Martha got upped to beta developer status at Ning, with a comment left by Marc Andreessen (no less). And I just got email today from Odeo that pointed me to a special audio feed for early sign-up folks. (Note to self: sign up for all beta Web 2.0 apps the day you learn about them.) That audio feed cleverly pointed me to my new capability as creator on the Odeo site.

This is an exciting and deeply interesting development. Odeo has a web interface that allows me to record audio directly to their website by taking a real-time microphone feed from my computer and storing it in mp3 format in a “channel” I create for that purpose at the Odeo site. It also allows me to republish my main audio feed from this blog/podcast site in a dedicated Odeo channel. Finally, it also allows me to aggregate those and any other feeds I select and republish them in a dedicated aggregate channel.

What else? I can either make the feeds public or share them with a private group. I’m not sure yet whether the groups can be saved–I just did my first test about ten minutes ago, so bear with me as I get the tool together. I can publish the feeds as RSS feeds or as m3u mp3 playlists. I can tag each channel and each individual show. Listeners can tag the feeds and shows they subscribe to. Listeners can leave comments (and there’s an RSS feature for these). They can rank the shows and feeds. They can email friends with a share-the-feed box. (Sounds like flickr for audio? You bet.) We can all see how many times each show has been played. (All the audio controls live within the web interface, complete with an easy-to-read audio level meter. Thank you, Flash.) Content creators can put links and images with their shows/feeds. Listeners can queue the files they want to listen to, creating a playlist within Odeo for later or current listening.

More:

Listeners can subscribe to their Odeo queues via iTunes.
I can store a list of contacts.
I can export my subscription list as OPML and put it in my public subscription list (Bloglines for me) or display it on my page. All will be updated automatically, of course; this is OPML.
I can publish audio feeds from a telephone (an important legacy from the developers’ audioblogging heritage)
The “may we control your computer” message that comes up when I hit “create” asks if it can control my microphone and my camera. Can we see where this is going?
There’s a tab for “upload media” that isn’t live. Yet.

I have questions, of course. What’s the “native” format of an Odeo-created feed? Any way to edit the audio besides erasing it? My hunch is “no,” as Odeo specifically says it’s for casual use–i.e., do-it-in-one-take, although you could do multiple tries until you got one you liked. What are the limits on recording times? How long will material recorded to the Odeo site be saved? Is there any way to dump the Odeo audio onto my local machine without “re-recording” it by capturing the streaming/downloaded audio?

Odeo has come up with a spiffy interface, a well-targeted mission, and a bunch of useful tools. I wish them well. And with multiple channels, I’ll be able to be the broadcasting magnate I’ve always yearned to be. That raises another question. Does Odeo have any plans a la Podshow.com to incorporate commercial development in their site? They do have the following item in their Terms of Use :

We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms. Accordingly, we will offer the ability to mark your content as belonging to the public domain or as licensed under a Creative Commons license.

There’s even a charming footnote to the Terms of Use:

“These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.”

Which raises the question of whether inspiration may be copyrighted. That is, do you need my permission to be inspired by me? Or is it simply good manners to say, “Excuse me sir, you’re inspiring me. Is that okay with you?”

Please do not adjust your sets:

We live in interesting times. Oh, and don’t overlook the Odeo blog. I almost missed it in all the excitement….

Actually, it was late in the afternoon when Vidya, Brian, and I talked about Croquet, Second Life, cognition, Star Trek, and lots of other exhilarating topics. They called it a “nightcap” because a) it was informal and b) it was intended to be a late-night chat experience for the listener.

For me, it was great fun. I hope it’s enjoyable for the listener as well. You can hear that I was in full EDUCAUSE-energy mode, jazzed by a great day of sessions and conversations, including a podcast interview with Matt Pasiewicz that I’d recorded just a few moments earlier. The “nightcap” came about because Vidya, Brian, and I didn’t want the conversation to end. The formal podcast interview should be up in the next few days.

I’m very much looking forward to our next chat, podcast or not. It’s always inspiring to talk to such bright, dedicated, imaginative people.

eSchool News reports on a new Intel/Center for Digital Education survey that indicates continued strong growth in wireless infrastructure deployment on US campuses. We’re just putting the finishing touches on our own initial wireless rollout at the University of Mary Washington. Given the data I’m seeing, it’s none too soon.

There’s also a list of the top 50 “unwired” campuses, and I’m pleased to see that my alma mater (Wake Forest University) makes a strong showing, just ahead of DePauw University, where Dennis Trinkle exercises his visionary, agile IT leadership. It’s also great to see two Virginia schools on the list: Hampton University (whose CIO just spoke at the EDUCAUSE closing session) and The College of William and Mary, where Gene “Techfoot” Roche, the inspiration for Gardner Writes (though he bears no responsibility for its contents otherwise), continues to be one of the most thoughtful and generous academic computing specialists I have met. Kudos as well to Courtney Carpenter, the W&M CIO whom I was privileged to meet over the summer. Their accomplishments keep the bar raised for all of us, and for that I am very grateful.

I’m at the 2005 EDUCAUSE convention and getting ready for tomorrow’s pre-conference workshop on digital assets management. I’m also looking forward to a reunion with some friends–friends I didn’t know just two years ago, when I first came to EDUCAUSE.

I’ve already heard from one of those friends, Bryan Alexander, who tells me the advance copies of the Nov./Dec. EDUCAUSE Review are in the convention registration packets. I have an essay on podcasting in this issue. (Hence the title of this blog post.) Editor Teddy Diggs and I thought it would be fun to podcast the article on podcasting, so here’s the audio version of my essay.

