Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
"How do you expect me to alt-tab and check the chat at work if it's audio?" was one response. "There's no sound card on my work computer," said another. Aside from the concept that people are surfing the net during their jobs rather than, you know, working, it surprises me that people resist new technologies.
When I got my first computer, it had a friggin' cassette tape drive. Seriously -- cassettes, just like what you play music on. It was a TRS-80, Model 3, if I remember correctly. It worked in BASIC and had 16k of memory. 16k! I had a Commodore Vic-20 later and even once I got into Macs, my first one had the expensive and unthinkably huge 40 megabyte harddrive. Earlier today, I was listening to a lecture on Buddhism that was just over 40 megs.
Before broadband, YouTube wasn't possible. Today, I'm not sure what the next step is, though I'm still unconvinced by lifecasting, though I enjoy the work of Justine Ezarik and Robert Scoble. So why do baseball fans, or at least BP readers, resist something as low-tech as sound?
Simple. Convenience and comfort.
Sound doesn't work for most because they don't think they can use it and it's a bit outside their comfort range. The problem is that until you work out the kinks of something, there's no way to get it comfortable for people. Video is the same as sound in this way, but to me, besides the impulse to innovate and push forward things, I think it's the choice. I doubt that people would listen to a chat in the same numbers that they read chats today, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't end up being 50-50, especially if we could get more questions in and get better answers. If there was a way to do both the audio chat and a transcription in near-real-time, all the better, but I don't have a way to do that, let alone a cost-effective way to do it.
At the leading edge of "new" technologies, there's a resistance that's difficult to overcome, both internal and external. Why do you resist? Discuss in comments ...
UPDATE: Rights issues are something that I often run into. It's illegal to do secondary comments, even post-broadcast, and to run videos using MLB property. Yes, I know a lot of people are doing it, but they tend to be too small to attract notice.
Real Networks blew it when kept making you upgrade their software for the sole purpose of filling their players with ads and other crap in an effort to monetize their product.
I could use headphones when browsing the web, I suppose, but who does that?
How humiliating! A newer version of Flash was exactly the thing I was trying and failing to install.
Ah, those were the days ...
A text chat, on the other hand, I can work while letting it scroll by, glancing over every few minutes. The slowness is a feature! And I can read the log later, at my leisure.
For me, it's not a technology problem at all, but a different kind of choice. It's a much bigger decision to say, "I'll dedicate the next half hour to this goofing off" vs. "I'll work at half speed for the next half hour for this goofing off." (Assuming these happen during working hours, and being on the West Coast, they usually do.)
That said, don't let this stop you - I'm sure some people will really like it. But the reason people like text chats isn't clinging to the old nearly so much as the format fitting in better with a multitasking environment.
I know the traffic at Bronx Banter spikes in the morning, when folks get to the office and check the news and such before beginning their work, at mid-day, when folks do some browsing with their lunch, and during games. The third similarly argues against multi-media. You can scan a chat or an article while keeping one eye and both ears on the game, but you can't watch or listen to two things at once (at least I can't).
Speaking of scanning, I think that's the other argument against audio or video chats/blogging. With all of the content out there, a lot of people will scan your text for items that might interest them, but you can't effectively scan an audio or video file for mentions of Jorge Posada's shoulder or Scott Kazmir's elbow. You have to listen to the entire thing, and that can be a slow and tedious process if you're only interested in that core piece of information.
Thus I think that it's ultimately a time issue for a lot of people. I can read a post or a chat faster than you can read it to me, even without scanning the sections that don't interest me. As nifty as audio and video files can be, they're not the most effective technology for fast and efficient communication. Nothing beats the written word for allowing readers to quickly and efficiently cram as much information and as many points of view into their heads as they want. Audio and video are better for entertainment, and there's room for entertainment in baseball coverage to be sure, but the games themselves generally have the entertainment side of things covered. We who cover them are in the information business.
To oversimplify--audio and video blogs:text blogs::Segways:walking. Sometimes the older technology is simply better.
But I do remember Trash-80 computers!
It's not a "fear" of technology, but it is an attempt to maintain my space. I've seen how the crackberries and the like have speeded things up... and then overrun people. I like having some choice in when people can reach me and haivng others realize that I'm not accessible 24/7. Most things can wait half an hour.
With all that though, I don't think your idea is crazy. Many years ago I took a communications class and they said people tend to learn 2 of 3 ways - audio, video, and kinesitic (touch). It put my school into perspective - I really don't remember much of lectures. But if I take notes (touch), it's amazing how much of it I remember, even without re-reading the notes. Sight is still my primary method, but hearing doesn't work well (as my wife can attest to).
Anyway, the purpose of this was that it does make sense to get the message out to people in different media.
Thanks for all you've done.
I can barely stand to listen to music on computer speakers, I certainly don't want to hear some blogger droning on even if that blogger is as talented as Cliff or Will.
Finally, while I realize that blogs are inherently attention whoreish, I think the desire to audio-blog is very much on the pretentious, self indulgent side.
There's a good looking female Yankee blogger who does video blogs on her site, and they frankly make me want to claw my eyes out because they seem so transparently self aggrandizing.
14 It may be infuriating, but I am not sure it's stupid. MLB has been very aggressive policing its brand of late, and while the actions might be annoying to some of us, you can't argue with its astronomical economic success.
Youtube is such a force because of the number of eyeballs on the site. MLB isn't really gaining much by having a million people head to YouTube to watch a clip. It would, however, gain significantly if it can force those eyeballs to one if its owned sites. Traffic is king on the internet, so I don't blame MLB for wanting to steer it their way.
I think we are past the age of sports leagues needing "free press". With the advent of things like MLB.com, an MLB cable channel, regionally owned sports networks, etc., baseball has the ability to create its own "free press".
My bigger question is - is 10% that like video enough for the effort? Won't that grow and some percentage of "readers" become watchers over the longer term?
3 To bring this full circle, my first computer was the TI 99/4A, with the cassette drive, and the speech synthesizer. That thing, at the time, was awesome.
As for old computers, if you want a terrific overview of them, check out the book "Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers." Beautiful photos and well-written copy.
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