Back in January I published a short article Auricle has Soundblox which introduced Laszlo's SoundBlox as an example of an audio blogging tool and distributed internet service. Today, over on the Robin Good site, the article Voice Publishing Is Here To Stay describes Audioblog, another example of the genre. The quality of the sound for speech and speed of download is pretty good but there are some issues worth considering. Although text can still carry an awful lot of meaning very efficiently I can certainly see some educational potential for services like Audioblog. Some obvious examples include: simultaneously working on something else; providing an alternative route to information which is otherwise blocked due to a physical impairment that prevents users from viewing or interacting with a screen. Also, sometimes only an authentic sound will do, e.g. the patient's heartbeat or breath sounds, the anxiety in someone's voice, the historical speech. Or just simply to know what someone's voice sounds like.
One of the problems, as with all proprietary web services (even low cost ones), is the implications of investing a lot of time and energy creating an archive of audio files which are stored in an external environment over which you haven't any control. Here today, gone tomorrow? Or, here today but tomorrow we want a whole lot more cash to provide the service on which you now depend. Users with a mission critical use in mind need to be cautious and perhaps seek a solution which can be delivered from long-term robust sources.
