With the championship almost upon us again, it is, I think, time for another technical innovation on this humble site.  The other day I came across a service called Audioboo, which (I’m paraphrasing here) is to podcasting in the way that Twitter is to blogging.  I’ve had a notion for some time about trying to do some podcasts (having taken part in a few non-GAA ones myself in the past) but getting this organised has always seemed to be a pain in the hole I could do without, not least given my limited tech-savviness. This little baby, however, strikes me as a nice way to dip one’s toe in these particular waters.

Audioboo is an iPhone application and, having joined the church of iPhone devotees a few months back, it’s one I was able to set up and use without any bother.  The application is a bit like a digital dictaphone, which enables you to record an audio piece (which, in the vernacular, is called a ‘boo’; God, I wish they’d stop letting children name these technical advances) of up to three minutes in length.  Having done this, you then upload it – directly from your iPhone, like – and, if you’ve hooked up your Audioboo account with your Twitter account (I’ve already done this), a link to the audio piece will then appear as a Twitter update as soon as you upload it.  I did a test piece last night and I must say that it worked a treat.

That’s kinda neat, I think, and so what I’m planning to do for future matches is to record a post-match audio summary, right after the final whistle has blown, and a link to the resultant audio ramblings should then be accessible on the site from the Twitter updates panel within minutes of the match ending.  I’m not planning on doing carefully sculpted audio pieces in the style of the great Michael O’ Muircheartaigh – which, let’s face it, would be like trying to take on Seamus Heaney in the art of poetry writing – but instead to provide an of-the-moment audio snapshot while one’s dander is still up and where the whiff of cordite is still in the air.  I think this will obviously work best for matches that I’m at (though, if we get to Croke Park, I might have to hold off till Tommy Fleming’s post-match warblings are done with) but I’m going to try it out from home for the New York game, providing there’s radio coverage from Midwest for that one.

Anyway, that’s the plan.  If it works, it’ll mean that there’ll be audio up there along with words, pictures and video clips – a sort of multimedia extravanganza. Let’s see how it pans out.