This little site is doing the rounds so no doubt you’ve seen it linked to already. If not, why aren’t you following Kottke?
The premise is simple, leave a short recording with your location tagged on the map. Why? Well the creators say:
VoiceDot exists so that people live and love each other. So that no one ever reaches for what is not theirs — someone else’s land, someone else’s home, someone else’s peace. That is the whole idea. There is no other.
The stories here are all different — joyful, funny, sad, about pain. That is what life sounds like. And sooner or later almost every one of them gets an answer — from a nearby city or from the other side of the world. No pity — just a living voice next to you: you’ve been heard. You are not alone.
I’ll admit the cynic in me thinks that giving my location and my voice, feels a little risky —what fun AI could have with that!— but I try and remember that most people, the vast majority of people, are good. YMMV.
So, if you want to hear my dulcet tones you can go and listen to my dot.
And if you don’t want to listen to me verbally butchering the English language, then here’s what I said:
My name’s Gordon and I live in a small town called Dumbarton in Scotland.
It’s summer here, but it’s cloudy right now. I do think it’s to get warmer later, up to about 24 degrees Celsius, which is quite warm for us.
Dumbarton is, on the face of it, a fairly average town. It’s a stereotypical Scottish town in every sense. A slowly dying high street, retail parks on the periphery that host all the usual fast food outlets and supermarkets.
It’s a commuter hub too, as it’s not too far from the nearest big city of Glasgow.
It’s also wonderfully positioned a short distance from Loch Lomond, the gateway to the highlands, so me and my family can escape to the forest and lochs very easily. T
his place feels very ordinary to me, but I guess that’s the same for everyone, no matter where you live. The dull grey pavements that I walk along will seem alien to you if all you know are forest pathways. The large windows on the old sandstone houses look odd when you’ve grown up, around brick buildings painted white with their small windows a key feature to keep you cool inside.
We all live in microcosms yet, as the world shrinks, we all start to have more and more in common than before, a closer shared worldview than we needed.
I think that’s a good thing, as we will all still have so much to learn from other cultures, so much we can share, and hopefully through our curiosity and the desire to treat our fellow humans with compassion and care, our world will improve. I hope so, at least.
Come visit sometime, it’s lovely here.
There are quite a few dots already on the globe, but I think it needs more. Why not add yours?
What are your thoughts?