Protagonize Pub

I don't know how I got to thinking about it, but I caught myself thinking about the roots of writing.

Nowadays, people write on computers, pads of paper, maybe even still the occasional typewriter.
Before that it was mostly typewriters and scribbling on paper.
Even before that it was pen and paper all the way.
But even before that? Before we even had written language, or decent literacy?
We told stories orally.

So here's what I propose: We take something we've written, and read it "to each other". How do we do this? Record a piece of yours as audio or video, post it on YouTube, SoundCloud, AudioBoo, whatever you use, and then make sure we can find it.

Three initial conditions to posting something:
~ The piece you read must belong to you.
~ It doesn't have to be a Protagonize piece, but it should be something you're comfortable having any manner of people hearing.
~ Avoid anything to which you'd affix a "Mature" sticker.

If this thing really has legs we can see if the technologically-inclined protagonize folks have any ideas for consolidating the collection of stories.

What do you guys think? Like the idea, hate it, thoughts of any kind?

Oo! I like this! :D If I had a camera that recorded longer than 30 seconds, I'd do this immediately!

As for reading, how should it go? Dramatic storytelling or just verbatim? Or maybe that just depends on the author/reader.

It depends on the reader. Ideally there should be some dramatic element to it, but really it depends on the piece.

I always read with emotion. That's just me. at least I try to.

Strange you mention this. Everytime I go to my mothers we end up spending some times in the evenings, her with her sewing and me readin gsomething I've writen. My voice usually gives out before she does. *grin*

It's like going back in time to when I was growing up, only it's not the obsessive compulsive bf that's reading to us while I color. He could do a mean Golum voice though, one of his good points (and trust me there weren't many in the end)....

Hm... Perhaps I should look into the camera this little Netbook came with. I know you can video chat with it since my Dad calls us from his all the time.

:} Elorithryn

Here's my own rendition of what I was thinking this could be.
Of course, the reading may be varied with the author and the piece.

Interesting idea, I'll definitely consider it.

Oh, how the years have changed me. Five years ago there's absolutely no chance I'd do this...

Also: I think it would be much cooler if this was only for pieces on Protag. Even if people feel the need to write/post something new just with this in mind.

E Gads! I don't think I've ever read aloud since school. However, I may give it a go.

Funnily enough, I've been pondering the idea of a sort of protagonize podcast, essentially a weekly reading of works from protag and this sort of fits the bill as it were. Perhaps something to consider, though quite who that'd be organised, hosted, etc I don't know.

Most of my works aren't standalone or finished pieces, except poems, but if that doesn't matter much, then I'm game assuming I can get my microphone to work :)

There we go, my awful, awful reading of one of my currently orphaned stories. Only minor editing done, so still full of stuttering and double-takes - and this was after trying 6 or 7 times :)

Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwVZMtiYlok

Actually the couple stutterings and stuff added to that Dark, made it really feel like you were the character. Also a great way to promote your orphan! *grin* (Oh and the american in me thanks you for the subtitles, though I'm sure I could have understood without them)

I liked G2's reading as well. This is cool. I'll have to figure out if I can do the same on my computer. I'm sure I can. And then there is the question of what to read, and when to record (as I'm sure you guys don't want to hear my kids 'talking' in the background).

:} Elorithryn

@ dark that was excellent. Like Elo said, the hesitations and stutters made it sound very natural. And I think for future reference, I don't think it matters if it's a standalone or finished piece; even if it's just an excerpt I think it'd be fine.

I really hope this idea has legs. This could really be something. ^^

I've actually been considering allowing people to embed video and/or audio clips in their works on the site for a long time.

If you guys find it helpful, I don't think it would be too much trouble for me to add the ability to embed it right into the site.

I'll follow this topic and see what kind of support it gets. :)

I'd go for that! that's one less site I have to have a membership to to post such things too. And like I said, I already have practice reading my stories out loud to my mom. Why not for Protagonizers too? *grin*

(Best part is I was on speach team, which had a debate division, but I did children's stories, like Leo the Lop.)

:} Elorithryn

Well, the video itself would not be directly hosted on Protagonize - I don't really have the space/bandwidth to support hosting video. You'd be able to embed video from other sites, i.e. YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc., into your works on the site. That's the general idea.

Would audio-only still be an option if the whole embedding thing came to fruition?

@g2LaPianistaIrlandesa Yeah, it would definitely allow for both video or audio-only. There isn't a huge difference in embedding between the two formats, it's more the site being used that affects things.

What would be useful is if you guys could put together a list of all of the different sites you'd be using to embed this stuff. I'd like to keep it to the video/audio-sharing sites that are the most heavily used, if possible, so we don't have a huge list of things to support embedding from. The top 3-5 sites for each category (video/audio) would probably suffice.

For example...

Video:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Viddler

Audio:
- SoundCloud
- AudioBoo

Feel free to suggest alternate sites. I'll use the most popular choices when I first implement the embedding feature.

If we're doing embedding, being able to support straight-hosted files (like using jwplayer or even the HTML5 audio/video tags to stream a file off my own webserver, for example) would be cool. To be honest though, I doubt I'd use it - it's cheaper and easy to just slap a video or audio file on youtube.

@darkliquid said:

I've been pondering the idea of a sort of protagonize podcast, essentially a weekly reading of works from protag

A weekly podcast could be absolutely sick. I hope Nick is considering / will consider this idea.

Well there isn't anything stopping me from setting something up now. I can knock together a wordpress install with the podpress plugin, slap it up on somewhere like dreamhost that provide unlimited storage and bandwidth and pow!, there we go, one podcasting site.

I could probably setup a trial account with dreamhost now, just to see how quickly it can be sorted.

If nick wants to make it 'official-ish', have a nice podcasts.protagonize.com or listen.protagonize.com subdomain would be nice, but otherwise it's easy to set up with a different domain.

I can setup a paypal account for managing the financial side of things (hosting costs, domain registration costs, accepting donations to pay for the aforementioned). Ideally, doing something awesome that allowed protagonize users to automagically log into the podcast site to comment, rate, etc would be cool, but that kind of integration isn't a big deal.

It's not hard to do at all, if enough people want to commit to doing readings every so often we can build up a backlog to post over time. The main issue will be maintaining quality and compatibility across the the MP3s, etc since everyone is unlikely to have identical setups or decent recording equipment.

The podcast idea is something that I wasn't really planning, myself -- I don't really have the time to operate something like that -- the stuff I'm suggesting concerns embedding audio/video content in works on Protag.

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with having some sort of official podcast sub-site if someone else (preferably a moderator) wants to run it. I could setup a clean Wordpress install on the blog server and give you admin access, Andrew, and setup a subdomain and use the same skin as the blog, whatever works.

Using the blog's server, I might be able to share login credentials somehow, if that's easily doable between two Wordpress installs.

-nick

The only reason I suggest doing it separately is to avoid potential hosting issues (mostly costs) for you, especially since podcast hosting can be particularly bandwidth intensive. If that's not an issue for you, then having something set up on your own servers would be awesome. As far as sharing user credentials goes, there is the wordpress multi-user 'network' system as explained here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network I think something like that may be appropriate.

Either way, before anyone commits to anything, I think we'd need to see how many people are actually interested in this. Now, I'm happy to do readings, starting with the featured works and working forwards or something like that if we don't/can't regularly get other readers. Doing something fortnightly, or monthly is probably best at first before we can get a gauge on it's popularity.