Strap your self in for another wild old crazy link tour, real audio echoes from the web past, and an anomaly of a free web storytelling tool that not only is around after a start 8 years ago, but quite useful. This web rabbit hole goes deep, deep, deep, including some browser source inspection of now dead flash embeds on a site preserved in the Internet Archive and some url decoding to find lost audio.
Okay you grey hair web readers, how many of you remember VoiceThread? I had forgotten about it, one of the keys, and actually the instigator for 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story. It’s still on the web some 18 years after it was planted there. Twas forgotten by me until I opened an email I could have easily just let slide down the unread bin.
Hi Alan Levine,
We’ve noticed that you haven’t used your VoiceThread account associated with [EMAIL READACTED] in over a year. If you do not sign in to VoiceThread again your account will be archived and all the data in your account will be permanently deleted.
email from Voicethread.com April 12, 2025
If you would like to continue to use VoiceThread, please sign in here.[link deleted]
Permanently deleted? Nooooo. All I had to do was sign in. And thus I found Stuff I Created and Largely Forgot About.
What’s the Big Deal?
Maybe not much. But for the time, and still now, VoiceThread holds up well. Really well.
“What does it do?” It allows me to upload a series of photos as a web-based slideshow. “Big deal!” Well wait, I can also record audio (and now video) that I add to each, along with text, like a comment. So now I have voice narration or comments. And I can listen to what I said 18 years ago. “Hmmm, but not so novel.” Wait, I can also set it up so anyone visiting can add a comment as text or audio, so it becomes a conversation. “Maybe interesting, but I have to go now to Like some Instagram photos.”
Well, hang on. I will be getting to some examples. But first.
A 2007 Discovery Tale
I am able to unravel what happened 18 years ago by, some miracle of AI mattering and spacing? No, it’s based in my blog timeline. I “discovered” it on July 5, 2007 (sharp eyes will notice this is the same date I created by first VoiceThreads). Also note in links to come I have already been in more recently to fix broken links, edit others to point to the Internet Archive.
“There’s no shortage at all of cool new tools to create and express yourself on the web. I came across Voicethread via a link from Tim Lauer (linktribution!)” Note I practiced the long lost art I coined for giving credit to the person who shared a link. Tim was a principal at an elementary school in Portland, Oregon, who shared so much valuable for me working in higher education. I seemed to remember he had described this find as a blog post, yet I failed trying the original link to Tim’s blog (when I tried last week it redirected to some crypto casino site, now it’s just a domain reseller). Oh Tim, I’m sad to see this. Damn.
Again, the Internet Archive saves the day, or maybe the minute. Not much to see as pretty much this was the blog post of what is more or less a socail media share today, at 117 characters it fits in the little container of an original tweet.
Joyce Valenza points to VoiceThread, a tool for adding sound recordings, and text messages to slide shows and images.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071016184524/http://timlauer.org/2007/06/26/voicethread/
Yet as you might see, what is there is the trackback ping from my blog post to Tim. Can’t do that in a social or even a static site generator. Moving on.
Tim shared a link, I clicked, explored, and it set me off on a journey of web based storytelling that sends associative trails in too many directions to even count.
The Awkward Family Photograph That Started All of This
From the very first example I found then, was something called “What is a VoiceThread Anyohow” where you saw this:
There is of course the classic 1960s posed family portrait, the kind where the kids are forced to wear their “good” clothes and stand and smile unnaturally in a photographers studio. You can see the goofy smiles, the “I hate being here” smiles, the fiendish smiles. I have one of those of my own family.
Just an old photo? No- see those icons on the sides? Each is an audio recording of the people in this photo, much later (like 2007) each telling you their version of what was happening here. The guy who created VoiceThread? His name is Steve, and in this photo he shares the story too. I do have in my blog notes the Mom’s message, surrounded by her 6 offspring, she trying to keep things in sufficient order to get a happy snap shot.
“I’m the happy mother here in this picture of these children, some of whom… appear to have anxiety disorders… I don’t know why the look unhappy, because I’m their mother- and they should be happy.”
For me, this was a pivotal find. Why? In July 2007 I was preparing for a huge honor and commitment. I had gotten this amazing invitation from the Flexible Learning Network to visit Australia, travel to every major city, and do presentations and workshops about this exciting Web 2.0 stuff for education. In my zeal, I aimed to use the same tools I would be talking about. I set up a free parallel blog on WordPress.com https://cogdogroo.wordpress.com (get the roo?) and most of my materials were on the free now gone but archived by me, Wikispaces.
I tentatively offered to do something on digital storytelling which my blog can show what I was doing in 2005, 2006 and 2007 (study those URLs, this is WordPress affords me).
I had noted at the time that Slideshare (still around), the service you could upload a big fat Powerpoint and get it in a sharable view on the web format, had added a feature where you could add to your slides a recording of your audio. And in the web tool, you could synchronize the sound to the slides. Thus, without any special coding, anyone could synchronize slides or photos to sound. One could tell a multimedia story. I knew of maybe five other web based tools I could do this on. Could there me more, like maybe 15? 20?
When then I saw what could be done with VoiceThread, it was literally the “perfect storm” of ideas. The crescendo cymbal crash came when Paul Simon was performing as part of his being recognized with the Library of Congress Gershwin Award for Popular Song. When he sang the classic “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” that’s when it hit to me- I am going to dare myself to find 50 Web Ways to tell a Digital Story (archived by me).
Even with the catchy name, I realized that for a workshop I would need to bring more than a list of tools– I’d have to know what they could do, how to use them. So my next big idea was for each tool, I would provide a version of the same story in all 50. Of course my 50 versions of this story involved a dog, one named Dominoe who I had taken in as a rescue, then almost lost, and found her again.
Yup, I blogged about this August 2, 2007. Time-lined myself, again.
Here, finally is a sample of VoiceThread, playing back over the web from the version I created in July, 2007.
What About That Original VoiceThread?
I do want to include the first VoiceThread I knew, the one where Steve, it’s inventor, gave his version of that family portrait as the infant in his mom’s arms. It was at one time described on the site as “the photo that launched a thousand ships.”
The original link I had blogged no longer works http://voicethread.com/#q.b409.i3129. Not surprising since the original site was powered in Flash so it has to have been re-engineered. Could I find it? Let’s dig.
Given that one of my blog posts listed a VoiceThread at the URL http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=2956 is available now at https://voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/2956 I can see the pattern. Going back to the original URL for the Awkward Family Photo Story, that the part of the URL with b409 was the id number, I guessed it might be now at https://voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/409/ — Indeed there is content there titled “What is a VoiceThread Anyway” but alas, the family and story are gone! It’s just a product ad.
What could I do?
As a long shot, I sent a message to the VoiceThread support contact, with pretty much what I have written here, and even included the screenshot. I got a response in a few hours (yay!) from Sadie at VoiceThreads
Thank you for reaching out! We did indeed swap out the new video at the current link so folks wouldn’t be stuck with older material accidentally. That wee baby in the photo is Steve, and he remains our fearless leader today. We have a few versions of this VoiceThread, but I think this might be the version you’re after: https://voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/3364/28708/17587
And indeed it’s part of what I remember, two of the voices are there, Pat (the mom) and Paula (one sister). I thought I remembered that Steve’s voice did chime in too, remember in my screen shot there were two more icons on the right.
Digging Deeper for the VoiceThread Back Story
My memory did suggest that this photo and its story was part of the genesis of VoiceThread. I went to the search thingy and looked for “Steve muth” family photo -thinking the photo itself might emerge. This link spawned some curiosity – Our VoiceThread Love-in (and something to worry about) from School Library Journal (remember when organizations actually wrote blog posts?). I knew it was connected because the author was Joyce Valenza who was references by Tim Lauer’s post that sent me going.
Joyce was obviously an early VoiceThread enthusiast:
Last Wednesday night I co-guested on Teachers Teaching Teachers with VoiceThread’s co-founders Ben Papell and Steve Muth. Please listen to this podcast.
Ben and Steve, best friends from junior high, had no idea how viral their project would become among educators and were delighted by the love they experienced in the webcast and in the chat room. BTW, it is Steve’s family featured on that now famous introductory family photograph–a photograph that they both admit cries, “what was happening?” Steve is the sniffly, crying baby.
https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2007/11/03/our-voicethread-love-in-and-something-to-worry-about/
Yeah, I remember Paul Allison and EdTechTalk and sure enough the link for this episode still works Teachers Teaching Teachers #77 – Participation is the Most Important Part.
Well, sort of works. There is no audio! Nothing in the web page source either. Am I done?
No.
Cue the heralding trumpets! The Internet Archive comes to the rescue where I can see, click, and listen to the audio via … a Flash audio player, only working because the Internet Archive has support for Ruffle Flash Emulator to attempt to play flash content (my success rate and getting playback is about 20%, not the Archive folks fault, only so much the emulator can do)
Great, I can listen to it, but WTF good is Flash content?
