Further to my note about a new #podcast about #indieweb things, I listened to Marty McGuire's rendering of This Week in the Indieweb. I really enjoyed it, even though I had read the text version. Production and audio were top notch, and it was very clear. My only quibbles concern the pace and the audience.
Even as a native English speaker, and despite Marty's very clear diction, it seemed a bit speedy to me. I wonder whether less fluent listeners manage to get it all.
A second, similar point, about the audience. In my estimate, as a newcomer to indieweb and a less than expert person, some of the stuff whizzed right by me. But if I were familiar with it all, I'd probably be keeping up with the IRC channels and the indieweb.org pages and so I'm not too sure why I'd need an audio version. But that's just a matter of choice.
The slightly bigger question is, would there be an audience for a more discursive podcast about the indieweb? Marty would be in favour. So would Chris Aldrich, who started this ball rolling for me. There's a fair bit of audio tagged indieweb at huff duffer, but nothing, apparently, dedicated to the topic.
We certainly have the technology to produce something that captures the history, what's happening now and how things might develop. There's no way I could do that on my own -- not least because I don't know enough to ask intelligent questions -- but with a co-host or two it would be a really interesting project.
Jeremy raises some great points here that mirror some of my own worries about trying to summarize the discussions happening on the IndieWeb wiki and the many #indieweb chat channels. When I had the initial idea to do an “audio edition” of This Week in the IndieWeb, the question of “who is the audience” seemed to have an obvious answer: folks who would read the newsletter but preferred an audio edition. However, it quickly became clear that doing a “direct read” of the newsletter — where much of the content is names and links to changes on wiki pages — wouldn’t make a lot of sense when spoken aloud. So, my first crack at the format evolved into answering a slightly broader question: “how can I explain these updates to someone who might not already be familiar with the wiki?” My short (and unhelpful) answer is: this is hard. The discussions on the wiki tend to be very technical, jargon-heavy, and touch on an extremely wide set of topics. In the first episode, I attempted to give some structure with groupings like “IndieWeb Events”, “Software and Services”, “Silo Updates”, “Silo Issues”, etc., but I agree with Jeremy that it is still very fast and dense. While I want to keep the podcast short (less than 10 minutes), I think a next positive step would be to give topics more time to breathe with some explanatory commas that give context. It is my hope that projects like this podcast will help find new ways to phrase and frame the things that the IndieWeb community are doing and talking about, helping to reach new folks. I have a feeling it is going to be a lot of work. :}
Marty McGuire, Feb 21 2017 on martymcgui.re