dose

Mike was hoping for some blogging while I was in San Fran…unfortunately I was busy doing things that did not include ruining my eyesight and generating carpal tunnel syndrome. I visited my pal John B, saw family in Sacramento, hung out a bit with fling93, and went to Porter Creek Winery, an amazing little vinyard in the so-beautiful Russian River area of California.

But I did go to the launch of the Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archives and the Open Content Alliance, as a representative of LibriVox. (newly moved to librivox.org, please update your links). I wrote a long review of the event over that LibriVox, but here’s the highlight:

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and the driving force behind this project made the case for his exciting challenge: to deliver “universal access to all human knowledge” … to provide an Alexandria for all the people everywhere (as long as they have internet access!). As he went through his speech/presentation, there were a number of periods of clapping, hurrahs etc. But this moment made me a little teary-eyed, I must admit. Brewster was demonstrating, on-screen, the Open Library version of the International Episode … and after flipping through a few pages, he clicked on the “listen” button.

You can’t hear it in the recording I made—which is stuck in my iriver for the moment, I’ll have it available in a couple of days, sorry about that!—but there was an audible gasp in the audience, as in “wow” … and then on came Alex reading for LibriVox… when Brewster pressed stop, the crowd went crazy with applause.

How cool is that?