Songs, presentations and analyst briefings

March 21, 2005 —

I have a mental checklist I use before leaving my house by car. Like many, many other people, "where is my cell phone?" has become a standard part of that checklist. A smaller, but growing number of people, including me, have added "where is my MP3 player?" into the checklist.

This may seem odd because, if there was a marketing code for "people unlikely to ever consider music worthy of expenditure", I would be in it.

Music really isn't my thing. I have a low threshold for listening/hearing/watching the same thing more than once or twice. I must be missing a gene or something.

Yet I pack my MP3 player every time I get into my car. I have a cassette conversion thingie that allows me to pump the sound from the MP3 player out of the cars speakers. It works great. Why do I have this stuff?

I have it because I listen to recordings of talks made at conferences I could not attend from sites such as Technetcast[1]. I have it to listen to Podcasts[2] on technical topics such as CIO Podcast[3] and IT Conversations[4].

I do occasionally listen to music too but not very often. When I do listen to music on my MP3 player, I find that my mental attitude to the experience changes in an interesting way. With MP3 music, I do not mind listening from the start, right through to the end. With music, I do not find myself wishing I had some way to step forward/backward to particular segments. With music, I do not find myself thinking "I want to skip forward to the next place where this guy has the microphone." or "I want to follow up the reference made to XYZ".

With business and technical audio, I find myself wishing I had these abilities all the time. An audio recording of a 30 minute presentation is not like a song. A one hour analyst briefing is not like a symphony. Although presentations and analyst briefings can be works of art, they tend to be more about getting the job done - information exchange. As consumers of this sort of audio, we need better tools for navigating the material, picking out interesting pieces, fast forwarding to particular voices, that sort of thing.

I do not have a well articulated vision of what sort of audio controls I mean, but I will know it when I see it and I do not see it for sale anywhere today. Making it happen will require looking past the play/stop/bookmark triumvirate that currently dominate audio playing user interfaces. It will require tagging of audio segments in a standard way so that they can be browsed by devices in a standard way. Simply put, we need a HTML-style, watershed moment for the world of sound.

I'm not holding my breath that this will happen because of the demand for it from geek circles. The market just isn't big enough. I do think it will happen though. The reason is, I believe it is only a matter of time before the business potential of structured audio browsing is realized. Most of us spend frustrating time every day in traffic, in airport lounges, on trains. With a little ingenuity, this time can be made more productive for millions of business people. If I can mix metaphor and analogy, today's MP3 'browsers' are in their infancy - they are merely Cellos[5] compared to what they will be in the future.

[1] http://technetcast.ddj.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

[3] http://www.ciopodcast.com/index.htm

[4] http://www.itconversations.com/

[5] http://www.law.cornell.edu/cello/cellotop.html

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