For example, I just finished editing a conversational podcast from which I removed maybe 2/3 of the “likes” and “umms” and false starts and repetitions, but left the rest. So it still feels quite natural, but things move along better than they otherwise did.

As I did this editing, I thought about Mike Caulfield’s very interesting point about when those “micro-expressions” might in fact conveying information.

However, if it’s more presentational then I prefer it to be more edited. In this case, I’m trying to gather information, and the pauses are blocking me.

In another life I studied discourse linguistics, and part of the funny thing was we had to transcribe conversations we recorded EXACTLY, all the ums and uhs and false starts included. It was a riot. I really grew to love them: when transcribed, they look like poetry. To me there was nothing more intimate in corpus linguistics than the false start (except perhaps conjunction use — but that’s another day)

I wonder in some ways about cleaning out redundacy though. I did a 20 minute interview of Governor Bill Richardson last week, and I cut out nothing — dumped it straight to mp3 and posted it. Had some reservations about that, mainly because *I* sounded like an idiot.

But the thing is, most questions he jumped straight off the mark, which was impressive for a guy who’d been talking for 10 hours straight. On the question of what his hardest political contest was, though, there was a long pause, and some “um”-ing and a bunch of false starts. That’s information to my listeners, because we’re interested not only in his answer, but in how he finds his way to it.

As you know from interviewing as well, very often those hesititations are the interviewer watching the face of the interviewee, and seeing confusion, then trying to swing the question around to an angle they look more comfortable with.

So obviously, when the subject is RSS etc., that stuff can go — but when the subject is partially the interviewee the pauses and false starts are much like micro-expressions — information possibly as important as the answers that follow. In such cases, I’d argue that editing them out is not in the listener’s interest.

While I probably won’t use this myself (not enough patience) I’m sure at some point in the future someone will ask me how to do this, and when they do, I’ll have an answer for them!

Also, see http://www.tkk.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/teleinterface.html for some coverage of the electronics behind telephone interfacing.

Plantronix MX-10 also looks like a possibility, but reading the manual I couldn’t tell so I’m not including the link.

Seems like, since the earpiece and mouthpiece of a telephone handset are separate circuits (I don’t _think_ I hear myself in the earpiece) it ought to be possible to wire two mono circuits in parallel with the handset and connect those via Y-adapter to the stereo in on the PC: but someone more versed in telephone electronics than I am will have to advise you on that.

Actually I do mean accessible. A cheaper alternative would be Skype, for example, if there’s a way it can do channel separation. (Is there? I haven’t found that out, and would like to know.)

But from my perspective Skype is not particularly accessible. There are a lot of people in the geek world who can and will use it. But increasingly the folks I want to interview are not citizens of that world. For most people, the telephone is still the most comfortable thing.

That will change, and is changing, of course. So in the short run I guess “accessible” means “a cheaper Telos” but in the long run it might mean “a procedure for channel separation with Skype that non-propellerheads can easily implement”.

From the context it seems that by “more accessible” you mean “cheaper”.
Sorry about being picky because I enjoy your articles and learn from them.

Ya think? Even so, they could’ve dialed it down a bit, leaving enough Terryness and Iraness to qualify for authenticity while eliminating much of what’s simply annoying.

- Jon