Biomedical and Electrical Engineer with interests in information theory, evolution, genetics, abstract mathematics, microbiology, big history, IndieWeb, mnemonics, and the entertainment industry including: finance, distribution, representation
@cathieleblanc I've been using Livescribe pens to do pencasts for 8 years or so, primarily for mathematics lectures. While it's not great at capturing images/slides in a classroom setting (which I do with cell phone photos typically), the pen can capture audio and everything that's written down in a chalkboard lecture. The pen also allows you to go back and to write down additional notes after-the-fact and link those with the spoken audio as well. This makes it a great low bandwidth method for capturing class notes to share with students/classmates who missed class without the need to videotape which generally is both high bandwidth (for sharing) and poor quality for showing what's being written/presented on a board or projector.
I've also used the pen for working my way through problems for students/colleagues in areas where it's necessary to have something written down, but it's useful to have the supplement of spoken audio to add to the problem-solving process.
@cathieleblanc I can't find it now, but it seems like you made a comment the other day that led be to believe that this post/pencast might help you out a bit: http:/
@mattmaldre I wish I was putting more content into my YouTube channel to make it more worthwhile. Alas... I can barely find the time for my microcast: http:/
@kingkool68 That might buy you some street cred, but it's a much higher bar than the "traditional" definition(s). ;)
Of course, if you want to go all-in, then you'll want audio too:
http:/
@mrkrndvs I'm curious if you manually cut & paste your replies for others' sites (who may not support webmention or even pingback/trackback) into their old-school comments sections?
I often worry that without that, or without replying to versions on Twitter if they syndicated, they won't see my response via pingback/trackback or other means. Instead my reply sits all alone on my site and they don't have the benefit of seeing it at all unless they come across it organically otherwise.
Generally when I manually cut and paste replies, I'll often use the comment's "website" field to include the permalink for my comment and then I'll take the permalink for my comment and add it to my syndication links since I've manually syndicated it.
Sometimes I notice that including multiple links in a reply can also run afoul of spam filters.
One of my favorite set of machinations occurred recently when I wrote this reply to Jon Udell: http:/
Jon came back to his original post and appended his own comment to document my comment in the most circuitous of manners which included using his annotation tool Hypothes.is: https:/
Interestingly we both used WordPress, Hypothes.is, and Twitter to carry on the conversation. I was quite impressed that he took the time to circle back around and document my end of the conversation since he must have missed my pingback (he doesn't have webmentions) and my manual cut & paste, but did manage to see the notification on Twitter.
It all just goes to show that you've got to keep your eye on the tech that you and everyone else is using until it's broadly and evenly distributed. One day perhaps...
@Padraig @realkimhansen Her prediction is particularly nefarious sounding as sites like Acast go to reasonable lengths to hide their audio files on web pages. They seem to be attempting to create silos of content instead of keeping an open architecture.
@jayrosen_nyu @consequently A free @huffduffer account will create an rss feed and an iTunes subscribeable feed for you for any audio you want to put into it.
@mrkrndvs @cogdog @johnjohnston @mdvfunes Here's a link to some of @schmarty's experiments and documentation: https:/
Rik, with the right license you can host audio on archive.org for free and just point/hotlink your audio posts to that.
@Chronotope They did make it very difficult to extract the audio files out of their web pages! That's something...
John, I has many of the same thoughts you did when I was looking at Anchor.fm again as a possible microcast option last week. The relative ephemeral nature of it made me think "it's snapchat for audio". I suspect it may be easier for them not to have to host/stream old audio, though they do keep users' streams if you mark them to be saved. I also have a feeling it's much harder for users to build a native audience on such a platform unless they're bringing an audience with them. I was pained by how much hunting and searching it took to find an option to download and save my recordings to archive personally or to post on my own site.
@Mercy They seem like completely different products to me.
Known is a CMS which allows you to own your data, then publish and syndicate it to multiple platforms (including uploading to Anchor). It doesn't have any audio creation or editing functionality. I have seen people using this and WordPress lately for small personal microcast "channels" which can be subscribed to or syndicated out to other social platforms.
Anchor appears to have some production and publishing tools as well as a distribution platform of sorts. It looks like the material you publish to your own station can be listened to for 24 hours, but then disappears unless you archive it to your account privately. Fortunately you can export your audio with a little bit of gymnastics, but it's not intuitive. This seems more like an ephemeral audio version of snapchat to me.
I'm curious what you're looking for in a minipodcast? I'm considering something shortly myself and have been looking at Anchor as well as Opinion2, Spreaker Studio, audioBoom, tryca.st, and even others as simple as using my LiveScribe Echo pen to record and then distribute via my Known or WordPress sites.
Jonathan, perfect, the new version fixes the issues with the content showing on the permalink.
The separate, but somewhat related issue is that the post interface still shows all of the UI for syndicating to all of the options (facebook, twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc.), yet choosing those options doesn't actually syndicate the content. (Typically I wouldn't POSSE these post types anywhere anyway, but other users may expect this piece to work if it's shown.) I know some post types in Known hide the syndication targets when they're not supported (ie, only audio related posts can be syndicated to soundcloud), but I'm not sure how these are done.
Interestingly, when editing these types of posts, the syndication targets (correctly) aren't shown in the editable version.
Screech, a simple client for posting audio content (such as podcasts) to your own site using Micropub, is now available publicly. You can check it out at https:/
@realkimhansen @signlfm If you hadn't been aware, this came out earlier in the week and may be of overlapping interest:
Three recommendations to enable Annotations on the Web | W3C News https:/
https:/
Their method of breaking down the problem and their vocabulary may be particularly useful; the overlay onto audio may be another problem altogether...
I also thought this post (with code) by Aaron Parecki, while a relatively simple concept, was exceptionally cool. https:/