Suw Charman is only audioblogging for the next few days, and as sound is not the most search-engine-accessible medium on the Internet, her words will need to be transcribed. Luckily everything on her weblog is governed by a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can remix her audioblog so long as they "share-alike" (that is one of the terms of her license). The following, then, is a transcript of her audioblog on August 6th, 2004. Ums, ahs, stumbles and mistakes not transcribed (errors in transcription are entirely my own, I do not discount the possibility that they may be a result of Suw's wonderful accent):

Well here we are again, after my post earlier this evening, I decided that I would try a little experiment and attempt to only audioblog for the next seven days. You're probably rolling your eyes and wondering why I would bother, but it's really to see whether audioblogging gets easier, because at the moment I feel terribly self-conscious and awkward recording this message, and also to see whether I can keep the momentum going and actually end up audioblogging something meaningful and worthwhile.

One of the key problems is that there's no real edit function. I usually pour over my posts--even the shorts ones I will check and read through and spellcheck and preview and re-edit and preview again before they ever get published. But with an audioblog there's a lot more spontaneity about it. You get to hear all my ums and ahs, you get to hear my stumbles and my mistakes. And unless I sit here for hours re-recording it until I'm blue the face, it has to be a bit of a warts-and-all experience, which is kind of interesting. Interesting that it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable to be so exposed, I guess.

But anyway, I'm going to resist the urge to type anything for a week and just see what happens. The only exception will be if I need to blog something with a hyperlink, frankly, I'm not spelling it out. I shall just type the link into the post and we'll go with that. That to me would be the one disadvantage with audioblogging: it may save my fingertips, but it's very difficult to to actually discuss something and provide a link to it. So again it's a matter of seeing how that goes. It's not something that I've done before, and it's just really a matter of seeing what happens. So, yes, welcome to a week's worth of me wittering on.

I hope you enjoy it. Speak to you tomorrow.

The other disadvantage of Audioblog (the service, not the idea) is that the audio itself is streaming, meaning rewinding in order to transcribe is, at the moment, impossible. That means that one has to start from the beginning, wait until the audio comes to the blank in the transcript, and then type like mad to fill in that blank, rather than simply rewind to the point at which there is a blank. I understand that feature has been requested by Audioblog members, but that it is not high on the feature request priority list.

The entire text of this weblog entry is governed by the same Creative Commons license as Suw's, which is Attribution, Non-Commercial, and Share-Alike.