Listen to Librivox Community Podcast Show #57– Ductapeguy’s Podversary

This episode of the Librivox Community Podcast marks my (ductapeguy’s) one year anniversary of podcasting. To celebrate, Jim Mowatt and I had a wide ranging skype conversation. I really consider being a Librivox volunteer and helping to produce the community podcast was my University of Podcasting. During the conversation we talk about current news around the Librivox community, as well as my other podcasts, For the Sake of the Song, and White Trash Land.

Topics Discussed:

Librivox on Twitter

Gesine provides an overview of ways to subscribe to librivox books using RSS, itunes, or by Email. Thanks To Tis and JackDale for setting up the code for the Chapter a Day Emails. You can also now click a link on the forum page of any work in progress to be informed when that audiobook is complete.

Explanation of the recent outages on Librivox.org

• Changes to the Librivox Uploader.
• Discussion of the Flac Audio format.

Special Rules Projects currently underway in the Librivox Community:

SPECIAL RULES MYSTERY: The 2nd Latchkey by Williamson

SPECIAL RULES: Exercises in Knitting by Cornelia Mee

LibriVox NaNoWriMo 2007: “The Blue Tulip”

Sean (ductapeguy’s) other projects:

For the Sake of the Song: A podcast featuring interviews with songwriters and their songs.

White Trash Land A podcast novel by Andrew Beatty. Narrated by Sean McGaughey

Other sites mentioned:

podiobooks.com

JC Hutchins Seventh Son Trilogy

Sean’s Really Bad Review

Sean and Jim discuss a terrible user review Sean received on podiobooks.com and the librivoxian response to it. The discussion continued into the time honored, “What if I suck?” into styles of reading and the privilege and responsibility it is to be a reader of another person’s words.

Kara (kayray) and Henry drop by with this week’s stats.

To Subscribe to the Librivox Community Podcast, go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibrivoxCommunityPodcast
or hit this itunes link to get you to the subscribe page http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=203970211

Past and present Librivox Community Podcast files can be found at Archive.org

Archived shownotes for the Librivox Community Podcast can be found at http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/
and the rss feed for those shownotes is http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/feed

Hosts Sean McGaughey (ductapeguy) and Jim Mowatt

Listen to Librivox Community Podcast 44

1. LV Theme

2. What is a Podcast?

   1. basically a downloadable media file on the internet

   2. Do you need an ipod? :Play Music– Uncle Seth- You Don’t need an ipod and John C. Havens of the About.com Guide To Podcasting

       

3. What are RSS Subscription Feeds?

4. Ways to listen to a podcast

   1. itunes

   2. another podcatcher Windows and Mac: Juice , Windows: Winpodder , Linux: Amarok

   3. Direct from a website (on a player) or downloaded

   4. On your computer, on Mp3 player, FM transmitter, Burn to CDs

   5. Even on Thunderbird email program

    

5. Producing the Librivox Podcast

   1. Get some ideas together

   2. Solicit input

   3. Record, receive Recordings

   4. Edit Edit Edit Edit

   5. Save to Mp3

   6. Upload to Server

   7. encode RSS Feed and upload (sometimes automatic)

   8. Make shownotes and post on blog and on forum

   9. Sit back and relax

6. Time to produce weekly podcast. About 1 week

7. LV New Releases Podcast. Outward facing vs inward facing podcast.

8. LV Podcasters: Sean Jim, Alan, TBOL3, Kri, Betsie, David, Caeristhiona, Catharine Eastman, Hugh, who else???

9. Librivoxians who have their own podcasts: Kara, Jim, Mark Nelson, FNH? TBOL3, Cloudmountain, ductapeguy. I’m sure we’ve missed a bunch. Stand up and be counted in the comments if we forgot to mention you

10. Namedropping: Links mentioned in the podcast.

    1. Podcast411

    2. Gigavox: Levelator

This weekend we held a Librivox Worldwide Gathering at various locations around the world. Esther aka starlite, came to our house and we spent the day recording audio, and talking with librivox volunteers around the world. At the end of the afternoon, we recorded this week’s Librivox Community Podcast with Catharine who lives in the San Fransisco area.

