After our posse talk last evening, a number of very random thoughts are running through my head. Allow me to ramble…
Alec wonders about all the “stuff” that’s out there such as blogs, podcasts, et al and is concerned that the good stuff we talk about and create may not last as technology changes.
I don’t have a great response but in the spirit of rambling and randomness, I check my feedburner stats today and was taken back a bit with this graph.
So sometime from September to now, my readership has tripled. As I listened to the EdTech Talk Podcast about the edublog awards, they were talking about the best individual awards and mentioned that those bloggers (Will, Stephen, Barbara and Ulises) have been doing this for a while and have found not only an audience but a voice that is distinct. I’m finding this to be very true for me, not that I’m anywhere close to their league but this space has allowed me to experiment and play and thankfully, folks have been kind enough to comment or better yet, link to me from their space.
So where does it lead? I hope Alec’s fear (you’ll have to listen to the podcast when it comes out to get his exact thoughts) that all may be lost is unsubstantiated, but I don’t know. Yet, even if all of this stuff is lost, there has been great learning and fun in creating. It reminds me of my lego days. Most of the fun was building stuff. Even if someone kicked it over that was fine because I’d just build it again and even better.
PS. Although initially I had mentioned to vote for us, I think the Dave and Jeff really deserve this one. The work way harder than us and offer some outstanding discussions.
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December 15th, 2005 at 11:40 am
I guess what I’m most concerned about is that some of the excellent being produced today will be lost in the format. Rick mentioned something like … how do you access our thoughts Edna St. Vincent Millay (for example) in the middle of our podcast? How can these long streams of digital recordings be indexed, chaptered, etc.? Sure … there are technologies that we could use to chapter our podcasts, but they are currently low-use, proprietary formats.
And I guess there’s more to the argument. When looking for information, people give preferential treatment to the format/medium. If I see something on microfiche, I ignore it … and find something similar in searchable, digital text. Perhaps, we could assume that everything worth reading has been now digitized, however, I am more pessimistic. I think that much has been lost over the years, has become irretrievable (much like some oral histories). I think we need to be aware of these issues as we blog, create MS Word documents, PDF’s, digitize our voices into .ram, .aac, etc. Some formats will prevail of course, while others will reach a dead-end. And certainly, much will be copied over (I still digitize my analog albums). But, certainly, much will be lost along the way.
December 15th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
This is something we’d love to do as well. As you are probably aware our shows can be VERY long… I’ve heard that technologies are coming out that will search through mp3 files for specific words. I wonder if we couldn’t use key phrases such as ‘chapter’ to give anchors so that we could search them out. We’ve experimented with simply leaving times in our show notes… but this is more of a stop gap measure than anything else. dave.