For a badly recorded spoken edition of this post click here 930K.
Hi. This is my voice. This is what I sound like, as if it makes any difference.
Voice is something that gets talked about a lot on the Web but rarely is it actually spoken about.
The written voice is really interesting and often very entertaining to read, especially when it's the real voice of the writer that's coming through. Jump over to the Cluetrain list and you'll find well over a hundred messages with the word 'voice' in their subject headings, never mind the countless others where 'voice' is discussed in sometimes excruciating detail in the messages themselves.
Of course, when we look more closely we see that we have a whole range of voices, of both the written and spoken varieties, that we selectively use depending on exactly how we are communicating and whom we are communicating with. For example there's double-speak, pillow-talk, happy-talk, your out-with-the-guys voice, your sincere voice, your formal presenter's voice and so on.
The Web is certainly a strange place. We get to know hundreds of people we've never met and we've gotten used to the fact that the only thing we have to go on is their written voice. No body language, no facial expressions, no hand gestures and certainly no sound. We've tried to compensate for this by constructing things like netiquette and ;) smileys but if we are honest they're poor relations to good old fashioned physical communication.
The Web forces us to sharpen our senses, we learn how to get to know people through their written voices to the extent that to actually hear them speak is a strange experience. A bit like now.
But voice mark one is actually alive and well and living on the Web. What about Napster and the MP3 phenomenon? That's all about the singing voice. And the inimitable Doc Searls has just started a new weblog called Skywave which is all about radio on the web, and if that's not about the spoken voice then I don't know what is.
So in the future, when you read this blog - that is if you ever come back after hearing what I sound like, you might like to overlay this voice on top of my written voice, and let me know if it makes a difference.
Hi. This is my voice. This is what I sound like, as if it makes any difference.
Voice is something that gets talked about a lot on the Web but rarely is it actually spoken about.
The written voice is really interesting and often very entertaining to read, especially when it's the real voice of the writer that's coming through. Jump over to the Cluetrain list and you'll find well over a hundred messages with the word 'voice' in their subject headings, never mind the countless others where 'voice' is discussed in sometimes excruciating detail in the messages themselves.
Of course, when we look more closely we see that we have a whole range of voices, of both the written and spoken varieties, that we selectively use depending on exactly how we are communicating and whom we are communicating with. For example there's double-speak, pillow-talk, happy-talk, your out-with-the-guys voice, your sincere voice, your formal presenter's voice and so on.
The Web is certainly a strange place. We get to know hundreds of people we've never met and we've gotten used to the fact that the only thing we have to go on is their written voice. No body language, no facial expressions, no hand gestures and certainly no sound. We've tried to compensate for this by constructing things like netiquette and ;) smileys but if we are honest they're poor relations to good old fashioned physical communication.
The Web forces us to sharpen our senses, we learn how to get to know people through their written voices to the extent that to actually hear them speak is a strange experience. A bit like now.
But voice mark one is actually alive and well and living on the Web. What about Napster and the MP3 phenomenon? That's all about the singing voice. And the inimitable Doc Searls has just started a new weblog called Skywave which is all about radio on the web, and if that's not about the spoken voice then I don't know what is.
So in the future, when you read this blog - that is if you ever come back after hearing what I sound like, you might like to overlay this voice on top of my written voice, and let me know if it makes a difference.