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I did a reading in a wedding once – another story altogether – and was told after the ceremony by nice old man that I had a good radio voice. Ever since, I’ve been waiting and hoping for an excuse to tell people what I hit I was. I got tired of waiting, so there you have a rough segue.

Adam Curry of live.curry.com has been toying around with the idea of audioblogging. The concept is simple – weblogs including spoken word audio in addition to text. It would be something like bite-size chunks of talk radio, I suppose.

There are lots of potential problems with the idea of audioblogging. The biggest and most obvious problem would be that no one wants to hear me, or any other navel-gazing weblogger ranting and raving about something or other. When you read text onscreen, you can skim and skip to whatever you’re interesting it. Audio runs on the timeline of the speaker, rather than listener. This just isn’t how the web works.

Another problem is that weblogs post are often based on links to other sites. Links just don’t work in audio. If there was way to link from an audio file, I suppose you’d have to say “click now” instead of “click here”. Regardless, inline links also tend to change the way you write in ways that don’t translate to the web. I tried reading a few recent Acts of Volition posts aloud – and much of the text is written with the understanding that you’ll be following the given links and doesn’t make sense without them. Incidentally, they’re riddled with embarrassing typos.

It wouldn’t make sense to offer an entire weblog in both text and audio formats. Something written for one medium may not work well in the other, and something written with both medium in mind might not work well in either. This post, for example, is much longer than it would have been if I hadn’t planned on reading it aloud.

So, if you aren’t going to make audio versions of all posts available, what do you do with audioblogging? Well, you could, as Adam Curry is doing, only make audio versions of posts you think would translate well to spoken word – but I’m not sure there’s any value in repurposing of content like that. It does, however, lead to any idea I’ve had floating around in my head for the past couple of years: Acts of Volition Radio.

I’ve never really nailed down exactly what aov-radio would be, if were ever to exist. What I’ve had in mind, roughly, would be an occasional radio-style program, as a compliment to the text-based weblog, including talk and music, available for permanently streaming or download on the site. I’m not sure if I would ever get around something like this, but it might be a fun experiment.

I have the means to produce audio – recording software and a good microphone is all it really takes, so this post is an experiment. Does audioblogging make any sense? Let me know.