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Audioblogging in Blogger

Believe it or not, you can put your actual voice right into a Blogger entry. Doing so is free to all Blogger users and fairly easy. Blogging in audio is called audioblogging, and Blogger uses a service called Audioblogger (located at www.audioblogger.com). Once you get the hang of putting an audio message in a blog entry, you can also place one in your profile page. How does it all work? First you establish an account with Audioblogger (again, it’s free). Then you call a phone number to record your voice entry. Your recording, up to five minutes in length, is automatically posted to your blog within seconds after you hang up.

The entry consists of an audioblogging icon; visitors click the icon to hear your recording. The audio file is recorded in MP3 format; to hear it, a visitor must have MP3-playing software on his or her computer. (Such software is installed on nearly all computers built in the last several years.) When someone clicks the audio file icon in your blog entry, that software opens and plays your voice entry.

Some people use audioblogging as their main, or sole, type of blog post. Others use it occasionally and support each audio entry with written text. You are free to experiment. You might use it only once, or you might fall in love with blogging in this manner.

Your audio entries are editable just as your written entries are. The audio entries appear on the Edit Posts page along with text entries. You cannot edit the audio, however. You can add a title — I try to do this as soon as possible, because audio entries get posted without titles. And you can add text that explains or enhances the audio.

The Blogger Look

Because Blogger offers relatively few (but fairly attractive) templates, many blogs are instantly recognizable as belonging to Blogger. One example is “Blogging For Dummies” — hey, wait a minute! That’s not my blog. It belongs to Jeff Sievers, who started the blog as a how-to about blogging. It has more recently evolved into a general diary about everything from politics to the repeated breakdowns of Jeff’s car. I thought it would be fun to put his site in the book, and Jeff agreed. See it live, here:

drumacrat.blogspot.com

Jeff’s blog has the typical Blogger look; that template and similar ones with different colors are much in use. If you scroll down the page, you might notice that there is no visible feed link. The lack of a visible feed is another drawback to Blogger. However, Blogger uses a common feed link that you can simply add to the end of any blog’s home-page URL:

/atom.xml

Using Jeff Siever’s Blogger site as an example, the feed link is this:

drumacrat.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Blogger uses an alternative to the RSS feed format called Atom. Atom feeds work just like RSS feeds in the important ways. Atom feeds display blog entries just like RSS feeds in a feed newsreader. Blogger’s choice of Atom has nothing to do with the lack of a feed link on Blogger blogs. The missing feed link is simply a design choice at Blogger — inexplicable, perhaps, but there it is. If you use a feed-enabled Web browser (such as Firefox), Blogger feeds appear in the browser just as reliably as on pages that do contain feed links. Firefox finds the feed link in the page’s code, where it lurks invisibly.

Using Del.icio.us links

Del.icio.us (the URL is del.icio.us) is not only the most difficult to type a Web address in history but that a popular social tagging site. Tagging is the way organizing of many items into categories such that each item can inhabit many categories. Instead of creating categories like dumping items, and boxes into those boxes, tagging starts with the item and assigns it several (or just one) descriptive tags. Visitors to a tagging site can choose any descriptive tag to see all items that have been assigned that tag.

As a voting system, Del.icio.us is not as organized as Digg (described in thepreceding section). But Del.icio.us preceded Digg and has a strong following. Instead of submitting items like Web pages or blog entries for group voting, in del.icio.us, you keep a personal store of favorite pages, each of which is tagged. Del.icio.us provides a bookmarklet that lets you save any page you visit with a single click.

Once tagged and saved, a page becomes publicly viewable in the del.icio.us site. Someone else maybe click through to your saved page and save it themselves in their own del.icio.us cubbyholes. Each saved page displays the number of times it has been saved by the entire community. As in Digg, most people are more curious about popular pages than unpopular pages. The result of popularly saved page is many of traffic to that page.

Digging for traffic

Digg (www.digg.com) is an experiment in collaboratively filtering Web content. Stop rolling your eyes; I’ll explain. Collaborative filtering is a way of finding high quality through group intelligence. The theory is that mobs are smart even if the taste and intelligence of individuals vary. Get enough people to vote Yes or No about something, and the cream rises to the top.(Unsatisfied election voters disagree, of course.)

Digg invites every user to submit Web page, where get categorized and put on long lists. Those lists continually have new pages added to them. When submitting, you can add short comment plus summary of the page. New items stay on the first page of the list until they get pushed to later pages by the continual influx of newer items. Once pushed off, an item’s visibility diminishes. At any time during this marching process, The Digg visitors can click through to the item’s page (or not), and “digg” the item by clicking a special link. A tally is kept of the number of times the item is “dugg.” After certain threshold is reached, the item is moved to Digg’s home page where it receives tremendously more visibility. Front page Digg items generate many traffic to their pages.

Some bloggers submit every single one of their entries to Digg, hoping for the one that clicks hard and delivers throngs of visitors. Even a modestly dugg item can generate substantial traffic. There is not a one-to-one correspondence of diggs (votes for the item) and visits to the item’s page; to the contrary, it is nearly inevitable that the item’s page receives much more traffic than reflected in the “dugg” number.

Here again, in Digg as on a blog, some discretion is advisable. Digg users can comment any submitted item, if the item is lame by the Digg standard of cool, the submitter is likely to get flamed. Cause everyone’s submissions is collected onto a single page, it’s quite possible to ruin your reputation by making trivial submissions that waste time and Digg space Digg’s purpose is to showcase the best of the best; it is everyone’s responsibility to focus on quality whether voting or submitting.