App for journalists: Bobler, for creating shareable audio

What is it? Social audio app

Devices: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android

Cost: Free

How is it of use to journalists? As many journalists will know, creating audio clips that are quick to produce and easy to share can be challenging.

Bobler aims to change that by allowing users to create small audio packages in just a few seconds and share it to social media using their smartphone.

Users can record up to two minutes of audio, add a headline, description and hashtag, geo-tag it and pair it with a picture before posting their 'Boble' to Twitter or Facebook.

Alternatively, users can choose to only share Bobles with those who are following them.

Sharing short audio clips together with a strong headline and image were some of the key recommendations  featured in a recent Journalism.co.uk podcast on making audio more socially shareable.

In the style of Twitter, users can follow others, whose content will then appear in their own timeline.

Tap the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen to search for Bobles by hashtag, category or popularity, which you can then save to a custom playlist with a button on the right-hand side of each snippet in the stream view.



You can also search for audio uploads posted nearby or in a specific location, while the 'on air' button allows users to listen to audio from accounts they are following.

Tap the buddy icon in the top left of the screen to see your profile, featuring your followers and the users you are following plus the Bobles you have created. Tap on these to share them to Twitter and Facebook retrospectively, or swipe left to delete them.

Founded by Marc-Antoine Durand and Pierre Brouder, two graduates from Sciences Po University in Paris, it is worth noting that some of Bobler's features (such as interest categories, for example) appear in French.

However, even if you do not speak the language, the app is so intuitive that this does not pose an obstacle.

How to record and share an audio clip in Boble

Tap the red 'record' button in the app. You can pause during recording, or choose 'start again' if you mess up.

When you have finished recording, tap the yellow 'ok' button.

You can then assign a location to your audio (the app's geolocation function will pick up where you are by default but you can manually add a different location if you choose).


Screenshot from Bobler app

Then add a headline (up to 50 characters) and description (up to 70 characters). Bear in mind that both of these will show if you choose to share your Boble on Twitter or Facebook, so make them searchable and engaging. You can also use hashtags here.

You can make your Boble more searchable within the app by adding an 'interest', such as news, media, politics or sport.

Tap the camera icon to either take a photo or add one that already exists in your phone's image library.

The last step is to select whether you want to publish your Boble to Facebook or Twitter, or just share it on Bobler.

For journalists covering a live event, this could be a useful app for creating engaging audio packages on the fly with minimum fuss.

At a football match, for example, the app could be used to record feedback from fans after the final whistle.

During an interview, it could also be used to share interesting soundbites to pique people's interest before the full story is published online.

It could also be used in crowdsourcing audio by location, or around a particular topic or event.

One limitation of Bobler is that there is no ability to generate an embed code to insert audio clips on your website, in the way you can with Soundcloud or Audioboo.

A way to get around this is to publish your clip to Twitter and embed it from there, as I have done below.

Testing out Bobler shareable audio app - My first Boble - a test for http://t.co/4AF7jXxhkI http://t.co/9zgjmGWf8x

— Abigail Edge (@abigailedge) June 16, 2014

It would also be nice if Bobles could be played in Twitter or Facebook timelines, instead of requiring users to click an additional link, and it is a shame that images are not pulled into the post either.

However, the resulting audio package does look rather good.


Screenshot from http://bit.ly/1pArIC5

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