Experimenting with podcast. Would love to learn what you think about it: https://foc-new-podcast-player.netlify.app. Asking since I converted Ep 31 with my tool, and the community survey reveals a high concentration of podcast-transcript readers. Endgoal: to have a text format similar to SRT/WebVTT, but allow HTML content. Have a CLI or website to convert audio + text to this interactive app. Basic features: - Mapping between HTML/audio, vertical-distance/audio-time. - Click audio progress bar to find corresponding HTML - Click HTML to jump to audio position - Click HTML to get a sharable URL-with-hash I edited first few paragraphs to include

<a>

, but you can put any HTML there, including

<img>

etc. All HTML can be then linked against audio. Some things I like: - Easily talk about visual things with

<img>

- Reference without having to explain with

<a>

- You can read-listen (Cmd+F -> Play) - Each piece of audio dialogue is referenceable I noticed some common shortcomings in podcasts: - can't talk about visual matters - linerality (as you can't easily reference) I think these limitations exclude certain topics and ways-of-talking. I'm making a podcast myself. Being aware of these shortcomings, I first made this tool/presentation before recording my podcast. My questions are: - Would you like to listen to such podcasts? - In what way would you listen to them differently?

What's great about podcasts is I can listen to them whilst doing other things (lately cooking and cleaning). So I feel like this runs against the grain of what makes podcasts successful. However, I agree that podcasts do lack these features. For example I really enjoyed the FoC episode on Orca but at some point I needed to stop and research what Orca was. And a lot of 99 Percent Invisible episodes come with an attached article with visual references. Maybe there's an opportunity here to allow me to stop what I'm doing and have a quick glimpse at my phone to get a visual reference (eg. an Orca gif) so the podcast can continue uninterrupted.

yeah i would love a podcast player that let me tap or yell at siri for bookmarks, especially if those bookmarks connected up to a transcript and links

I've done something similar with a presentation, but allowing scrubbing through at the word and image (slide) level: http://vitor.io/uxr101

What does the minimap on the right represent? Distance in text vs audio?

This is really useful for me. I generally read the transcript and sometime read and listen. I never only listen to it. The reason? I am more fluent at reading English than listening to it. And you can read at your own pace slower, faster, or read diagonally. So for me this is great tool, I can jump to some paragraph and have the equivalent audio playing right away. And +1 for the links and images of course.

@Ryan King

have a quick glimpse at my phone to get a visual reference (eg. an Orca gif) so the podcast can continue uninterrupted

Yeah, I think that'd be useful — not necessarily need to include full transcript, just mapping some images against specific audio periods is useful enough. Thinking about slides + audio, could be a great way to record lectures, esp visually intensive ones such as https://cmsw.mit.edu/podcast-gediminas-urbonas/

I will tinker around with this! Thank you 🙏 for sharing

@Pine Wu, fyi, there's a w3c standard for specifying a timecode in a URL fragment like that: https://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/

@vitorio Thank you. I didn't know that before. I'll make the hash follow the spec then 🙏