when i hear audioblogs.

what is an audioblog?

it is like streaming radio, so you can hear the authours voice for the first time, hear how it matches up to his written content.

do you notice a similarity in the written content as well, though? Or is it strictly confined to their diction?

oh its diction.

All high voices with lisps? I mean, I obviously know you aren't one to stereotype queers, and those I know don't all sound similar, so I'm wondering what the commonality is.

Post links to audioblogs please.

seconded!

www.jonno.com
www.swishcottage.com
www.uffish.com

Swish Cottage? Yay! That would be David Sim, scholar and gent (and NOT the Cerebus guy, I should note).

He's no gent (the Cerebus one).

Blogging is a fascinating subject, and the current essay on the Momus site is on the subject. My position there is basically that the blogs which rely on text (and especially those, like Ian Penman's, which give opinions about media and politics) interest me very little. I'd much rather see photos. It doesn't seem useful to make so much 'commentary about other commentary' in a world where the snake is already swallowing its own tail (the TV Penman discusses, for instance, is often about other TV). But I do feel that photos can give me insights and truths which are useful and might tend to break the ever-narrowing vicious circles of language. Break them with textures, colours, forms; the peculiarly irreducible specificities of the visual world.

The latest developments in blogging, apart from photoblogging, are audioblogging, where you simply phone your entries in from a mobile phone, and photo-enhanced moblogging, where you take snaps with your camera phone and upload them to your site with a line or two of commentary.

Now, when your digital camera and your cell phone were two separate gadgets in your bag, it was easy to characterise the 'digital activity' that each tended to promote. The phone was for 'talking to my friends'. The camera was for 'preserving things for the future / strangers'. The phone tended towards the disposable, the phatic, the private, the trivial. The camera tended towards permanence, seriousness, and the idea of communicating rather thoughtful things with strangers. When you used your phone you took a step towards life, but when you used your camera you took a step back from it, to look at the bigger view.

Now the gadgets are combined, that distinction becomes harder to make. We can have trivial, fuzzy little snaps posted remotely to our blogs, with reductive one-liners printed below. I still think, though, that the act of phoning a number to leave a word message for an audio blog is inherently less creative and interesting than a the act of uploading photos. I persist in thinking there's something arty and slightly transcendent about photos which cannot be destroyed by the merely technical achievement of putting a camera into a phone.

William Gibson recently said he plans to stop his blogging activities because 'it's not something I can do when I'm actually working. Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn't be able to exist if I'm in daily contact. The watched pot never boils... I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel," he said. "Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social."

For instance, speaking of gay photoblogging, isn't this worth a thousand words?

I should say something, but I am calm.

anthony i can't find any audio entries behind your links :-( were there specific days that they did audio?

i found a discontinued audio blog here

there is also audioblogger; you can upload "posts" from any phone it seems!

oui ned, tu es toujours trés calme

Mercy buckets.

audio blogger is a compoent of the blogs, often on the sidebar.

I enjoyed your essay, Momus. But, thinking of Barthes, I recall him writing, in 'RB par RB' of the great pleasure he got from writing the captions for photographs. Not to provide "semiotic anchorage", but to complement the image in an interesting or provocative way. The picture of the bus in that particular book means so much more to me because of the lines "the white snout of the streetcar of my childhood..." that accompany it. Without this complement or supplement, are photoblogs any more interesting than being forced to sit through other people's holiday snaps? (the only thing more tedious than listening to other people's dreams...)

why do i need to comment on the images in my blog, why does my blog have word nets rather then sentences or paragraphs.
why am i so self absorbed

I love other people's holiday snaps! Especially people I don't know! I went round to someone's house on Sunday and the main topic of conversation was a couple of photo albums he'd bought in a market of some knapsackers hiking in the Tyrol in 1979. They were truly fascinating, all golden saturation, ski lifts, lederhosen, anonymous but bizarre group portraits. How we laughed! But I guess we were providing the 'commentary' ourselves.

Listening to other people's dreams is tedious only because language is such an inadequate communicator. If people could provide their dreams to you as a tactile 3D interactive environment, think how great it would be!