My friends Bob and Mark at the Canadian Podcast Buffet have declared December 1 as the Great Canadian National Day of Podcasting. Looking through my folders of recordings from this summer, I found the perfect material for a national celebration of podcasting. Last spring, Bob Ledrew invited me to come to the Ottawa Folk Festival in August to record an audiobook of public domain Canadian literature for Librivox, with volunteer readers from festival performers, organizers and audience members. We chose to record The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service. During the weekend, I was able to record For the Sake of the Song interviews with a number of musicians, which will be featured in upcoming episodes.
This special episode of For the Sake of the Song is an audio journal of some of the highlights of my weekend at the Ottawa Folk Festival.
Music in the Bush by Robert Service. Read by Jill Zmud.
The Tramps by Robert Service reading and guitar by Chris Page.
I have yet to complete the task of releasing the completed Ottawa Folk Festival Collection of Robert Service poems on Librivox.org, but I intend to during my Christmas holidays.
You can leave comments on the blog, send me an email to ductapeguy at hotmail dot com, send me a voice feedback at 206-666-7374
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:
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.
On your computer, on Mp3 player, FM transmitter, Burn to CDs
Even on Thunderbird email program
Producing the Librivox Podcast
Get some ideas together
Solicit input
Record, receive Recordings
Edit Edit Edit Edit
Save to Mp3
Upload to Server
encode RSS Feed and upload (sometimes automatic)
Make shownotes and post on blog and on forum
Sit back and relax
Time to produce weekly podcast. About 1 week
LV New Releases Podcast. Outward facing vs inward facing podcast.
LV Podcasters: Sean Jim, Alan, TBOL3, Kri, Betsie, David, Caeristhiona, Catharine Eastman, Hugh, who else???
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My friends Bob and Mark at the 
