AudioBoo

AudioBoo has me excited. It fills a gap, it’s a missing link, and while we wait for a good quality audio/video (maybe VideoBoo) on an non-jailbroken iPhone.. This is going to keep me more than occupied.

Audioboo is an audio blogging platform in the shape of an iPhone app that was in private beta in January but is now available free of charge right now in the app store.

I first got wind of it through @Sizemore via @Bash. Weirdly I had just been listening to @Loudmouthman and @doctorpod on the podcast Social Media White Noise as they talked about something i had said in an old podcast of mine about wanting a one touch podcasting solution. I have never really got into Utterli. Sometimes it takes the simple interface of an iPhone app to really grab my imagination.

I think Audioboo could be it. It was a free download on the App Store created by Best Before Media with funding from 4iP.

In a nut.. it lets you create and tag recordings and upload them to a timeline with your GPS coordinates and a photo. The app and site are very much a work in progress and I’m very excited to see how it will develop.

I have already submitted my Atom feed (http://audioboo.fm/users/124/boos.atom) to the iTunes store and recorded a couple of interviews at @StationX The RSS could do with some work and there are some UI ideas i would like to pass onto @mattwaring and the team but with plugins and access to an API on the horizon I really feel a serious journalistic tool, as well as a fun social media toy has arrived on our iPhones.

I imagine it’s only a matter of time before Audioboo is available for other phones, either as apps or within their mobile browsers.

In the meantime, while i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds. Combined with a photo attached to act as a catalyst for the imagination, the listener is not being force fed the story. they have to take a moment to let their imagination get involved in the media.

If you are not keen on recording straight away, Take a trip through the timeline.. With every sound bite you are taken from one place to the next.. from one life to the next. Last night I lay in bed and visited countless places illustrated in sound. It reminded me of when I first found podcasting.

There is no hiding behind the production here though.. these sound bites, (at the moment anyway) are limited to 5 minutes of raw recording. If you make a mistake, your humanity shines through. The intro and outro do not get in the way of the content, as they are the content.

At the moment I’m playing with adding a windshield to the iPhone for cleaner outdoor interviews but to be honest, I’m amazed at the audio quality as it is.

Perhaps the words would flip round with the assistance of the iPhones accelerometer when the phone is held upside down. The button to start and stop the recording is already in a great place for this.

Here is a link to my feed.. http://www.audioboo.fm/profile/Documentally

If you have one of your own please drop me a link in the comments below. Lets experiment with this cool new tool so we grow with it and shape it into an even better app than it is today.