Fedora and lack of audio communication with the community

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Dec 23 15:45:32 UTC 2007


seth vidal wrote:
> 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.

Are you against radio as well?  Some podcasts are just recordings of 
radio sessions that were broadcast live.  And most of the technical ones 
are just people talking about things that are available in print anyway.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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