Joe Janes and the iSchool podcast

I sometimes have a hard time talking about technologies I don’t know much about. I can see things like cell phones in a professional context — library policy, kids IM on them, they’re good for updates — as well as in a personal context — I don’t have one, I can’t get service at my house, if I really wanted one, I would have one. I feel this way about podcasts as I’ve said before. I don’t listen much to radio shows, sometimes I feel like the only person of my political persuasion who isn’t an NPR junkie, so podcasting doesn’t appeal. On the other hand, the whole idea of personally created content appeals to me much the same way that zines do. How great is it to be able to produce your own radio show and immediately be able to distribute it internationally? Seems sort of great. With that in mind, I point you to InfoSpeak created by the tech-positive smarties at the University of Washington iSchool (yes I went there, no it wasn’t anything like this when I was there). It’s “student-produced serial media” which, yes, is a podcast, but if you don’t get the whole podcast blah blah blah, you can also just listen to it online, simple. First episode, one of my favorite talkers Joe Janes, iSchool prof and Google pundit talking about how Google is changing the way we work, among other things. Check out the links next to the description, that’s what I’d like to see from more podcasters. Happy inaugural podcast, iSchool! [thanks carolyn]

librivox serendipity

A few people had sent me a link to LibriVox before I left on the trip and it was in the queue to look at when I got back. I ran into Hugh McGuire at the Open Content Alliance Open Library Launch (his blog notes) and was happy to be able to say “Hey your link is in my inbox” and then get to talk to the man himself about the work that he does with group of dedicated volunteers. With a tagline like “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain” you’ve got to believe they have big plans. The specific project involves volunteers recording chapters of books and making the audio files available. The broader vision is to have “all books in the public domain to be available, for free, in audio format, on the internet.” You can have a copy of Call of the Wild to use however you want and whenever you want, thanks to LibriVox and the four volunteers who read and recorded the chapters. What are you waiting for, go volunteer to read something! Hugh is also on the board of Canda’s oldest lending library in case you were skeptical about his librarian cred.