Fedora and lack of audio communication with the community

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Sun Dec 23 14:51:33 UTC 2007


On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 17:40 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >> first excuse me if this is the wrong mailing list. If there is
> >> fedora-marketing or some similar :) mailing list please point me in
> >> the right direction.
> > 
> > There is a fedora-marketing-list indeed.
> > 
> > But to answer your suggestion: I personally don't understand why all the fuss 
> > about podcasts, IMHO written plaintext is more convenient for things like that 
> > (easier to skim over, easier to find a section when going back to something you 
> > already read, easier to search automatically (fulltext search), easier to find 
> > in a search engine too (fulltext indexing), no need to either put headphones on 
> > or have everyone around listen to the podcast too whether they want it or not, 
> > can be consumed on a machine with no sound at all (as in some offices) and of 
> > course faster to download too).
> 
> One word: commuting.  Podcasts do to talk radio (or the internet 
> equivalent) what tivo does to television.  While it is absurd to hope 
> that an interesting personality will be chatting on a live broadcast and 
> conclude at precisely the times you are trapped in your car for the 
> daily commute, it is quite easy to subscribe to a podcast and automate 
> the transfer of new content to your ipod/player. Then it is a matter of 
> pushing the button to pause/continue at convenient times.  It's also 
> great if you work out regularly on a treadmill or similar device that 
> doesn't require your full concentration.  Sometimes way a person is 
> saying comes across differently when you listen to an interview compared 
> even to reading a transcript of the same thing.  I tend to prefer the 
> ones moderated by someone with actual broadcast experience like Leo 
> Laporte or fast paced ones like CNET's Buzz Out Load.


Podcasts are useless to the deaf and Hard of Hearing. If you want to put
a podcast up, fine. if you don't have a transcript of it you're
excluding that portion of the population, entirely. There is currently
software to read text in a voice for the blind, we have nothing to
convert speech to text.

that's why we shouldn't do podcasts.

-sv





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