dose

The single thing, I think, that makes me happiest about LibriVox, is the Community Podcast, a random initiative of volunteer Jim Mowatt (now an admin).

The Community Podcast now has a number of regular hosts, inlcuding Sean (ductapeguy), and Alan (cloudmountain), and I think there have been some others. For 2007, hosting spots are going quickly, with various people signing up to get a chance to direct traffic.

And what happens on the Community Podcast? Talk about LibriVox, snippets of projects, reporting on stats, various pleas for help on slow-moving books, musings on the librivox, public domain, on books, on poetry, news, views, and all sorts of other sundry bits and pieces.

In any case, the most recent installment (mp3), is really a fabulous listen, whether or not you care about LibriVox. Alan hosts, David (Earthcalling) talks about his love for the crazy fringe projects of LibriVox, Annie (LibraryLady) discusses her relationship with poetry, and there are a few other things on there.

Once again, well worth a listen: LibriVox Community Podcast 19.

After ripping into Richard Dawkin’s for his embarassing book, The God Delusion, I was glad to hear this Dawkin’s talk online:

The Strangeness of Science

Human beings are unable to grasp the reality that exists beyond our perceptions. Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins explains why in the Beatty Memorial Lecture recorded at McGill University. Richard Dawkins is the also the author of a number of controversial books, The Selfish Gene, and most recently The God Delusion.

This is the sort of stuff he does well, and is a distilled version of the interesting stuff in God Delusion, without all that crap.

Julien just launched a wonderful project: Listen to Your Kids:

Listen To Your Kids connects kids that want to share with parents that want to listen, all through very simple, existing technologies.

I’ve always felt that the most effective innovations are created through connecting already powerful elements (think podcasting). Here, there is a telephone number, and a podcast feed. Anything (relevant) that gets said by kids in one end will come out the other, to be heard by parents all around the world. I hope we can make this a valuable learning tool for people everywhere

You can subscribe in itunes, or if you think that Apple’s near-total control of the podcast market is dangerous, you can infer the plain vanilla RSS feed, and use that to subscribe, and hear what kids around the world want to say to their parents.

Powerful idea, I think. I love it when friends launch these little projects - Julien hasn’t said a word about this, and just got it done. Kudos.

I’ll be away, so I can’t make it, but if you podcast, and you’re in town:

When : Dec 28th - 7:30 pm
Where: Café Melies - 514-847-9218
3540 St Laurent, Montréal, QC H2X 2V1
Reservation under Twist Image or Mitch..

More info chez Bob.

Barak Obama is, apparently, the great hope for the Democrats in the US … he’s got a podcast, which you can find:

• on Collectik

or

• at his own site.

And, now I know his position on Network Neutrality (episode from June 8, 2006) … saying:

It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it.

Please pop in if you are nearby, I’ll be there:

News Conference at Atwater Library and Computer Centre
1200 Atwater Avenue (at Tupper)
Thursday, November 30th at 4:00 PM

Senator Andrée Champagne
to Speak about Digital Literacy Project Serving Youth and Community Organizations

24 November 2006 – Conservative Senator Andrée Champagne, the Quebec caucus representative for cultural issues, along with Atwater Library and Computer Centre (ALCC) Board members will hold a news conference at the ALCC at 1200 Atwater Avenue (corner of Tupper) on Thursday, November 30th at 4:00 pm.

Senator Champagne will make a presentation about a Department of Canadian Heritage contribution to an exciting new ALCC initiative called the Atwater Digital Literacy Project. The goal of the project is to develop and support creative new media learning programs for Anglophone youth and community organizations. New media include audio, video animation and text publishing done through the internet.

more info about the project.

Just signed up for: PodCampToronto

Deets:
Date: February 24-25, 2007
Place: Rogers Communications Centre at Ryerson University
80 Gould Street, Toronto
Registration: Free (wiki sign-up).

This American Life is podcasting for free (again), this time officially:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast.xml

M-C just launched a new blogging/audio/video servcie called stars of the web. It’s got text and audio, but the killer ap for me is the video thing. You can, with zero effort (if, like me, you have a little camera built-into your computer) record and post a video to the net, then easily copy paste the code into your blog so it appears there. Thus… UPDATE: there seems to be a bit of a bug in the code snippet to embed the vid- crashes my wordpress layoyt. but you can check the vid here: video.

Mike just announced the launch of HAL … a demonic onboard computer that … no. wait. that’s not right.

HAL = hub des artists local. The idea (I think) is to serve local artwork (music, vid, visual art etc) to ile sans fil login pages at their free wifi hotspots. But don’t take my word for it: visit ISF’s HAL page.

Launch party at Sala Rosa, Monday Oct 8. 8pm. $3.