TechnoChitlins

Audio TIVO

Does anyone else think this is a good idea? A TIVO for life, as it were- being able to go back to earlier in the day and listen to exactly what you or the other person said? As Anil Dash says bq. Why would you want such a thing? That's always the first question that arises. My own desire for this device dates back to my late teens, when I used to make really bad music with my friends. My constant frustration was that I didn't have audio records of all the found-sound elements that I stumbled across in the course of a day. Snippets of conversation, ambient sounds, messages left on voice mail, obscenities shouted at me by strangers: these were all elements that I was determined to appropriate. bq. Later, as I realized the boundaries of my talents, (somewhere between a lump of coal and Ja Rule, which is to say, nonexistent) I started to realize that perhaps this audio record would be valuable on its own. bq. Having a complete audio record of my day, indexed by time, would allow me to refer back to a moment in conversation when quoting it later, or when I needed clarification on a specific point brought up while talking to someone. The timestamps alone, with perhaps quarter-hour index markers annotating a day's recording, would offer chronological indexing of the audio diary in a way that parallels permalinks in a weblog. Links to specific points in time turn out to be a very powerful way to manage microcontent. Heavy indeed. And all this came from me looking through Google for a program that would allow me to record Hugh Hewitt off the 'net and time-shift so I could listen to his show. The internet is a wondrous place. Posted by Jim Webb at April 4, 2004 10:26 AM | TrackBack