judy Gombita of PR Conversations has very kindly forwarded me an extremely interesting article about (yet another) New Way To Standardize The Podosphere*:

The newly formed Association for Downloadable Media, based in San Francisco, is setting out to standardize* audience measurement and advertising for media such as podcasts. Fifteen major companies are backing the organization* so far, with interim board reps from companies such as Apple BlogTalkRadio, NPR, Nielsen Online and Porter Novelli. Internal elections will happen in September. The group will also meet at the Podcast and New Media Expo that month.

It seems that everyone is trying to grab the ‘new media measurement’ ground although the ADM’s primary focus is on downloadable media, presumably because it conveniently side-steps the problem of blog measurements – ie a download is a download is a download – and covers greater media content (could this be anticipation of an interactive multimedia Web 3.0?)

* Apologies for the Americana there. Those ‘z’s just seem so harshly angular don’t they? Give me the curvaceous Anglo ’s’ any time.

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The Friendly Ghost BlogBoost: review of ‘a shel of my former self’, Shel Holtz

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Recently I reported on the Case of the Disappearing Widgets in which, because my blog reverted to its default layout, I realised how useful the blogroll could be and started displaying it again. Now I’m starting to think that it’s about time I really got to know the people I link to rather than running around and gathering subscriptions like some demented magpie intent on accumulating shiny things.

So, I’m going to give short reviews of each of the blogs on my roll. This isn’t because I think I’m particularly qualified to do this, nor will I be an annoying critic. I’m just going to take the time to find out where that person’s at, and give a flavour of it here.

My methodology is fairly loose. I’m going to spend as long as it takes to nose around the blog, read the content, check out the links and so on. We’re not talking half a day here, but neither are we talking half a minute. Anything from half an hour to an hour, say, just until I think I’ve seen what there is to see.

The only fair way to do this is in alphabetical order so, first up is ‘a shel of my former self’, by Shel Holtz…

It’s strange how in this world of connectivity you can have what seems a small, innocuous link on a webpage that on further inspection proves to be highly significant. Perhaps, like tag clouds, links should be displayed with font sizes giving an idea of how important they are to you, based on your past preferences (maybe like the search engine idea I had recently).

If this were the case, a shel of my former self – blogging at the intersection of communication and technology - would be in 50 point Impact bold. Turns out Shel is what some might call a guru (I prefer ‘expert’) although he seems to have moved beyond that and is an illuminati in the twilight zone of new media marketing and PR.

The major feature of his blog is The Hobson & Holtz Report, a bi-weekly hour-long podcast in which Shel and his colleague Neville Hobson talk about, well, anything they’ve found interesting in their worlds recently and interview, well, anyone they find interesting! It’s a varied format, often with Neville’s part of the blog from his base in Wokingham, Berks, UK, and Shel out and (very) about in the US, with contributions from other colleagues along the way.

The podcast lives here as well as on their personal blogs and I highly recommend you subscribe. At first I wasn’t sure – Neville had a little whinge about how he can’t get Vista drivers for his soundcard in the first one I listened to - but you soon settle into it, and next thing you know you’ve listened to a polished podcast, complete with sig tunes and a magazine-type format comprising regular sections, highlights and comments fom other significant figures. If you don’t want to listen to it right now you can even download the MP3 and listen to it at your leisure (which is what I did this morning on the Tube with my fab 4GB-enabled K750i).

It works well with Neville’s thoughtful tone and Shel’s charismatic stateside drawl. I’m trying to think of any other Anglo/American double-act and can only come up with Laurel and Hardy, which is contrived and unfair. Their tone is relaxed, informal and chatty while their content is interesting and insightful. It really is quality time with two very experienced people – and this is what I mean when I say it’s astonishing that I can get this for free simply through that little link to the left of my blog. I mean – for FREE. Wow.

As Shel says, he’s simply taken advantage of the blog as narrowcast and essentially produced a show that focuses on PR which most radio stations probably wouldn’t countenance (although I’d like to challenge that somewhat and point out that The Message on Radio 4 is an excellent half hour of news for journalists, producers and writers) (POST EDIT: The Message doesn’t have a feed. Thank you BBC).

That’s not all. A shel of my former self also includes observations on issues that interest him, as do many other ‘pro’ blogs (such as, hopefully, this one). There are some real nuggets. For example he illustrates the difference between IT and business leaders perfectly:

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that business leaders seem to have more enthusiasm for social media applications as business tools than their peers in IT. It should serve as a reminder that IT is a service function that should implement business solutions identified by business leaders.

You see his engaging tone there, inviting the reader actually to think? That’s what the podcasts are like too.

He then goes on to list the Six IT Decisions your IT People Shouldn’t Make:

The first three relate to strategy: How much should we spend on IT? Which business processes should receive our IT dollars? Which IT capabilities need to be companywide? The second three relate to execution: How good do our IT services really need to be? Which security and privacy risks will we accept? Whom do we blame if an IT initiative fails?

Great stuff.

The only criticism I’d level at a shel of my former self is that I find the layout a bit confusing. There are messages from sponsors, show notes, links to podcasts and download links dotted about the place and at first glance it looks a bit busy. But you soon figure out that if you click the little player icon you get the podcast, in much the same way a monkey would realise that if it presses the yellow lever it gets the banana.

I’d also say that the podcast tends to accentuate the positive. I’d love to hear them really throw a controversial viewpoint into the mix, which is after all a characteristic of a blog (and imho a good one).

So to summarise, what’s good about a shel of my former self? It is ‘about’ something, it’s entertaining and it’s informative. But the podcast is its ‘killer’ feature. It’s two hours a week of expert analysis and opinion and – tell me if this gets annoying – it’s FREE. My God.

So from now on, as well as listen to the Reith lectures on the BBC Radio 4 website each Saturday morning while eating my poached eggs on toast, I’m going to catch up on the Hobson and Holtz Report too.

I’m starting to use my broadband for a lot of web audio nowadays. Something tells me I’m going have to build that HTPC I always promised myself.

If you’re interested in Whitehouse and Wolfowitz, you’ll love this.

I don’t just receive. Actually, I don’t really receive much at all on this blog. But I do give.

Subscribe to my feeds and you get a good all-round view of what’s happening in the PR, journalism, copywriting and tech blogospheres.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how I created these feeds, but what I do know is that I’ve developed techniques to ensure wide-ranging, deep-probing and relevant hits for each category. They’ve been filtered, collated and filtered again, and I’ve tested them and they work. I use them every day in my professional life.

So:

• PR Pros Proclaim – find out what’s the haps in the PR blogosphere. This does not cover regional PR activities in Pig’s Knuckle Arkansas. It does cover the latest, most important PR news, in part voted for, digg-like, by PR professionals.
• Journalists retort – well they don’t really but they do like some antagonism to elicit interest. This feed has been honed down from several hundred to just several dozen, and then filtered again for the most relevant to PR and social media. It’s the Carling Black Ice of feeds.
• Writers mumble – and don’t they just. This is the least active feed and the most informative. Quality over quantity. If only those writers would think less and write more.
• Geeks speak – and don’t they just. Strange, in company they’re the quiet ones but give them a screen and a keyboard and you can’t shut them up. I worked in tech for 15 years before coming to PR, so I know. Bless them. The future is in this feed.

Subscribe to all four and all you’re missing is the one feed to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.