When you begin reading, you are already on a mission to find an answer. You follow along as the story unfolds, and when you've finished reading, you discover for yourself if the story is a tragedy, a comedy, or just a rewarding saga with a happy ending. The conclusion you reach is entirely dependant on your own skill and the writing efficacy of your narrator.

The howto is a unique sort of story, because in a howto, you, the reader, are the protagonist.

I'm really enamored with the form of the howto, whether done up in HTML, complete with images and figures, or the plain text variety that you find tucked away in the installation path of almost every open source software package ever made.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people experimenting with media rich audio and video instructional programs. Up to this point, I don't think it's been particularly successful. The temporal nature of audio and video makes it extremely difficult to present enough information to make the howto effective. Take a look at the instructions on building a warspying box on the first systm episode and you'll see what I mean. Well done, and very entertaining, but not sufficient for instruction.

Things are about to change, though. With iTunes 4.9, you can now create "enhanced" podcasts which incorporate audio, photos, url links, and chapter/index information into a single media program.

Phil Torrone wrote a nice howto on creating these enhanced podcasts and he also posted Make Magazine's first enhanced podcast, a howto on making a PSP charger. If you're interested in really digging in, more detailed instructions can be found on the Voxmedia Wiki.

I'm really excited to see the things people come up with for this emerging format. Would anyone here want to try experimenting with the enhanced podcasting? I'd love to see someone post a compelling howto or an interesting story.

If you've made a great piece, let me know and I'll help you put it up for people to listen.

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