John Caddell's blog

‘Presentation Zen had another great, novelistic post stating that complaining about constraints in product design is completely misguided—in fact, dealing creatively with severe constraints is the essence of good design.

Then, the New York Times profiled 19-year-old basketball player Greg Oden, variously called the next Bill Russell or Tim Duncan (either is a great compliment, but I’d take Russell), and his switch to shooting left-handed after a serious injury and surgery to his right wrist. As a result, now that his right wrist is healed, he’s a much more valuable player than he would have been if he hadn’t been required to learn to use his left hand.

I’m working to create something within significant constraints. I’ve been playing with the Spin-my-Blog service (which allows me to talk for up to a minute and then send the transcription directly to my blog) for some weeks, and I’ve created a new form that will use the capabilities of the system.

Postlets: very short, conversational posts with limited (preferably no) editing, focusing on a brief business-related anecdote, hopefully funny. I’ll load them up whenever they pop into my head.

Saturday’s post is an example of the postlet form. Perhaps it adds a bit of freshness or change of pace to the normal blogging stuff. Let me know what you think.

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging

Last month, I wrote about a new speech-to-text service that allows you to speak your blog posts into an ordinary telephone. Now I’ve got the service, SpinVox Speak-a-Blog, set up with my own blog, and I used it to create today’s earlier post.

Some results:

The translation service worked very well. I had to make a handful of very minor corrections–the spelling of a name, a couple of capitalizations, one verb tense problem. But these took all of a minute to do.

I retitled the post, did some slight line editing, and added Blogger labels and Technorati tags. (Note to product management: it would really be something to speak your tags and have the code appear magically in the post.)

I’m going to try to do one spoken post a week to see how they evolve and compare to the written posts. There’s enough time to speak about 75 words. Most readers would say that’s plenty!

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging