I was reading an article on FiveThirtyEight.com, and noticed a very interesting technique. I imagine some of you have seen it before, though probably some of you haven't (as I hadn't). In the article, certain phrases were highlighted and had an arrow. When you clicked the highlighted text or arrow, a sound clip was played that was related, whether it be a person elaborating on a point or crowd noise to illustrate a different point. Rather than pulling you out of the stream of text to watch a video, this inline audio gave you the option to hear more while staying in the topic. I'll give a not-too-inspiring example below:
My MWLUG session was very well received.
There are obviously far more interesting ways to use sound, but the technique is very simple. I used SoundCite, merely because FiveThirtyEight did, but there appear to be a variety with different options to implement the inline audio. I used my own MP3 sound file as a file resource, though I plan to experiment and see if I can use a data URI, which would offer the most flexibility for me.
Let me know if you have already used the technique for your blog or website, or if you do after reading this, as I'd love to see examples of this outside of the "news article" setting.
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Tags: SoundCite