malcolm 2

malcolm 2
Originally uploaded by ddavison.

Attention is scarce - and the web is overflowing with content and searching for just what you need or might want is difficult - even more so with finding useful, informative or enjoyable audio podcasts for your iPod or mp3player.


This post features a mashup from blogspot to flickr to take advantage of the flickr'Note'function to demonstrate the use of "clickable" graphics to save prospective listeners
time in searching for podcasts they might like to hear in full.


A click on the image at the right will take you to the same image in my photo gallery at flickr.

Clicking on that image will reveal several small transparent boxes. Mouse over the box and it will present a note and a link. The audio links to Malcolm's speech that you will link to are just random clips - in "production"the clips would be salient sound bites (edited to be clean and crisp snippets and directly related to the relevant segment of the graphic.)

A further refinement would be the addition of a tag cloud containing the key tags for the speech/graphic providing links to the same audio clips.

The green link at the bottom of the image is live, the red one is still not linked up, but would connect the user to his personal playlist queue, where just one click would add the full podcast to the user's playlist for later listening.

Hopefully this process will both save valuable time in searching the podcast spectrum and make the process of doing so more engaging and lead listeners to the good stuff that is otherwise not easily findable.

I intend to use Thoughts Illustrated to "host" a continuing series of minicasts where the graphics, tagclouds and linking to the sound bites would all be contained as integrated elements within the blogpost frame.