Audio weblog listening

My first experience listening to an audio weblog was David Duchovny's.

Most people remember David Duchovny as the man who played Agent Fox Mulder on the TV series X-Files. He also tried his hand at films, appearing in movies like X-Files the Movie and Playing God.

At present, David Duchovny is a man at both sides of the camera. He directed and acted in his own movie, House of D. The studio that produces his movie also gave him a weblog where he writes to his fans about the film, the promotional tours and also about his family and himself.

Parts of his weblog are recorded in audio. The audio posts are actually recorded messages, which I find kind of weird because it was like listening to Mulder, only this time he is talking about the weather and his sick children (something you wouldn't hear Mulder talk about) . I guess it's because the way David talks in his audio posts is similar to the way he talked as Mulder, with the ever recognizable occasional pauses.

Audio weblogs are quite intimate and more personal than the written ones because we humans respond more to sound and voice compared to words. It's easy to detect feelings of happiness or sadness in a sound or a voice than in a paragraph of essay or a stanza of poem. After all, we normally talk and listen more than we read or write.

David's audio weblog posts were made during the times when his was too busy to write or when there wasn't any opportunity for him to type any posts. The last audio post he made was in 19th of April. It's understandable because audio posts are larger in size and takes a longer time to download. People with a slow Internet connection are not able to fully enjoy the experience.

The latest trend in audio weblogging is podcasting. It's basically a syndicated, audio-based weblog where listeners can download the posts and listen to them at their convenience. Podcasting is slowly taking off because it is quite easy to set up and the explosive growth of MP3 players sale is making podcasts more accessible to the masses. Audio weblogging would also enable people with vision impairments to use and experience the web with the rest of the world.

Since don't own any MP3 player, I might be a while before I could get my ears on podcasting. Audio weblogging is definitely a new experience for me, and it will continually change the way we see, and hear, the world wide web.