It never ceases to amaze me, that the best experience we seem to come up with for feeding a computer, after multi-touch this-and-that and semantic wonderment, and peer2peer, socially syndicated gobble-d-gook, are text fields, radio buttons, check boxes and menus.

My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms.

Cliff and I used to produce a bunch of securities trading applications for clients – first at Wells Fargo (an early, heck, maybe the first “Wells Trade site) then later a couple for WRH+Co. People were always tempted by “wireless solutions”, that is, transporting all those fields and buttons onto a screen the size of a match book. Cliff was fond of saying “our customers already have a wireless interface, and it works quite well; It’s called a Cel Phone and their human voice. When they want to make a trade, they call their broker and make a trade”.

Now, blogs, or micro-content distribution systems are getting into the voice game. Utterz let’s you call in a plog cast by phone… you dial the phone, you speak your mind, your voice shows up on their site – for now, without wanting to investigate their version of an interface, I’m going to assume these files can be accessed, syndicated and sliced and diced at will, like any well behaved pile of web content.

What could be really interesting out of this is to be able to post-facto reassemble a conversation, perhaps including multiple people. To be able to follow the train of thought that get’s spread out over time… perhaps months, and follow an articulate thread… from your iPod, from your networked audio player as you drive across country.

Return to English (or, insert your preferred native language here).

/Joe