Good tools do not guarantee a good product.
This was brought home to me this morning as I glanced at something I wrote on this day 16 years ago. I was moaning then about poor audio quality in many podcasts, likening it to the abysmal visual design that accompanied the democratisation of publishing via the desktop computer. Back then, there wasn’t any artificial intelligence to help you make different voices sound roughly as loud as one another or to ensure that your background music didn’t drown out your speakers. True, you didn’t have to deal with the vagaries of VOIP much either, and yet some people managed to make extremely listenable audio with the tools they had.
So why, today, with the advent of those online places that will take your tracks and massage them for you, are people still pushing out unlistenable podcasts?
This is not an elitist excuse on behalf of expertise. The tools exist. If your own expertise is not up to the job, do everyone a favour and use those tools.
Two ways to respond: webmentions and comments
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
“Ordinary” comments