Writing -And Your Voice

Writing -And Your Voice

I thought I would give a quick talk about writing and your voice. "Voice" what do I mean by voice", you may ask? I call "your voice" the emotion and method of your writing.

I always knew you had to have a "voice" to be recognized on the Internet or with any writing, but I guess, I took it for granted. This simple concept came to the forefront of my consiousness when I happened upon an article/interview that lost it's voice. Let me explain.


The Interview

The interview started well, but slowly turned annoying. Why? The interviewer was not directing the conversation, but was trying to upstage the interviewee with his humor. Yes, humor is great when it's used appropriately. However, in this case, I feel the humor was inappropriate. Why?

If the interviewer's humor is making the interviewee uncomfortable (which was obvious when the interviewee tried to graciously dodge the interviewer's comments)-it's inappropriate. This interview, though I wanted to read what the interviewee was going to discuss with the audience, I had to click away.


What I learned.

1. Use your writing voice-and it's emotion with care. Overstated emotions will frustrate and anger your readers and leave them no choice but to click away.
2. If doing an interview, carry the interview forward without upstaging the interviewee for your own ego sake.
3. Leave your ego at the door if you're conducting an interview. The interviewee will thank you. And, more importantly, your readers will appreciate your integrity by not trying to upstage your interviewee.

So, is voice important? I think so. Not only is it important, it's a part of your own credibility.
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Putting Voice or Music On Your Blog

I don't understand the lure of wanting music on your blog. That's probably because I'm on dial-up and sites that use music take forever to load, and I get three second snippets of music every fifteen seconds until the whole thing has loaded.

And music always takes up a lot of bandwidth, which can make the connection timeout on you...but with all that said, if you still want music...

If you would like to make digital voice clips, go here to Gabcast.

To upload music from like an iPod or MP3 player:

First you need to host your music somewhere. I'm a Google nut, so the first place I'd say would be Google Pages. You have to make a GMail account to use the pages and if you don't already have one...BEWARE! Because creating a GMail account will override your email account that has Blogger.

If you don't want a GMail account, create a Google Group *snort*...you can be a group of one, but it will give you a whopping 100MB of file space where you could upload all of your music, for free!

So you've opened a group, uploaded your music file. Now copy down the URL for the file.

Then go Dashboard >>> Layout >>> When the Page element page opens, click on "Add a Page Element. Choose a HTML/JavaScript element.

Copy this code into the Page element:


<embed src="URL of your audio or video file" loop="false" width="400" height="300" autostart="false" type="video/x-ms-asf"></embed >

The parts of this code are:

The URL of your music at the freehost of your choice.

Loop can be set to false, so the piece doesn't continually repeat. Set it to true if you want a particular sound like waves to keep repeating.

The height and width which you can change to fit your particular sidebar.

Autostart set at false lets your visitor start the music themselves...they will love you for this!

And the last part, type...tells you what kind of file it is. For example:

An MP3 file would be: type="audio/x-ms-mp3"
A AVI file would be: type="audio/x-ms-avi"
A MPEG file would be: type="video/x-ms-mpg" (or what ever they call it)

You can also put a Player on your blog, by going to Google Gadgets. They have 12 players from MP3's to YouTube and Podcasts.

UPDATE: You can have your MP3 Links:
<a href="my_file.mp">Link</a>

Automatically turn into a little simple player by adding this code into your HTML:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://googlepage.googlepages.com/player.js"></script>



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