Audblog & Captioning

February 28, 2003 - Posted by André Restivo- 3 Comments

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Audblog & Captioning

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but pure audio
blogging discriminates against deaf people. Don’t get me wrong,
it’s a great idea; hearing the sound of someone’s voice is a great
way to make a more personal connection. (Only a dozen of my 4,000
daily readers know what I sound like in person.) But any audio
content needs to be supplemented with a simultaneous text
transcript.

It’s not only the deaf people that make me think audio blogs (like
Audblog) won’t work without
some kind of text support:

  • You can’t search the web for an audio post
  • You can’t translate entries using href="http://world.altavista.com/">the fish
  • No RSS feeds
  • Now way of skimming through a site looking for usefull things,
    you have to ear it all.
  • Bad sound quality makes it hard to understand
  • …

Posting by SMS or using some kind of speech-to-text technology, now
that would be cool.



Is this snow?

February 28, 2003 - Posted by André Restivo- 1 Comment

We don’t get much snow where I live, in fact the last time it
really snowed in Porto I was 10 years old and that was a long time
ago. Even stranger is the fact that this event didn’t happen in the
peak of the winter, its not that cold and it only lasted a few
minutes. So this is what it looked like near my house the day
before yesterday.
Neve8.jpg src="http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/Neve8.jpg"
width="640" height="480" border="0" />
To see more pictures …