This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. It was developed by the BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D team – for this project consisting of myself, Tristan Ferne, Chris Bowley, Helen Crowe, Paul Clifford and Bronwyn Van Der Merwe. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.
More Classcaster Sitings
By way of correction, we are not using Shockwave to record podcasts. We are embedding a Flash MP3 player object in the post to play the audio, but the recording is done using a telephone connection or by uploading locally recorded MP3s. We are using the open source Musicplayer at the moment, but are developing our own player that is more tuned to playing single MP3s from a blog post.
RSS4Lib:: Shockwave Audio and Weblogs
The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content.
Classcaster features an Asterisk PBX on the backend that allows us to record phone calls and then generate a blog post containing the MP3 recording of the call. Blogging services are provided through a modified version of pLog. Taken together these tools allow Classcaster to be a full featured blogging and podcasting platform.
Splice All Those Feeds Together
KickRSS takes multiple RSS or ATOM feeds, combines them, and displays them as a single RSS feed or a webpage at an easy-to-remember URL.
License Free Fonts
Vitaly Friedman is collecting license-free fonts. That’s right, free as in beer; you’re able to use these for commercial work, and unlike most free font collections, there are some in here you may actually want to use. Consider plugging a few of these into your new, free copy of Font Explorer.
libmrss – RSS Library
ibmRSS is a C library for parsing, writing, and creating RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, but not RDF Site Summary) files or streams.
House Speaker Blogs!
Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has just started his own blog on the official speaker.gov site. I don’t know if he’ll keep up with it, but from reading his initial post, it seems clear that he’s not employing ghostbloggers.
OPML Validator Released (Beta)
Because it’s a beta, you shouldn’t depend on its results.
Oracle to Release FreeDb
Oracle intends to release a free version of its database, a reaction to the growing competitive pressure from low-end open-source databases.The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.
Facebook: A Social Network Success
On the reason why the first generation of social networks failed (as compared to MySpace and Facebook), he thinks that they have not focused on providing a set of utilities to their audience, they were merely about creating connections.
Software Only: The Facebook unplugged at Stanford ETL
This is a great article on the folks behind Facebook and how it is put together. The above quote makes me wonder: how can CALI create a social network among law students, among law faculty, amng law librarians? What utilites can we provide that would ignite a community and a social network?
Blogging the Day Away…
Trade paper AdAge.com reported this week that US workers would waste the equivalent of 551,000 years during 2005 reading blogs, online web diaries and gossip sheets, which have exploded in numbers in recent years.Around 35 million workers — one in four of the labour force in the United States — spend three-and-a-half hours, or nine percent of their working week on blogs, the survey found.
Blogs on the job: US workers waste millions of hours online – Yahoo! News