Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve talked about the difficulty of staying on top of all the content I want to consume these days. This is one of the biggest double-edged swords to the net. You have so many choices that it’s hard to keep up with even a fraction of them. One might ask why you need to “keep up” at all, but perhaps that’s only my obsessive-compulsive streak playing out. In fact, that is part of the reason I haven’t posted for a while. This week I’ve been trying hard not to keep up, but just to get through some of the backlog that seems to build up in record time. I could seriously spend every waking second reading, listening, and watching all this stuff, but, although this is obvious, one really needs to create filters to pick and choose because there’s way to much produced in a single day for one individual to consume probably in an entire lifetime.

(A quick side note. I am going to try for the first time to divide this particular entry into a few different “parts” which will actually be separate entries. A fellow blogger has suggested this mainly because my entries tend to me so long and this will allow people to consume them in smaller and easier “gulps.” Let me know how this works for you. If it doesn’t, I won’t do it again.)
Content types:

“Content” is one of those way overused words, but I don’t know of anything else to describe the general conglomeration of all the different types of information you can consume. I can clearly categorize this content into three main forms: audio, video, and text:

Text: text for me is mainly about blogs and rss feeds. I use Bloglines to “keep up” because it lets you hold onto an historical record of what you’ve read or haven’t read. This way, I can come back after a week of not reading Boing Boing and have 200 old entries stacked up instead of just getting the last 30. Keeping up is still a struggle, but it’s mostly just a matter of time. As far as the portability issue, I can access my Bloglines account from any computer connected to the net, and even on my Treo 650, although its mobile interface has some inherent flaws that cripple its usefulness for me. There are other readers specifically built for handheld devices, but none yet with the same functionality I describe above - Bloglines seems to have an exclusive on both for portable and non-portable solutions. What about books, you ask? I’ve never gotten into eBooks, but of course there are plenty of old-fashioned paper books on my bookshelf. Alas I am a slow reader in general which means that I opt for audio books whenever possible because it makes reading faster.

Video: video for me is mainly about a collection of DVD’s much of which I haven’t even watched for the first time, and TiVo. The DVD’s are kind of like books. They tend to be movies that are at least a couple of hours long, and what with the bonus features, commentaries, etc., it could be many more hours to fully consume a DVD’s content. TiVo lets me record the programming I want to see and watch it as I have time or inclination. TiVo by itself can be quite different from consuming a backlog of blog entries mainly because TiVo’s have a limited amount of space to record. So at a certain point your TiVo will have to delete content in order to record new content. Of course I did an end-run around this limitation by buying the Humax DRT-800 which includes a DVD writer, so if I ever get too low on space, I can always just burn as many DVD’s as I want. And at around $.30 per DVD, I’m probably not going to go broke even if I’m recording 30 DVD’s a day! Luckily, I tend to record only about 9 hours a week max, and often less than that due to repeats or when programming simply skips a week or two or more. Using the 30-second skip that TiVo offers, this becomes closer to 6 hours max, and that’s very easy to keep up with for someone who used to watch probably 7 hours of TV a night as a kid! Even if I increased this programming and didn’t have time to watch everything at home, I could theoretically burn a lot of stuff onto DVD and watch it away from home. I can also take those programs and put them on my Treo 650 for viewing, although the small screen doesn’t make the viewing particularly enjoyable!

Audio, for some reason, has for me become the most complex part of the equation, perhaps because its nature falls somewhere in between text and video in terms of space needed, flexibility, etc., and at the same time it has its own unique qualities. The most useful of those unique qualities is something that’s so obvious that one doesn’t tend to think about it in its full implications; Audio does not require your eyes! Because of this fact, Audio becomes inherently something that you can multitask with as part of other tasks, like driving, working, exercising, etc. Audio can also take the place text. Audio books can provide alternative to hard copies. Even what normally would be seen can be transferred to audio such as radio theater, and entertainment that we would normally associate with TV but which doesn’t lose anything critical, such as stand-up comedy, talk shows, news reporting, etc.

Technically speaking, audio files (especially when compressed using MP3, OGG, AAC, or WMA) are much smaller than video but much bigger than text. As such, they can be handled with some degree of ease. However, even though MP3 players have been around for at least 7 or 8 years now, audio is still wrapped up in large companies trying to protect their revenue streams, just as movies and books are. Early MP3 player manufacturers were sued by the record industry and even today we continue to see efforts among these companies to keep a stranglehold on what they want you to hear when and how. The record industry along with the massive radio station chains pretty much control what you hear on conventional radio, but with satellite radio, internet radio stations, and the flexibility to buy individual songs from artists that don’t have to be officially “approved” by the powers that be, there’s a much bigger choice for consumers. As bloggers have opened up a world of textual content as an alternative to the mainstream media and publishing, the podcasting movement has done something similar around all forms of radio, in particular talk radio but also music. Audio Books are geared to a much narrower audience, but the main online Audio Book publisher, Audible.com, is beholden to similar interests in the publishing arena but if not already being done, we should very soon be seeing unpublished authors recording their own works and publishing them as podcasts or similar audio files.

Next - Audio listening Zen