I go into the source of the Internet Archive version of this URL to find the flash embed code:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="/web/20080220224824im_/https://edtechtalk.com/sites/all/modules/audio/players/1pixelout.swf" width="290" height="24">
<param name="movie" value="/sites/all/modules/audio/players/1pixelout.swf"/>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
<param name="menu" value="false"/>
<param name="quality" value="high"/>
<param name="FlashVars" value="soundFile=http%3A%2F%2Fedtechtalk.com%2Faudio%2Fplay%2F2463"/>
<embed src="/web/20080220224824oe_/https://edtechtalk.com/sites/all/modules/audio/players/1pixelout.swf" flashvars="soundFile=http%3A%2F%2Fedtechtalk.com%2Faudio%2Fplay%2F2463" width="290" height="24"/>
</object>Where’s the audio? Is it some .swf that I will have to convert? Hmmm. No I can see here, bolded what I guess is a URL for the audio
`flashvars=”soundFile=http%3A%2F%2Fedtechtalk.com%2Faudio%2Fplay%2F2463”
I take that string through a URL decoder … and voila! http://edtechtalk.com/audio/play/2463 There it is… well it does not work in the current site. But the sound file must be there for it to be working.
But… if I search for this URL in the Wayback Machine, I land on a real honest audio file I can download and preserve myself.
I even ran it through MacWhisper to generate a transcript. It is, well lively, but here at least I can get to the origin story that the guests, again the founders of VoiceThread, say in 2007:
Host: But I thought to slow it down a little bit and just have you tell us the story of where you got the idea and what you were thinking about and just kind of set us up with–
Ben Papel :Well, I can just say, I don’t let Steve tell the story because frankly, it was Steve’s family that in a sense was the impetus behind Voice Thread. But I just will say that Steve and I have been best friends since junior high school. So the idea that we’ve done something together is really no shock to either of us. But the story of Voice Thread is actually hysterical. And I’ll pass it to Steve.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080220224824/https://edtechtalk.com/node/2463
Steve Muth: But basically, the idea came from just a picture and everybody’s got them, which is just a family picture that you look at and you realize that there’s probably at least four, maybe six, or maybe 10 different stories and different perspectives about the same image. And this is two years ago. And I thought to myself, well, with all the technology that’s out there, why can’t I capture that easily? And the answer was no. You could do it if you were tech savvy enough to know about four different programs and also spend a lot of time tracking the people down, talking to all of them and gathering all the information. And the technology was already out there. So there’s nothing cutting edge technologically about Voice Thread at all. The only thing that’s cutting edge about it is what we’ve tried to remove from the process. It’s a process of removal, getting all of the hurdles and impediments out of the way so that you can do this basic human thing that everybody loves to do. And so it’s really just removal, getting things out of the way and keeping your eye on exactly what it is that causes people joy and what they enjoy doing, which is sharing simply and easily and sort of trying to get the technology out of the way.
Well it mostly tells the story, but the excitement veered into the talk of the development and appeal of the tool plus what teachers can do with it. There is a little bit reference of it being built in 2005 in History of VT Universal in the VoiceThread docs. I might have dug more, but that’s enough to know it was started in 2005, and became available in 2007, just in time for me to find it.
Talking Back to Beyond the Blog Sci Fi Remixes aka ELI Fish Tacos
Bear with me for more even wayback backblog memory sifting. On January 30, 2006, Brian Lamb and I co-presented a the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference in San Diego (EDUCAUSE lacks their own archives, the Wayback Machine obliges) what we pitched as Beyond The Blog: Ready For Prime Time.
As Weblogging matures, the supporting technology and techniques become more sophisticated, from online diaries to powerful social networking and Web publishing tools. Participants will plunge headlong into the pitfalls, perils, and payoffs associated with supporting social software use in educational settings. Disruptive technologists and skeptical academics are especially welcome.
Look how our bold vision panned out (dry). But still, it was an exciting era. Brian and I definitely “presented” in our atypical style. We were inspired by an approach Leigh Blackall and Sean Fitzgerald used for sessions they did on Networked Learning. The “slides” were images uploaded to Flickr and organized as “set” (now known as an album), with each slide augmented with details in the caption, and available for commenting.
We did the same, and for reasons I will try to explain, we created a new account in flickr, that still exists. I have no idea where the password is for the non used yahoo mail account we made up for it. Notably too, the short link we created than STILL works http://fishtacos.notlong.com/ or just in case of web emergency at the permanent link https://www.flickr.com/photos/elifishtacos/albums/72057594052420567/
I recall the science fiction book covers was Brian’s idea, as we were pretty much pitching edu scifi, right? We had found a Flickr group photo pool of sci fi covers but as they were not openly licensed, I suggested making our own to match our talking points. I also changed the titles and deliberate mangled the author names on the covers to reflect edubloggers active then (blog links that could be found) – D’Arcy Norman, David Wiley, James Farmer, Phil Long, Stephen Downes, Bryan Alexander, and Leigh Blackall.
