Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Text > brain Just like non-OCR'ed documents, Audio as well as all multimedia wants to be translated into text - it just gets into our brains faster. "Five guys talking. Tim Bray raises some good questions about last week's Gillmor Gang episode: First of all, a transcript would be so much better; I don't have an hour to listen and if I did it would be in my car, and even if I tried, sitting here in my office (even though the audio is excellent) my attention is continually getting pulled away by email or instant messages or red letters in NetNewsWire or whatever. If I'm writing code or a tricky position paper or reading something material or even just thinking about a hard problem I can tune out the distractions no problem, but four guys talking? The mind wanders. [ongoing] I agree. Doug Kaye is working on providing transcripts, but it's a hard problem and a thankless chore. Meanwhile, I've been exploring a middle-ground approach. I went through the first half of the show, in which various aspects of service-oriented architecture were batted around, and added a layer of indexing and annotation. The result: this SMIL presentation for the Real player. Note: Clicking an index link will seek in the audio stream and synch the annotations panel, but (at least for me) won't always actually play the audio at that location unless you click again. (Annoying. Why is that?) ... [Jon's Radio]" 11:59:30 PM    comment []