Show notes follow:
Librivox Community Podcast Show 35 is now available at the Archive.org page for the LV community podcast or from your podcatchers.
To subscribe please use this FeedBurner link FeedBurner link

The direct link to the show is here.

Host: Sean McGaughey, Catharine Eastman, and Esther Lockwood
Length: 28:00

1. Welcome to the Librivox Worldwide Gathering by Sean
2. Worldwide Recitation of the Librivox Disclaimer.
3. Greetings by Shurtagal (California), Betsie, Julian and Kirstin (Chicago), Esther and Sean (Ontario), Catharine (California) and Lucy (Australia). We also spoke with David Barnes, and Chris Hughes in Great Britain, but failed to record greetings from them.
4. Catharine, Sean and Esther had did a lengthy survey of the Childrens Literature available on Librivox. Any of the works mentioned can be found on the Librivox Catalogue by clicking on More Search Options and doing a Genre Search for children.
Here is the search page we used.
5. Sarah came to give us a child’s eye view and told us about her favorite pocast, The Radio Aventures of Doctor Floyd which can be found at http://doctorfloyd.com/ . She can also be heard singing and playing in the background throughout the podcast.
6. Catharine’s cats also make a cameo appearance.
7. The show ends with an impromptu singing of the Librivox Theme, followed by a father-daughter recitation of the disclaimer by Sean and Sarah.

Enjoy

This week, Jon Udell interviewed Hugh McGuire, the founder of Librivox on the IT Conversations, Interviews with innovators podcast. You can listen to it here.
http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/itconversations-1783.mp3

During the conversation Jon Udell said that Wired magazine interviewed him about Librivox, then didn’t use the information because Librivox wasn’t a “Killer App”.
I wrote the following reflections on the Librivox Forums. You can follow the conversation here.

6 Reasons Librivox is a Killer Application

I think in many ways Librivox is becoming a ‘killer app’

My understanding of a ‘killer app’ is a use for computers that attracts a new and large amount of people to buy and/or use their computers specifically for that purpose. One can argue that email, itunes, IM, craiglist, and EBAY are all Killer apps. Wikipedia describes a killer application as “a computer program that is so useful or desirable that it proves the value of some underlying technology, such as a gaming console, operating system, or piece of computer hardware.”

Reason #1: Getting Grandma and Grandpa recording
As a member of the tech-support generation, over the last 10 years, I have spent a substantial portion of my holidays and countlesss phone calls helping my parents and grandparents maintain and use their computers effectively. What is their killer app?– Communication with family. Pictures of grandchildren over email, instant messages with children flung across the globe, genealogy, contacting distant relatives.

At Librivox, we are seeing more and more retired people with grandchildren, who see the value of our project and are taking the daunting step of buying logitech usb microphones (because we tell them to) and downloading audacity so that they can record for us. (Wait I’ll call my son who knows computers– “How do I download this audacity thing”). We’ve seen this story played out many times. I would say that this qualifies Librivox as a “killer app”.

Reason #2: RSS Feeds, Turning the Entire Catalog Into Podcasts
On yesterday’s Canadian Podcast Buffet, Mark Blevis interviewed Charles Hodgson of the excellent Podictionary podcast, where he discusses the etymology of a different word each day. Charles made the point each Christmas, millions of people receive IPods and immediately go to itunes to find content for them. Many people have told us that we produce ideal content for their IPods. This week’s addition RSS and Itpc subscription feeds to all the works in our catalogue makes it much easier. I strongly believe that we will come to see these XML feeds as a “killer app” for librivox. A next step might be to get our entire catalogue listed in the podcast directory of the Itunes music store.