The flickr format gave us room on each to add details, notes and links, e.g. for the “cover” intro. And while the “slides” were made to be sequential (fudged thew order via editing the photo date), we added what we branded “tag paths” as alternative ways to access the information, since this was the heady time of folksonomy.
We coined it a “Flickrtation” — yeah that stuck.
I also note in the description, and npow remember, that Brian and I at the time collaborating from his location in Vancouver and mine in Arizona– we used this new nifty web 2.0 tool called “Writely”, just before it got gobbled up by Google to be what we know as Google Docs. I did have an archived version of our planing document, which for this post, I flipped back as a shared doc via that link.
“But Alan, why the bleep did you keep referring to ‘fish tacos’? That’s not very professional for an important education conference.” This was the common streak of irreverence I connected with from the start with Brian, through our blogs, and also the first time we met in maybe 2002 at another ELI conference. It was all about the idea of being in San Diego where once before I recalled eating my fist fish taco. We wrapped around this (pre Twitter, y’all) a sort of open networked request for others to suggest where in San Diego we could eat the best fish tacos.
We did achieve this the last day of the conference, and my photos do indicate we have Bryan Alexander as a witness at Blue Water Seafood, which is still at the same location in 2025. I can’t fully explain or refrain from why exactly Brian and I presented in aluminum foil hats.
But yes, getting finally to the VoiceThread connection! It is there! That same day, July 5, 2007 that I discovered VoiceThread via Tim Lauer’s one sentence blog post, I created this VoiceThread, where I added my own audio annotations describing what or who each sci fi book cover remix referrred to in topic and author.
Given then my 2007 audio was still hanging on this thread, rediscovering my VoiceThreads account this week in 2025, I went back, and added to each one a current recording as an “update.”
And more
Looking back at the non slides, I’m impressed with how much we packed in, mostly links, many likely dead now – for example, the discussion on blogging network effect with the cover title The Weblogger’s Guide to the Galaxy written by “Steve Downs”
Blogs Unite, Spread… and Conquer The Galaxy flickr photo by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
The internet has shown itself to be a model for growing, interconnected “scale-free” networks… and as new services and tools are added, we face a world where things are not all neatly categorized or stored centrally. Can we deal with it?
with sections/references on “Network Literacy”, “Network Literacy”, and “Network Behaviors”. See a 19 year old comment from Bryan Alexander:
Excellent point about blog conversations. The task for social software advocates is, in part, to emphasize the middle ground in a very polarized conversation. Conversation networks are bigger than individual blogs, and smaller than the blogosphere.
[Mostly] Lost Audio
The flickr links refer to audio we had recorded for many “slides” available at a site ourmedia.org – which now is definitely not what it was then. I could not find these in the Internet Archive. With some digging my memory was dusted off- Ourmedia was created by J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter (the guy who created Macromind / Macromedia) and launched in 2005
Exactly nine months ago, Marc Canter and I met up at Supernova. I mentioned to him the idea I’d been kicking around with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive to create a grassroots media organization, site, and registry called Open Media.
Turned out that Open Media was, ironically, a trademarked name. But Marc jumped at the chance to dive in as co-founder of this new entity — he’s been a multimedia pioneer for 15 years, and this is the culimination of what he’s been striving toward all these years.
https://insidesocialmedia.com/ourmedia-is-here/
I won’t lay down too much on the big dreams and ideas, we all had them.
I have no idea where the media is that Brian and I uploaded to Ourmedia. The one things I did find, at least, was the audio recording of our session, recorded on that tiny iRiver digital media recorder I had at the time.
So that’s the quality of the original
VoiceThreading Onward?
Coming out of the catacombs of Web 2.0 I am quite happy to find VoiceThreads still not only working, but really a viable means to do more with photos and images than freeze them into the grip of PowerPoint. You get not only web-based slide shows, but ones you can add audio, and even open up for commentary by voice, text, even video (if that’s every done any more). And you get something to share as a link and/or embed into the web.
Thanks VoiceThreads for keeping the web alive. Over and out.
Featured Image: Screen shot of Beyond The Blog by Fish Tacos at ELI 2006 rendered with PhotoFunia’s Traveller’s Diary effect.
