Reviews

Audioboo is a web and mobile application that enables you to record and publish audio segments directly to the web and straight into other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook if you have enabled the connections.

In this debrief one our correspondents, Bernard Goldbach, shares his enthusiasm and his experiences with the application as an educational and Social Media tool.

You may want to listen to this compilation that he and Peter Donegan put together to get an idea of the breadth and depth of what is possible with the audiboo format. It is also a rather lovely soundscape of Ireland in 2010.

click image for "Irish Boosters"
(background via Google Earth)

So how did you get started?

I am writing this as a convert. Just a few days ago if anyone has asked me what I thought of 3DTV I would have grimaced a little, murmured a few niceties and ended my answer with a sentence containing the words "marketing gimmick." They can only make televisions so much bigger and so much flatter, and an old boxy TV with a cathode ray tube is now a rare sight in places both public and private. So 3DTV technology must have been a godsend to the manufacturing executives. Another fad to generate more cash. Blu-ray never became a must-buy. Just something you thought about upgrading to when your DVD player needed replacing. It was only better, not different and better.

Clearly a lot of work went into this NBC Olympic Pulse site but not a great deal of thinking. As a piece of engineering it's fine. But aggregating Twitter streams is no longer bleeding-edge technology. Not that it ever really was. The clunky design of both page and visual representation is definitely not to my taste but I have seen a couple of tweets that have appreciated the style of the page. So as ugly to my eye as it is I shan't be spending anytime criticizing the look of the page.

However, as a demonstration of Social Media in action it is a complete fail.

It is a fail because the mentality that informed the conception of the site is not a mentality that is conducive to operating in the Social Media world that we now all find ourselves in whether we recognize it or not. It is a mentality that operates on a linear process which says: we decide what information, news events, sporting events, entertainment and so on that we think interests you, we get it for you, we package it for you, we give it you. A one-way process that noticeably lacks the idea of dialogue.

(Sorry for the lack of updates recently.