Reason #3: Turning Consumers into Producers
Let’s remember that You are The 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year. By “You” Time Magazine meant anybody who is producing their own creative works and sharing them with the world through the magic of modern computers and the Internet. Youtube, podcasts, blogs, and websites offer anybody a zero cost to low cost means of creating and distributing their own work to anybody of like interests anywhere in the world. Most of the active volunteers here would agree that it is way more fun producing media than merely passively consuming it. I hardly watch any television any more. I would rather be working on audiobooks, producing my podcasts, or listening to other people’s podcasts. One of the tremendous strengths of Librivox is that we teach people how to become a creator of content (young or old, of any technical skill level). Once they know how to record audio, upload to the net, create a podcast, etc…, we are seeing them develop on to their own projects. In my Librivox journey, I began by recording the weekly poem, then infrequent chapters for books that interested me, followed by volunteering to host the community podcast, and eventually developing podcasts of my own outside of Librivox. In a way, I used Librivox and its tremendous community resources as a kind of Podcasting Night School. Thank you all for that.

Reason #4: Turning interested people around the world into a genuine community.
Our greatest strength is our community. It is not just a word we use. We have taken great pains to have a welcoming, nurturing forum and I think that makes us stand out from so many other online ‘communities’ where venturing onto their bulletin boards is a frightening wild-west scenario of trolls and flame-wars. With the launch of local chapters and our upcoming Worldwide Gathering we are growing into a genuine club, not unlike the Kiwanis, or scifi- fandom.

Reason #5: Enriching the Public Domain and Educating People about copyright.
I’ve said this many times, but Librivox is at the forefront of the copyfight. We are taking existing public domain written works and enriching them by producing audio books. As a side effect, our volunteers and listeners are being made aware of the current worldwide copyright craziness and our hopefully learning about the importance of the public domain, and alternative ways of releasing creative works such as the creative commons.

Potential Reason Librivox is a Killer APP: The Proposed Librivox Bookshelf
The proposed Librivox Bookshelf, where users can create their own collections of Librivox books and share them (by RSS or OPML?) presents a new opportunity for our passive listeners, those people who download and listen to our works but do not post to the forums, record, or prooflisten. With their bookshelves, they could share their favorite books with their friends and family. Teachers could create audio bookshelves of course material. Reading clubs could form ….

Getting back to the ITC interview where John said that Wired Magazine did not pick up the article on Librivox because Librivox is not a ‘killer app’, I must heartily disagree. Using open source free tools, the internet, and the public domain, I think that we are on the forefront of a great wave of people making instead of consuming media and that Librivox will come to be recognized as a ‘killer app’ in that revolution.

 Episode 4- Angels [15:09m]: Play in Popup | Download (587)

I have no guest for Episode 4, just little old me and 2, count ‘em 2 brand-spanking new songs.

Theme Music: For the Sake of the Song (©2003 S. McGaughey)

Last week I was deeply moved by this picture in the Toronto Star on Thursday March 29.

The picture, by Cathie Coward, from the Hamilton Spectator shows the impression left when a 5 year old boy fell 9 stories from a balcony– and lived to tell the story. That very day I wrote the song, Angels (© 2007 Sean McGaughey). I hope it moves you as much as it moved me. The article and picture can be found here (from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record).

Every week the volunteers at Librivox.org choose a public domain poem to be recorded by as many volunteers as possible. This week’s poem is Beautiful Soup by Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland.

Song #2 Beautiful Soup ( Written by Lewis Carroll Arranged by Sean McGaughey). I have dedicated my arrangement of Beautiful Soup to the public domain.

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Canadian Podcast Buffet

Buffalo Live! Music Podcast

Deyscast

White Trash Land

Podiobooks.com

Creative Commons

Upcoming Guests of For the Sake of the Song: Aaron Howes, Ken Allen, Pushbuttons, Chuck Baker and Russ Clayton.

Song 3: Chuck Baker: Music for Depicting Fight Scenes, Riots, etc.

