Talk hard Or make silly music, or dictate your grocery list. The world is your audience, because audioblogging has arrived BY JESS KILBY

Remember that classic scene at the end of Pump up the Volume, when Christian Slater’s character calls on the youth of the nation to seize the airwaves? "Steal it," he says, "it belongs to you. Speak out, they can’t stop you."

It was a giddy dream: a generation of indie commentators who cared naught for FCC regulators triangulating their signals. But in the world of 1990, when the movie debuted, it was nigh impossible to jack the airwaves and broadcast controversial content without coming to the same fate as Slater’s character: cuffed in the back of a paddy wagon.

With the proliferation of weblogs during the last few years, the dream of indie media has become more lucid. Through the glut of good, bad, ugly, vain, and irrelevant, niche communities of peer-vetted, first-person reporting have emerged. But still, the immediacy and intimacy of voice has been missing from the blogs of all but the most technically adept. Not to mention the bandwidth required to listen to such dispatches, a hurdle that immediately disqualifies anybody with a dial-up connection.

But right now is one of those golden moments of convergence, where easy-to-use, low-cost technology comes along at precisely the moment when the target audience is ready to hop onboard. To put it more succinctly, audioblogging has arrived.

For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be noted that bloggers of the hardcore-techie ilk have been including audio posts on their blogs for at least three years now. But such feats have involved, at the very least, enough server space to accommodate audio files — which are obviously much bulkier than text. Additionally, unless the post was recorded directly onto a PC using an external microphone, there’s the frustratingly complex issue of transferring an audio clip from the recording device to the computer, which is a trickier task than you would think. But save some patience: You’ve still got to convert your track into a Web-ready file format, be it MP3, RealAudio, WAV, QuickTime, or Ogg Vorbis. (That’s actually the easiest part.)

In the past several months, though, consumer-friendly (read: cheap and easy) audioblogging applications have sashayed onto the scene. For less than the cost of my first pack of cigs ($2 to $2.50 — sorry, mom), you can post at least a dozen audioblog entries per month, at four to five minutes per entry. That might not sound like much time in which to wax eloquent, but let me tell you, after cruising some of the latest audioblog offerings, that you can say a lot (or a whole lot of nothing) in five minutes.

These new audioblogging tools share a basic logic. Create an account with the service of your choice, and let the service know where you want your clips to be posted (either on your blog or sent to specified email addresses). To publish a post, call the phone number provided by the service. This can usually be done from any phone, though the dial tones on international calls can sometimes pose a problem. Speak your post into the phone, or play it back from a recording device. Within a few minutes of completing your call, your audio post is published to its desired location.

The implications of audioblogging are, as Happy Harry intuited, liberating. No more are auteurs and authors bound to the limitations of broadcast regulations and their attendant political baggage. No more is the cost of airtime a prohibitive factor. No more, even, are time and place an issue. Download or stream an audioblog post that was made thousands of miles away, weeks or months in the past. Find out from indie journalists if that quote from a prominent politician was mangled or skewed by the mainstream media. Hear the rain fall on a beach in Vietnam in 1998. And realize, after sifting through minutes — nay, hours — of schlock, that crafting a quality audio narrative, musical clip, or field recording is indeed an art.

To get started with audioblogging, check out the following resources:

Audblog.com

Price: $3 per month. Posts: 12 per month. Post length: four minutes each. File format: mp3.

Compatible with: Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio Userland. Soon to come: Manila, Typepad, b2, uJournal. Additional notes: professional package available for bloggers who want to regularly create longer posts.

Audlink.com (formerly voicemonkey)

Price: free. Posts: unlimited. Post length: appears to be unlimited. File format: mp3.

Compatible with: Blogger, Journalspace, possibly others. Additional notes: requires some manipulation of source code to include on your Web site.

LiveJournal.com

Price: $2 to $2.50 per month. Posts: 15 per month. Post length: five minutes. File format: Ogg Vorbis

Compatible with: LiveJournal.

For those who want to take a more DIY approach to audioblogging, check out the excellent resources at quietamerican.org, an exquisite collection of field recordings (including the aforementioned Vietnamese rain storm). Specifically, find advice at http://www.quietamerican.org/links.html

And looking forward, keep an eye on Syndicated Audio Messaging (SAM), a project of audioblogging pioneer Harold Gilchrist (www.blogaudsphere.com). In a nutshell, SAM would use XML to search and aggregate Internet audio files, so you could set your mp3 player to automatically download your favorite audioblog programs from your PC (or, once players are more widely equipped with WiFi, straight from the Web), ready for listening during that morning commute or whenever else you choose.

So pick a name, go on the air. It’s your life, after all.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jesskilby@yahoo.com