François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

Thanks to Maciej who kindly authorized my to translate his original Audioblogging Manifesto, I just posted a French version of it: un manifeste de l'audioblogging.

I've been wanting to do this for quite a while (the original is more than one year old) and it's been triggered by the recent podcasting hype. I guess I just wanted to raise a few points around the issues of audioblogging. But don't take this as a judgment, audioblogging and podcasting are different things and there are very good examples out there. That I'm not into it doesn't mean it's bad :-).

Indeed. Although it was fun to do, I guess I won't go into podcasting anytime soon. It requires a lot of work, technique and attention if you want something of quality, and I definitely don't dig any medium where I'm a passive listener. (Although I like radio when I'm de facto in listening mode, e.g. awakening, eating, showering, etc.) It also really amazes me that Apple doesn't give you any simple way of recording voice on Mac OS X. We've got microphones all over the place (I've got two, one the in PowerBook, the other one in an iSight, and I guess I've got two or three old Apple mikes around). I've tried an iTalk with my iPod but the background noise is annoying (and it's picking up the hard drive sound). I ended up using an iSight with QuickTime Broadcaster, iMovie to edit and mix then iTunes to produce the final MP3 file. I know I could have got a third party software to record audio (there are half a dozen from $15 to $50 out there) but I really wanted to see if there was a way to do that with what Apple provides (answer's yes but that's an ugly hack). It's nice to see them popularize podcasts, but the same cannot be said for helping people produce them. May be Odeo retains an edge over iTunes here.