Broadcasting from her home in Edinburgh, the radio-mad Miller is one among many web innovators taking their first steps into the interactive depths of broadband internet. Fed up with playing “miserable songs” on Red Dot, an Edinburgh hospital radio station, she quit and started her own country-music podcast. The rapid take-up of superfast, always-on connections has transformed the internet into a worthy mouthpiece for her passion, winning her an international audience of music fans who scour the web looking for such treats. You can download The Miller’s output from www.themillertellshertale.co.uk, or head to a search engine such as www.ipodder.org to set up a subscription.
High-speed internet is abuzz because it’s a very different animal from its dial-up forebear and makes a practical proposition out of transferring large files for sound and vision. It’s open to all and as easy as sending an e-mail. Today, three in five of Britain’s 14m connected homes favour broadband, a tripling of take-up in the past two years. Not surprisingly, it has quickly become the catalyst for turning ordinary people into creators as well as consumers.
A year ago, the terms v-logging, MP3 blogging and BitTorrent were little more than entries in a geek’s lexicon. No more. Now it is easy for extroverts to post their home-made video diaries on the web. Music fans who previously wrote about their favourite songs on their blogs can back up their wild opinions with an MP3 or music video. Not only can you upload holiday snaps to an online photo gallery, you can tag and reuse other people’s pictures in all manner of creative ways.
Here’s a quick tour of some ventures that have caught on. Half of the common terminology seems deliberately chosen to obfuscate, so we’ll translate each activity into plain English...
MP3 BLOGGING
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Find obscure and interesting music
The web is littered with MP3 music files, but it is hard to find the good ones because the choice is so huge. An MP3 blogger (or music blogger, or whatever — terms are fluid) is someone whose online diary contains a collection of links to music files, often with their own written musings about the selection.
The music posted is normally hard to find, and often restricted to a particular musical subgenre or theme. As with all blogs, these are intensely personal, and the sensible thing is to hunt around for someone whose tastes you share.
I am devoted to www.aprilwinchell.com/multimedia, where I found a Gregorian-chant version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Petula Clark singing in German, but sniff around the big music blogs (www.fluxblog.org, tofuhut.blogspot.com) and you are bound to find a soul mate. Or pop mate. Or punk mate. Do note that many MP3 blogs post material that infringes copyright.
PODCASTING
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In the last week of September 2004, searching for “podcasts” on the Google search engine garnered 24 hits. Today, they number 104m. Dozens of sites, such as www.mypods.net, explain how to subscribe and download — it is as simple as installing the right software, then selecting a show to have delivered regularly to your computer. Others, such as www.podcast.net, are vast directories of podcasts.
The BBC is one of the first mainstream broadcasters to have got in on the act, offering as podcasts a number of shows, including Lord Bragg’s In Our Time from Radio 4. The real fun, however, comes from surprise stars such as Dawn and Drew, a husband and wife bantering away in Wisconsin, who have a loyal audience of many thousands (dawnanddrew.podshow.com). That might not sound a huge number, but podcasting, like many of these technologies, is about hunting around until you find someone who is really on your wavelength — that’s how I discovered Karen Miller, for instance.
Some podcasters say that radio shows that you download individually by clicking on a link are completely different from true podcasts, which you subscribe to once and which then arrive automatically. It’s not worth getting hung up on the distinction.
BITTORRENT
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The lack of legal television downloading services in the UK means many people find programmes online and turn them into computer files, which are then shared (illicitly). However, even with broadband, large files take time to download. The new and entirely legitimate BitTorrent standard makes this process much faster than traditional peer-to-peer software, and is now the most popular method for file-sharing television.
Be warned: almost all people’s activity is illegal, which does not appear to deter many. In a study of downloading of popular American shows, conducted in 2005, the internet monitoring company Envisional found that Brits topped the world file-sharing rankings with 19% of the total traffic, headed by Kiefer Sutherland’s 24. Indeed, as of last November, peer-to-peer file-sharing accounted for 62% of all consumer internet traffic in the UK — roughly half of which is now downloaded with BitTorrent.
Copyright owners have tried to crack down on this largely illegal traffic, with limited success. There are explanations at the official BitTorrent website www.bittorrent.com, and at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bittorrent, which links to specialised search engines for finding files.
The software that makes sense of BitTorrent is fiddly to set up, but many people clearly think it worth the effort, at least until legitimate download services take root. The nearest thing to a licensed video service is Apple’s iTunes (www.apple.com/uk/itunes) for iPods.
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PHOTO BLOGGING
View all the world’s photo albums, and share your own
Broadband makes it laughably quick to upload digital photographs to the net.Sites such as photoblogs.org list blogs based on this concept; huge networks such as www.flickr.com and www.fotolog.net (which claims 2m members and 60m photos) provide a framework for uploading and informing friends that they can catch up with your snaps. Some terrific photographers (www.chromasia.com, yourwaitress.com) are worth visiting, but they are in the minority. Most of the deluge is humdrum — unless you have friends or a family and don’t care what this idiot journalist thinks, in which case the web suddenly becomes a handy way to show and share pictures.
VIDEO BLOGGING
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Be your own Big Brother, and make history
A newer, much smaller offshoot of the blogging phenomenon. Much of what holds good for photo blogging holds good for its video equivalent (aka v-logging). People who put videos of themselves online don’t have to be exhibitionists, but if you watch a selection of entries from, say, Trine, a young Norwegian student living in Brighton, you notice that most video bloggers become more relaxed and less guarded over time (trine.blogs.com).
Some video blogs at vlogdir.com, such as Sara’s Corner (www.human-dog.com/sara) by Sara Weagel, are well-made little films rather than diary entries, but most feel like personal versions of reality television — and think how wonderful life would be if real reality television was killed off by amateur reality television. Historians are always going on about not having an insight into people’s daily lives, yet with photo and video blogs that is not going to pose a problem in the future. As the pictures and videos posted online within hours of the London bombings show, the prevalence of this tech- nology has transformed the way many people think about sharing their lives.
SOUND MUSEUMS
Listen and learn
Bricks-and-mortar museums are inefficient places to display sound archives. From secret tapes recorded by American presidents (www.whitehousetapes.org) to the moving testimony of holocaust survivors (holocaust.umd.umich.edu), these collections are perfectly showcased by broadband internet.
Perhaps the most strikingly successful current project is the BBC’s Voices, a huge continuing attempt to document the slang and accents of spoken English. Audio files include a nurse talking about what the young wear to Shetland discos and an Indian woman from Peterborough explaining that second-generation British Indians see left-handedness as less of a stigma than their parents. A long search revealed that the funniest piece of slang is “hypocracapig”, an Essex word for ugly. A similar, more scholarly museum, containing voices from the past, is hosted by Collect Britain at www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects.