Simply put, Audio Blogging is the act of putting home made audio files up on a blog.
Putting audio on your blog (instead of just on a normal web page) opens up the possibility of people
leaving comments and possibiliity of trackbacks which are the cornerstones of the loose social networks that blogs enable.
While the internet itself has done a great deal to enable everyone with the ability to publish to anyone, it hasn't been until recently that the bandwidth has been available to support rich media publishing and consumption. Blogs with their ease of use in publishing text opened the floodgates and one of the first things to come through in the new world of many-to-many media creation is audio.
In order to create an audio blog, you simply need to enable the listening of an audio file from your blog. You can utilize a myriad of plugins and embed the audio file in your HTML but generally that makes things more difficult for the users (cross-platform issues, plugins not installed and so on). Many audio bloggers simply link to an MP3 audio file which enjoys almost universal support. Of course there are a thousand ways to go about putting audio on a web page and many more players and production techniques that can be utilized.
Any other video or audio editor that can save a file in a compressed form (AAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RA, WMA) including QuickTime Pro, Real Producer, QuickTime Broadcaster, FinalCut Pro, iMovie, SoundForge and on and on..
RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary
As we now know, RSS is an easy way to syndicate web based content. It is built into many content management systems (CMS) and there are an increasing number of aggregators available for subscribing and browsing through that content.
RSS has a couple of versions in general use: .91, .92 and 2.0.
All RSS version are composed of a channel <channel> with multiple <item> tags.
RSS versions less than .92 are good for standard news and website syndication (ie. text) but things get really interesting (for our purposes) with version .92
.92 allows for <enclosure> tags. Enclosures allow for the inclusion of media elements.
A Sample: <enclosure url="http://hostname.com/path/to/media.mp3" length="12216320" type="audio/mpeg" />
The length attribute is the size of the file in bytes. The type attribute is the mime type of the file.
WordPress automatically puts enclosures in RSS feeds for mime types that it knows about. If it is a mime type that WordPress doesn't know about you can manually do it by:
Create a post, use the "Advanced Editing" feature
In the "Custom Fields" add "enclosure" as a Key and in the Value text field put the URL to the file on the first line and the length (remember, in bytes) on the second line.
PodCasting
Term is a blend of iPod and broadcasting. Thanks to enclosures in RSS, audio blogs (or any other audio delivered via RSS) are automatically downloaded to your computer through the use of a special aggregator.
The term and concept of podcasting was originally developed by Dave Winer and Adam Curry (of MTV fame) and has quickly exploded due to the ubiquitous nature of portable digital music devices (such as the iPod) coinciding with the growth of broadband to the home.
More information, what is it and how it came about:
Payloads for RSS nice explanation of the concept behind delivering media via RSS.
Basically any device that can play MP3s and be synched with a computer fits the bill. Whether or not the software or aggregators make it easy is another story.
With the music industry coming down hard on people who use copyrighted music in non-sanctioned ways (file sharing, streaming and the like) and the fact that there exist no blanket agreements that cover podcasting with the rights clearning houses (ASCAP, BMI, Harry Fox, SoundExchange), podcasting copyrighted music is risky business.
Fortunately, efforts of organizations such as Creative Commons have made some progress. Creative Commons offers a flexible licensing system that artists can use to choose what they will allow people to do and what they won't. It is clear, written well and increasingly being used in a wide variety of mediums. We The Media has a CC license and therefore can be found in a myriad of different formats such as a free audio book along with the standard PDF downloads.
Video Blogging
aka: vogging, vlogging, vodcasting, video podcasting and so on..
Just like audio blogging is the posting of audio to your blog, video blogging is the posting of video.
What is Videoblogging?
Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting.
Vogme Manifesto
First published December 2000.
A vog respects bandwidth. A vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television). A vog uses performative video and/or audio. A vog is personal. A vog uses available technology. a vog experiments with writerly video and audio. A vog lies between writing and the televisual. A vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media. A vog is dziga vertovJean-Luc Godard with a mac and a modem. A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog.
QuickTime, with it's support of MPEG-4 (now very much a standard) is probably the most universal tool in use for video blog creation. Of course, most other plugin based media players are able to be used but for now we will stick with QuickTime.
QuickTime Pro is by far the most useful tool for creating QuickTime movies but any capture/editing software that supports QuickTime should be able to do it.
Super Simple Capture and Export
QuickTime Pro can be used to record directly from a camera (Firewire and DV are directly supported). Choosing File: New Movie Recording brings up a recording window that you can capture directly into.
The next step is to export the video in a manner that can be published on the web.
File: Export: Movie to QuickTime Movie: Options: Video: Compression MPEG-4: Bitrate 600 kbits/sec. Sound: Format: AAC Sample Rate: Recommended: Bit rate 64 kbps. Prepare for Internet Streaming: Fast Start - Compressed Header
Following this, you should be able to publish your video on the web in the same manner you do with any other file. Upload it to a webserver and create a link to it. (As with podcasting, you should include the full path to the file: http://itp.nyu.edu/~sve204/ppm_spring06/test.mov instead of just ppm_spring06/test.mov.
Simply posting the link to your blog should make it available as an enclosure in your RSS feed (as long as you have WordPress or MT with the MTEnclosures Plugin).
Embedding Movies
QuickTime players can be embedded in a webpage.
There are many advantages to doing this:
Precise Layout Control and better user experience (no annoying ads and branding)
Integration with other web based components such as Java applets, images and
text
Simple interactivity of your own design (through JavaScript or VBScript)
The main disadvantage is that it can take a while to load video and multiple videos on one page make the page heavy and sometimes unusable for older browsers.
To Simply Embed a QuickTime player in a page utilize the following HTML:
You will notice that there are really two things going on here. The first is
the "Object" tag and associated "Param" tags. These are
included to support Internet Explorer and other browsers that support ActiveX
controls. The second is the "Embed" tag. This is included to support
browsers that utilize the standard Netscape plugin architecture. In order for
your embedded player support the range of browsers available you need to include
both. Also, both tags should include the same set of information. For instance,
if you are going to change the height of the plugin you should change it in
both the "Object" tag and in the "Embed" tag.
There are quite a few tags that you may utilize when you use a QuickTime embedded player.
A full list is available from Apple by following the For more information: QuickTime Embed Tag Attributes.
Some of the more interesting ones are: AUTOPLAY, CONTROLLER and HIDDEN.
If I wanted to make sure the movie plays as soon as it is able, I would set
the AUTOPLAY to true.
If I didn't want a controller to be available
on the page I would set CONTROLLER to false (better make sure that AUTOPLAY
is true in this case). When you have a controller you should increase
the size of the movie by 17 pixels in height.
WordPress has some features which are there to correct HTML tags if they are entered incorrectly. Unfortunately, the WordPress feature that does this, incorrectly identifies the embed and object tags above and tries to correct them rendering the video unplayable.
Each of these pieces of software have their own set of features and formats that they support. It is interesting to track the development of each, especially as they add things like Tagging, Integrated Directories, BitTorrent support, Sharing and so on.
