Jeremy raises some great points here that mirror some of my own worries about trying to summarize the discussions happening on the IndieWeb wiki and the many #indieweb chat channels.

When I had the initial idea to do an “audio edition” of This Week in the IndieWeb, the question of “who is the audience” seemed to have an obvious answer: folks who would read the newsletter but preferred an audio edition.

However, it quickly became clear that doing a “direct read” of the newsletter — where much of the content is names and links to changes on wiki pages — wouldn’t make a lot of sense when spoken aloud. So, my first crack at the format evolved into answering a slightly broader question: “how can I explain these updates to someone who might not already be familiar with the wiki?”

My short (and unhelpful) answer is: this is hard. The discussions on the wiki tend to be very technical, jargon-heavy, and touch on an extremely wide set of topics. In the first episode, I attempted to give some structure with groupings like “IndieWeb Events”, “Software and Services”, “Silo Updates”, “Silo Issues”, etc., but I agree with Jeremy that it is still very fast and dense. While I want to keep the podcast short (less than 10 minutes), I think a next positive step would be to give topics more time to breathe with some explanatory commas that give context.

It is my hope that projects like this podcast will help find new ways to phrase and frame the things that the IndieWeb community are doing and talking about, helping to reach new folks. I have a feeling it is going to be a lot of work. :}