12/03/2017

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

Introducing Sonant Thoughts

Sonant [soh-nuhnt] - Adjective

  1. sounding; having sound.
  2. (Phonetics) voiced.

I have wanted to record a podcast for several years but never thought I had anything to talk about.

One of my failings when writing is the desire to be too perfect and, because of this, losing the moment and the passion for the post I am working on. I have often wondered if recording ideas as I think of them could be a way round that but podcasting always seemed a bit excessive and overly involved.

This is why Anchor initially excited me, it took a lot of the complexity out of recording and anchor waves could be embedded just about everywhere. 1

A number of casts I listen to clock in about the hour mark and, while these are conversational and I wouldn't expect to match them, I realise I have always been thinking too big.

Anchor's two minute sound bites, however, seemed to be going too far the other way and not long enough to get a proper point across.

In the spirit of the open web, just as with the microblog, I also consider it important to be self-hosted so not reliant on any third party service.

Let's talk

Inspired by the likes of Mark Clifford and Manton Reece, combined with the move to self-hosted microblogging, the idea of a "microcast" - a short podcast - began to appeal greatly.

A microcast (thanks Manton) is a short form podcast with episodes of around 5 minutes each that can still convey interesting ideas or information.

Even I can talk for 5 minutes.

So, without further ado I am launching the "Sonant Thoughts" microcast designed to complement the blog and microblog.

My key criteria in setting it up were simplicity and being able to do everything from my phone. This initially seemed like it was going to be a problem; podcasting apps didn't seem to be WordPress friendly and Workflow couldn't bridge the gap in simplicity and functionality.

Then I found Mobile Podcaster, an app which lets you record, upload directly to WordPress and create a new post all in one. It hasn't had an update for over a year, isn't optimised for larger iPhones and has an old fashioned UI but it does almost exactly what I need so I'm willing to forgive this.

Function over form.

The app is designed to work with the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress which automatically handles the back end - including the RSS feed and auto-posting to iTunes. The only manual part of the process is copying over any show notes I create - probably in Drafts.

That's the how, now the what

I want a play on the blog title and, as I wanted to voice some of my ideas, Sonant Thoughts seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

I envisage these sonant thoughts (lower case, vocalised ideas) to mainly fall into two categories:

  • riffs off of existing posts or microposts to convey a point that I didn't quite catch with the written word, and
  • ideas that are not fully baked and need to be mulled over out loud to see if they can become a post.

I expect average episode length to be around 5-7 minutes and will set myself an absolute hard limit of 10 minutes, but even that is getting too long.

So, let's get started!

An introduction, Episode 0 (zero) can be found here.

  1. Anchor's relaunch with Stations instead of Waves, however, completely changed the app's usability. ↩