Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

An unfortunate thread on RPG.net today (that isn’t worth linking to) prompted a lot of bile on the Twittersphere. Here is my official response to such things:

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- Ryan

[Image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribition-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Original from http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-2260682216.]

Last week, I was on #zinechat talking about podcasting & new media. As these discussions tend to go, we talked about production. I was asked to go into further detail into two of those production topics by a reader.

Sin #1: Cutting All The “Ums”

I understand the impulse to do this. When you’re editing audio, every “uh”, “um”, stutter, restarted sentence, vowel elongation and the like are discordant notes. Many of us as podcast editors hate those. They grate on us. So we remove them.

I did this in the early days of Master Plan. I thought it was “good audio.” Today, I can’t stand to listen to that. I did what I call today over-editing. The end result was (a) many hours of work on my end to produce the show, (b) a lot of cut waveform artifacts you can hear, and (c) the remove of the human quality in a voice.

It turns out that only I really noticed them. Listenrs, it turns out, are used to human speech. Ums and Uhs and the like are a part of that. However, jarring cuts in the waveform are not a part of that — and those do get noticed by listeners, particularly headphone & earbud ones.

Today, on the rare occasion I still edit audio, I don’t slave over every Um. I only work on the ones that happen in succession — “Back when we were uh uh uh developing Podcast the RPG…” And even then, I’m as like to leave one in for the human element as I am to cut them all. It largely depends on how easy it is to cut all of the Uhs in a moment without leaving a cut artifact behind.

I saw it as part of my duty as an interview podcaster to leave my guests sounding human. A few Uhs and restarts helps convey that humanity in a way we unconsciously recognize. Now, I was incredulous to this idea, until I started watching and listening to professional interview pieces. Stutters are at times left in. They’re character.

And it makes editing easier if you aren’t trying to remove them all. As to which ones I remove? Generally ones in succession (“uh uh uh”), sentence & thought restarts that last ten or more seconds, and anything that makes it hard to understand what’s being spoken.

Sin #2: Separating Speakers in Left & Right Track

I’m going to use a bit of hyperbole here. If you have some people speaking in just the left track, and others in the right track, you either intentionally or accidentally despise your audience.

Often, your listeners are going to be listening on headphones or earbuds. When you do that, you’re saying “fuck you, you don’t get to listen to my show” to:

• Folks partly deaf or completely deaf in one ear — can’t hear half the conversation
• Folks with a sore ear or ear infection — can’t hear half the conversation
• Folks who have inner ear disorders — the conversation is literally disorienting, dizzying (this applies to grossly non-normalized audio as well)
• Folks with suddenly-busted headphones (since they do wear down) — can’t hear half the conversation (this also applies to commuters with stereo system problems, which is much more expensive)
  I had this happen on a plane trip once. That…sucked. Luckily, the shows I listened to were in mono.
• Folks with a reason for only wearing one ear bud, like going jogging in a traffic-busy urban area and still wanting to be aware of your surroundings. Cuz, hey, cars.

Some of these situations are temporary, some permanent. But even cater to the temporary — if I can’t listen to your show when people are talking about it, what are the chances that by the time I can, ten other things have grabbed my attention instead?

And that doesn’t even address when the two tracks are not normalized, so that one side is quite and the other loud. There’s one indie podcast years ago that used to do this. I stopped listening the day that the grossly un-normalized spiking laughter happening in just my left ear nearly caused me to clutch my head in pain and disorientation. Remember, we use our ears for balance. Don’t fuck with that, and you’ll keep more listeners.

If you’re just doing a talk show, make it mono (or barring that, identical stereo…which is just like mono except you’ve doubled the file size). Unless, of course, you like telling a portion of your audience that you are comfortable discriminating against them–because that’s what we feel when podcasters thoughtlessly make such audio.

- Ryan

There’s this really cool this called #zinechat, a Twitter-based panel chat about different topics in small press-land. Jaym Gates runs this, and you can find out about this year’s schedule at http://wingsliftingwide.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/zinechat-the-next-generation/. This month, Jaym won’t be able to moderate it, but she’s enlisted the aid of Lillian Cohen-Moore (who is the co-editor on Solis’ Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple). From her tweet:

May 25th, 6:00 P.M. PST: Podcasting and New Media #zinechat ! Guests Ryan Macklin, Mur Lafferty, Don A. Dehm, Patrick Hester, John Anealio!

I’m looking forward to this. Anyone who has known me since my first podcast, Master Plan, debuted in late 2006 knows that I love to mouth off about podcasting. I’ve done a few panels and the like, and even if I’m semi-”retired”, I still have a lot to say about the one-man podcast shop and how to work with/use podcasters as a publisher. (After all, the reason 95% of you know me starts out with me being a podcaster, even if you don’t personally know me from that. That’s how most the people I work with did. So I suppose I’ve forged my rep through new media.)

Plus, you know, that’s an A-class lineup she’s got. You want to know more about podcasting & new media, check it out!

- Ryan

I saw this on a mailing list recently, and it bothered the fuck out of me. Edited to, well, not detract from my damned point to be quite honest:

>>> Original poster wrote:
>>> A question for you more experienced people: [Question that was recently discussed]
>> Reply wrote:
>> Didn’t we just have this conversation recently? [A curt summation of some points]
> Useless Reply wrote:
> Yes. Yes, we did. [End of message]

Way to be a cockbite to the poster, guys.

Yes, you had that conversation recently. Did the original poster? Maybe they just joined the mailing list/forum/whatever. Maybe their lives were busy enough to where they didn’t notice the thread before. I sure as hell didn’t–as far as I’m concerned, that was the first time in a bit this conversation happened. Or, and this might be a shock to you all, sometimes people ask questions in different ways because their brains are wired differently.

Your experiences in a community are not universal.

Your context in a community is not universal.

Your history, both distant and recent, is not universal.

Your brain’s wiring & information processing is very much not universal.

Stop acting like it is. Stop shaming people for not sharing your brain. Stop being cockbites.

Here’s how the reply should have happened:

>> Original poster wrote:
>> A question for you more experienced people: [Question that was recently discussed]
> Reply wrote:
> Hey! We recently tackled this. You should check out the discussion here [link], but in short here’s the answer: [answer]

It’s interactions like these that turn people off of communities and hobbies. I almost said “it’s people like these…” but that’s unfair–nice people have off-days, and I don’t have the experiences, context, history or brain wiring that those people have to know if this is something they regularly do.

Oh, and if your reply is to just dog-pile on someone, like Useless Reply did above, just walk away. You Don’t Need That Third Taco.

Still, bad interaction. Bad form. I feel bad for the original poster because it was just an innocent question from someone who lacked mastery of a topic that could have been treated with a little more respect. After all, each and every one of us started out lacking mastery of the things we love today.

A final point: politeness in replies is like putting a little english on the shot that’s your point–it helps you get the point across.[1]

- Ryan

[1] Maybe not the best metaphor, but I do like the phrase “put a little english on it.”

It used to be that doing an April Fools’ Day joke would earn you the ire of your victim on that day, and you’d only have to deal with that fallout. But these days companies post and leave up April Fools’ PR that people continue to find.

Here’s the thing: not every day is April Fools’ Day. It is the first time your readers see it, but then it’s indexed by Google and comes up on search results every day of the year. Then you have people missing the date of a post (or missing its significance since we tend to forget that AFD exists except around AFD), thinking it’s legit, and…screw it. Here’s what happens:

You can also visit RPG.net to see this in continuous action. :)

When you do April Fools’ Day pranks, know that this’ll happen. I’m not saying to not do it, but just know going in. Eyes open, and all that.

- Ryan