When I drive back home from work, I'm usually pretty beat. It feels good to sit back, relax, crack open the radio on some smooth jazz, and cruise on home, letting the whole day drain out. Sometimes, though, I'll tune in to stations on the radio that, had my wife caught me listening to them, she would beat me up pretty badly.

 

These are mostly talk radio shows. The "Jerry Springer"s of radio land if you will. I tune in and listen to all the loonies. I find it interesting… in a pathological kind of way.

Anyway, one of the shows there is totally based on listener contributions.

What they do, is they let people call in to a voice mail box, and leave a message about pretty much anything they want – politics, football or how the traffic lights are too damn short these days. Then, they collect all the people that were recorded and pack whatever they can get into a one hour show, in which they play them one after the other. The catch is: each caller has only 1 minute to complete what they were talking about. 60 seconds, and the line hangs up.   They play the messages with small beeps between them, like when you listen to your phone messages when you get home.

 

The effect, to me, is pretty darn interesting. You get to hear 4-6 major issues that repeat themselves, with some minor stuff you never though about scattered in between. Lots of calls are about the economic state and political issues, but what I usually listen to is the people, and I try to think why they are talking.. You'll hear old people, and young people alike, calling in and telling it like they think it is. It might be stupid, it might not make a lot of sense, but it's real.

 

It occurred to me that what they are doing is actually a kind of  voice-blogging. Or – it might be that Blogging is part of whatever category this show belongs to as well – expressing yourself through potential mass publication. Like in the blog world, lots of people are return-recorders. They usually record a message once-twice a week. Now, they also respond to other recorders(I'll just call them 'VBloggers' from now on) that put messages on the show. They basically – leave voice comments on other voice blogs. Then they come back to hear the replies, then they reply again.

 

Actually, an analogous structure to the blogging world would be that each caller had their own talk show in which they would voice out their opinions, and there would be a main talkshow that would voice out all the opinions from the other shows, aggregated into one feed.

 

Taking it further – you could have a Feed-listener that would somehow collect voice blog posts from feeds and aggregate them in an easy manner – much like today's aggregators, only instead of reading, you'd be listening to MP3 posts.

 

What am I getting at here? I'm trying to see if this whole thing, much like a lot of things in our world, is a pattern. It repeats itself in many forms, but the idea stays the same. Where else can you see the "blogging" pattern? How about News Articles, Weekend and daily columns in the newspaper, Graffity, Mailing Lists, Forums. What's the pattern here?