Perry

Hewitt

Tag: soundcloud

  • Friday 5 — 10.17.2014

    Friday 5 — 10.17.2014

    1. NASA audio tweetTwitter has enabled streaming audio to a limited number of partners via Audio Cards using Soundcloud. Now users can listen, like and share audio content on SoundCloud without leaving Twitter. This feature will be big for music, and useful for finding new audiences for public radio programming. Audio excerpts might also serve up interesting teasers for online learning content.
    2. With stickers in comments and the ability to draw on photos in Messenger, Facebook got a lot more visual and fun this week.
    3. Facebook is for the olds, while Spotify, Quora, and Instagram topped this list of digital products teens use and love. Product Hunt this week featured products made by teens.
    4. Data security has everyone spooked, and rightfully so. Do your part by reading this handy guide to not being that idiot who got the company hacked. TL;DR: two-factor authentication for everything.
    5. How do organizations that adopt and advance by new technology effectively drive digital transformation? According to this HBR post, it’s not an impossible task or arcane art — the main requirements are time, tenacity, and leadership.

    Weekend fun: Remember that McSweeney’s piece and subsequent video mocking 1990s feel-good font Comic Sans? Now someone’s made a typewriter called the Sincerity Machine that produces nothing but.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    instagram analytics

    1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
    2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
    3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
    4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
    5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.

    Weekend fun:  Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

     

  • Listen up: how to advance an audio strategy

    Audio is the perpetual bridesmaid at the multimedia wedding celebrated on the web today. That’s not to say people haven’t long recognized the value of audio files distributed over the internet. Major milestones include the creation of PRX and the mainstreaming of podcasting, the iTunes store (now 10 years old with 50 billion downloads), and the relatively recent arrival of SoundCloud for more social and embeddable audio. But most people looking to create a comprehensive online presence don’t stop and ask “What’s my audio strategy?” They should, and here are three ways to do it.

    1. Resist the knee-jerk, “let’s make a video” answer for content you want to call attention to. Remember that good video can be difficult to make — and that it requires great audio to be watchable. Evaluate your content resources (story, people, space, equipment) and decide whether audio may be the best fit. Pro-tip: if you do make a video, consider separating out the high-quality audio as a discrete asset, and make both available to your audience.
    2. Consider audio less as a companion retelling of your text piece, and more as a way to add depth and color. Here’s an example of a Harvard Gazette article about Cambridge Phone-a Poem enlivened by one of the poems read by its author, Allen Ginsberg.
    3. Remember that NPR’s oft-cited COPE model applies here: create and store your own audio, but publish it everywhere. Holy wars are regularly fought over the virtues of streaming versus downloading: enable both through as many platforms as feasible. The goal is to keep the content in a format that remains accessible as long as possible with minimal deprecation. Multiple custom players served only on your own website is pretty much the worst way to achieve that audio longevity.

    Audio is too often an undersung web content hero beyond the context of radio online. Make sure it has a seat at the table as you plan your next online initiative.