CodeProfessor

Adding Audio Comments and Feeds To Your Blog March 1, 2006

Nine years ago, I set a goal for myself to communicate with 2 million people in my lifetime. As part of that goal, I had planned on literally walking (when possible) around the world for 10 years, learning languages and community history. For reasons I won’t get into, I couldn’t yet go through with my plans, but I’ve kept my language and communicating goals intact, and keep moving forward.

This is the primary reason I love the blogosphere so much: the potential to communicate directly with many people, and to be part of one or more communities. Building communities is a hot activity online, but so is communicating directly with individual visitors. (Or as directly as possible, given that blog comments are more of a time-lagged two-way communication.)

Over at Performancing.com, Ahmed Bilal wrote recently about using group chat to build a community. Chris Garrett talked about ways to generate more comments on your blog. James Cotton provided some tips on setting up podcasting. What if you could combine (almost) all of these activities to add an interesting new way to have your blog readers communicate with you?

Odeo.com allows you to create and store your own audio recordings, tag them with keywords, and even create ‘channels’. You can use the control panel to record messages of up to 3 minutes, or import podcast (audio RSS) feeds into your channels. You can then share and promote your channels with “subscribe” chicklet/buttons. If others like your channel, it’ll rise in the rankings.

A new feature on Odeo is the ability to allow blog visitors to leave an audio comment in your Odeo inbox. This is damn cool, and while not the same as skyping or zoeping with people in near-real time, still provides visitors a way of communicating with you beyond text comments or email.

The service certainly seems cool, but there are some minor flaws that I hope they work out. One is that instructions for basic activities are buried instead of being prominent. There’s also no obvious way to upload audio files from your computer, although this may have been by design, to reduce copyright infringement. Without an upload feature, the only way you can promote anything other than short snippets of panel-recorded audio is to have an existing podcast elsewhere.

If you want to see the “send me an odeo” in action, find the green rectangle (with a star) somewhere in the navigation column of this weblog, or use the one below. Click on the button, and it’ll take you to a page where you can record a brief message. Pressing send will place your audio message in my Odeo inbox.

I’ve installed the above button on some of my tech blogs and a few others, so that if anyone has specific private questions or comments, they can send them. I can manage all of my incoming messages from a single location.

While I’m hoping that they’re used for comments, requests for tutorials, or possibly as a stepping stone to landing blogging/ programming contracts, I wouldn’t be surprised if I start getting e-marketing sales messages