Voxopop

I so wanted to find that this site was thriving, and worth promoting (the two things not necessarily going together). But it's not, and it isn't, and that's a shame. It's a forum in which all postings are in the form of podcasts, using the posters' own voices. An exciting, and dare I say, sound idea. But something's gone wrong here. At first I puzzled over the length of time that had passed since conversations had started, and about why there were no further contributions. Then I thought I'd listen to some of the contributors, and that's when I discovered that after several minutes, nothing was happening or apparently going to happen. The connection to the audio server simply hung, and eventually apparently did connect, but there was nothing to hear and no clue why. Something seemed to have been up at the Melbourne-based server at audio.chinswing.com (the site was initially named "chinswing". What were they thinking?) and that was that. But being nosy I looked a little further and 'pinged' the server, which resulted in a timeout at an Amazon Cloudfront machine, instead. This is Amazon's web service to developers, and I'm assuming that the audio files are all being stored here for streaming back to clients. And at the time I was trying the service out, it was dead as the proverbial Monty Python parrot. Although I got nowhere, and I did try a few times, I really hope to go back and take a listen if and when everything is working. I think it's an idea worth the attempt, although I can also see why the extroverts that would want to use it might prefer to go the distance and join a webcam community instead, while the rest of us would be too shy to try. It might be a touch ahead of its time, but for people who can't type or have limited vision, as well as for those of us who enjoy the podcast concept, it has some serious potential.