Add this podcast to your favorite podcatcher at http://feeds.feedburner.com/For_The_Sake_Of_The_Song

Librivox Community Podcast 26 March 8, 2007

librivox_community_podcast_26.mp3 43:30

Hosts: Sean McGaughey (ductapeguy) and Jim Mowatt with special guest, Hugh McGuire

1. LV Theme

2. Librivox Hellos to Podcamp Toronto

3. Introduction and how Jim was able to “attend podcamp”

4. Sean McGaughey– For the Sake of the Song, live from Podcamp Toronto 2007

5. Interview with Steve “Snowball” Saylor from This Week in Geek

6. Discussion with Jim Regarding the VoxForge Speech Recognition thread Help Improve Open Source Speech Recognition, on the forum

7. Stats by Hugh

8. Other Libri Projects

9. Interview with Connie Crosby

10. Promo Time:

    1. Help us to complete as many books as possible during MARCH MADNESS!

    2. Sean (ductapeguy) recorded a book written by his brother-in Law Andrew Beatty, White Trash Land and it is just about to be released on Podiobooks.com.

11. Jim gives an overview of Newly Started Projects.

12. darwin & boing boing Discussion on the completion of Darwin’s Origin of the Species and BoingBoing.

13. Uncle Seth at Podcamp,

14. Blooper by ductapeguy.

My mother points out that it is over a year since I updated this blog.
Actually she pointed out that it was 3 months, … and 6 months… and 9
months… You get they idea.

In the last 1-1/2 years, I have been very busy with a new workplace, a
new home, listening to a million podcasts, booking acts for a folk club,
recording public domain audio-books for Librivox.org, spending time with
my wife and daughter, and rediscovering my faith.

In an attempt to rediscover this blog, I will start to answer the
question: So what have you been up to?

Funny you should ask.

1. On the music front, my entire CD and several newer songs are available
   on my EZFOLK.COM site. http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/600/
2. Last December 26, one of my songs, Homeless  Babe was included on a list of 128 CC licensed Christmas Songs on Some Rights Reserved, the blog of Uwe Hermann, a German Debian developer. The article was featured on boingboing!   This led to over 1500 downloads throughout the year. The song is
   currently the #1 all-time downloaded Christmas song on Ezfolk.com.
3. I still maintain my classroom webpage, but at a different school. Mr. McGaughey’s Grade 2 class  http://par.scdsb.on.ca/classes/mcgaughey
4. I have been recording chapters of public domain audiobooks for Librivox.org. Over 2500 people from around the world are volunteering to try torecord ALL PUBLIC DOMAIN WRITINGS and release them as free
   audiobooks. My (somewhat out of date) page on librivox is http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/DuctapeGuy
   . Some of my contributions to librivox include: Host of Librivox Community Podcast

   Episode  5: October 12, 2006

   Episode 6: October 19, 2006

   Short Poetry

   I Do Not Love Thee by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

   “Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams,Weekly Poetry August 14, 2006

   Collaborative Books

   Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse by Anna Sewell

   Chapter 18 - Going for the Doctor

   Chapter 19 - Only Ignorance

   The Junior Classics [vol 1] - by William Patten: Fairy and Wonder Tales

   Boots and the Princess- done

   The Bear And the Fox - done

   Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

   10 - The Old House - 00:19:31

   20000 Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne

   Chapter 08. “Mobilis in Mobili” - Done August 14, 2006

   Chapter 09. The Tantrums of Ned Land - Done August 15, 2006

   Chapter 10. The Man of the Waters - Done August 16, 2006

5. Mundy’s Bay Folk Society: http://mundysbay.ca  For 17 years, the Mundy’s Bay Folk Society has provided live Music in the community of Midland, Ontario. I book the bands and take care of the web page for them. (Please come out to see the wonderful Toronto roots-country songwriter Greg Hobbs on November 24, 2006.

It’s time for supper. I will continue with this thread another day.