Jon Udell has kicked off a series of articles at O’Reilly Network on what he calls “hypermedia blogging”:
“The two-way Web unleashed by the blogging revolution is, and will remain, largely a textual medium. And yet we’re clearly at an inflection point. It’s increasingly feasible to create and share media content. If you needed special AV skills and instincts in order to do that, it would be a non-starter. But I’ve never been an AV guy. What motivates me to explore the subject now is a profound sense that it’s ready to become part of mainstream communication on the Web. I’m not sure where this series of columns will lead, but let’s take it one step at a time.”
2004 for me has been the year that multimedia has finally started to live up to its promise – as a medium of expression for everyday people. I’ve dipped a toe into the waters with my recent audio blogging experiments. However I’m ashamed to say I still don’t have a decent mobile phone, so photo blogging is something I haven’t got into yet. It’s a matter of time though. Like Jon Udell, I’m not naturally an “AV guy”. But I am artsy-fartsy by nature and in 2004 I’m able to express that using any number of inexpensive and accessible mainstream AV tools – such as digital cameras, PDA’s, pxt mobile phones, software such as Garageband – and services such as Flickr and Audioblog. And blogging of course is the foundation.
One of my multimedia heroes is the late great Glenn Gould, who in the 60’s and 70’s recorded some amazing contrapuntal audio tapestries. The best known is a trilogy of recordings called The Solitude Trilogy. Here’s an excerpt of the first of them, called “The Idea of North”. The interweaving of voices mirrors the counterpoint that Gould so loved to play in his music (Bach’s Goldberg Variations being the most famous example – coincidentally I listened to Gould’s rendition of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Klavier just last night, for the first time in ages). Gould himself referred to his audio work for CBC Radio as “contrapuntal documentaries”.
I guess what I’m saying in this post is that I’ll be closely following Jon Udell’s series of columns on the mechanics of multimedia blogging. At the same time, I hope to explore the creative side of multimedia – building on the foundation of Glenn Gould and many other multimedia visionaries. I see lots of bloggers posting photos, mixing audio, and even composing original music. The time is ripe for multimedia.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)