I very much enjoyed writing and podcasting this essay. The subject is near and dear to my heart, and Teddy was a great editor to work with: sharp, funny, humane, and vigilant. She coped very well with my desire to try to stay ahead of the news just as podcasting went mainstream with iTunes. Since the article went to bed in mid-September, Yahoo has come on board, and Apple has introduced its video iPod. I considered putting the late-breaking news into the podcast, but I wanted the audio version to be as close as possible to the print version so that the experiences could be compared more directly. I think and hope there’s enough analysis and musings in the article that it will be interesting and perhaps valuable even in the midst of rapidly evolving circumstances.

I found it harder to do the podcast than I had expected. It’s a longish piece–it runs about 50 minutes read aloud–and I wanted to do it all in one go as much as I could, rather than recording it in sections. That took some stamina, and I ended up with several complete takes that have quite different characters. In the end I went for something gentle instead of a more upbeat approach. I wanted the gentleness to carry both excitement and thoughtfulness. We’ll see if I got anywhere near. Comments are welcome, as always. I’m particularly curious about how the print and audio experiences compare; if you do both, let me know what you think. The print issue will be online next week, I imagine.

Thanks, Teddy, and thanks to Bart Prater of WROV Roanoke, the best radio teacher I ever had. Thanks too to my family, who gave up many hours of gaming, NeoPets, TV, and computer access so that I could wrestle my Rode NT1-A into submission and get a version I could live with.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (32.6MB)

Interesting blog entry from Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution” blog on Thomas More’s Utopia, a work that in C. S. Lewis’s phrase “starts many hares but catches none.” I’m not sure Lewis was absolutely right, but it is fascinating to see how many perspectives More’s justly famous piece rewards. I’m neck-deep in John Donne right now, and loving it, but next term my sixteenth-century lit. class will give me a chance to talk about More again. I’ll clip Cowen’s entry in my Bloglines account and have another conversation- or paper-starter for my class.

Cool.

I just read an excellent blog entry from Paul Angiolillo at Technology Review that compellingly demonstrates the need for hybridity in technology. Too often I find either nostalgia for older ways that, to be fair, were sometimes abandoned too quickly, or pedal-to-the-metal futurism that scorns anything pre-1999. The truth about technology, like most human truths, is much more complex, interesting, and provocative, and Paul’s blog entry today is a fine example of deep and precise thinking on this topic. More, please!

Teaser for Andy: Boston cops on technology-enhanced bikes.

The title demonstrates a false dichotomy, one right up there with books vs. e-text and dozens of others in this stage of the information age. One can fall off an elephant on both sides, after all.

The specific inspiration for the title comes from a Chronicle Wired Campus blog entry linking to an essay by Robert Johnson, CIO of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnson makes a good case that removing books from a library in favor of e-texts and social spaces is a shortsighted strategy. But then he falls off the elephant on the other side by insisting that the screen experience cannot in any way rival the print experience, which is one of great involvement, physical comfort, life-changing depth, and so forth. After awhile, I feel as if I’m watching a Maxwell House commercial, and anyone who knows me knows that I too love books with a mighty love.

But of course I love computers too. Funny how that works. Here I am writing and reading online. Not too long ago I was gently turning the pages of 16th- and 17th-century books in the Duke Humfrey’s Library at Oxford’s Bodleian library. I find both experiences compelling and valuable. I bet I’m not alone. Perhaps this is the issue, or the divide: there are those who have found compelling textual experiences online, and those who have not. My hunch is that Johnson is looking at online reading/writing through the wrong generic lens. It’s the difference between curling up with a novel and reading a blog. Both use writing, and both can be extraordinary, even transformative experiences.

The Chronicle’s blog entry features a long comment from Dartmouth’s Malcolm Brown that offers a very reasonable middle ground. Well worth reading, especially if one wants to stay on the elephant.

Not the kind from Quadrophenia, the kind I spent time on this summer and last spring, when I had time to spend on modding the blog. I needed to upgrade to WP 1.5.2 for a) security reasons and b) to install Spam Karma (following CogDog’s example).

Now I’ll need to a) remember all the mods and b) find time to tinker. But tinkering is fun, so all is not lost. (How else to approach the jigsaw puzzle of life, he asked portentously?)

EDIT: I restored the old version; couldn’t stand the plain space any longer. Now to discover how to do the 1.5.2 upgrade without killing the mods, if that’s possible.

EDITEDIT: Back to the new version. Comment spam was just too much. I’m slowly tweaking my way back to where I was.

Joan Vinall-Cox at WebToolsforLearners links to a very interesting essay in the University of Toronto magazine: “The Infinite Library.” Joan’s blog entry sums the piece up very well. My postcript is this little pull quote:

As UTL boosts its technological capabilities, Moore [Carole Moore, the chief librarian] likens the direction that the library is heading to a much earlier forebear – a medieval library. These institutions of the Middle Ages were not only book storehouses but places where manuscripts were rewritten and information was combined and republished in new ways, she says.

That’s a remix culture I can get behind. It’s also a little vindication for my oft-stated position that the online revolution reveals to us truths that have been hidden in plain sight for a long time.

Back from a reunion where I danced for hours with a perfect partner … clearing the decks and unpacking to watch more of disc two of the Dylan documentary … things about to come clear again. About to again. Why do you sing? Anything special to express? Will you suck your glasses? Donne would push farther, and so would Dylan. Donne pushed farther, and so did Dylan. Still pushing. What’s there when the fog clears? Anybody around to show it to? John? Bob? Joni? Brian? Johanna?