After 12 years, Yahoo’s “picks” feature has packed up. I have been following it off and on since its inception and especially in the early years when there wasn’t so much going on on the web it was for me an invaluable information source. I suppose Yahoo’s owners believe that there’s no point in hand-picking when the wisdom of crowds finds the ‘cool’ automatically. I’ll miss it, if only because of nostalgia…

Over at Media @ LSE I just posted about my experiences with Librivox - a free project to read public domain texts aloud turning them into audiobooks. I hate to criticize a bunch of people just trying to help spread the availability of classic works but… well… check out my posting…

365 Ways to Change the World - stocked by the cash register of my local bookstore - includes “Fight child slavery with fairtrade chocolate” alongside, “Influence the world’s media: become a blogger”. Unless you happen to live in a country or situation that is both inaccessible and newsworthy or you have specialist expertise and connections to the mainstream media you are unlikely to make much of an impact on the mainstream media, and in any case there are many reasons to blog and a desire to influence the world’s media is one of the least common.

Here’s a radio series I am going to have to record - Meet the bloggers - mostly A list British personal bloggers but also featuring an interview with the ubiquitous Instapundit.

Wow - at last you can look at the BBC News site statistics in some detail so you can see who reads what (at least for the top ten stories in a given subject or continent - and without exact page views).

Interestingly, the site’s announcement of this feature is in the top 10 even though it doesn’t appear on the front page….

I am beginning to realise there is no reason for me to be bored ever again…

My biggest problem remains books - I occaisionally run out of books I am interested in reading (I tend to rely on book reviews from The Guardian, Time Out, or more occaisional outlets). I do really wish that as much work was dedicated to making book reviews and recommendations available and searchable online as has been devoted to movies and music. But now that I am an academic I have plenty of interesting books and papers I can and should read alongside my recreational reading.

I am not a great TV watcher anyway but now that I have a DVD recorder I have recorded more documentaries and movies than I will ever have time to watch - around 70 hours unwatched on DVD, another ten hours or so of unwatched - and unlikely to be watched - videotape and perhaps 500 hours or so of stuff I have already watched but am keeping for a rainly… er… month. In fact the size of my collection is starting to alarm me a little.

I spend most of my time in front of this lovely little iBook and as you can see from my link list on the R there is plenty there to both interest and entertain me online…

Which used to just leave the time I can’t spend in front of a book or screeen - when I am in the shower, cycling around or doing the dishes or ironing etc - which I tend to spend listening to an MP3 player. I selectively recorded the many speech radio programs listed at R from the Internet into MP3 format and listened to them, normally in preference to music (though I now have nearly 15Gb of MP3s now that I have almost completely digitised my CD collection). There too as with books I sometimes found that I would sometimes ‘consume’ faster than I could ‘collect’ good listening material. Now with the arrival of podcasting (see new collection of links on R) I am finding at last that there is more interesting stuff coming in than I can listen to in a week and my last ‘content gap’ has been filled.

Like I said - there is no reason I need ever be un-stimulated. But I fear this may be a bit of a problem. I am getting used to having every waking moment filled with some kind of stimulus, and I can’t help thinking this isn’t particularly healthy. It also means there is an abundance of distractions available for my all-too-distractable mind…

Playlist magazine has a handy roundup of places to get free or cheap audiobooks, including an interesting organization called Tell Tale Weekly which sells the audiobooks it produces but for very small sums and gives the money to the people who read out the books, which has helped to produce a reasonably large list of available works. Then after five years (or 100,000 downloads) it releases the audiobooks that have been digitised under a Creative Commons license. Librivox is a similar effort but relies on volunteers to read the books and charges nothing for the result. There are a couple of books read by people available through Project Gutenberg as well - lots more if you are happy to listen to computer-generated dictation.

If you want to hear free contemporary SF instead, check out Escape Pod (which broadcasts short stories) and Podiobooks which hasn’t quite launched yet but you can subscribe to it through iTunes or whatever and wait…

Benjamen Walker’s Theory Of Everything is quite like one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life, but… well… stranger (which is sometimes no bad thing). Ben is a professional radio producer and it shows.

If you are more interested in technology (and I am guessing most of you have some interest in it) the top-ranked podcast at the moment - This Week In Tech - is head and shoulders above much of the podcasting rabble. It features a large round table of tech luminaries and is a very convincing and enjoyable reproduction of the kind of tech-related banter, gossip and bluster that I used to enjoy myself when I was a tech journalist (though at over an hour each week it may be a little self-indulgent). For daily more ’straight’ tech snippets, you could try Future Tense, and for recordings from the many technology-related conferences that seem to happen every other day across the US you should check out IT Conversations. And if you are a hardcore Macintosh user you should try listening to the MacCast (though frankly it could do with a little pruning as there is a lot of discussion of minutiae on it).

Update: If you want more audiobooks for no payment there are a number of streamed options. They are less easily downloadable (you need to use Total Recorder - PC - or WireTap Pro - Mac - to turn them into MP3s) but OneWord radio offers free audiobooks and book commentary 24 hours a day (streamed only) and the BBC - Radio 4 and BBC7 broadcast less but includes some originally commissioned work too and unlike OneWord the streams are archived (if only for a week) which makes capturing easier. A few BBC radio programmes are even being podcast (though not drama yet).
Podcast Review

Visiting the Edinburgh Festival,
originally uploaded by D & D.

This packed schedule gives you an idea of the richness of this amazing event. Of course we won’t be able to see even a fraction of the tens of thousands of performances at this the world’s biggest arts festival. The advent of the Internet has been a godsend in helping to arrange our upcoming visit. Not only can we listen to interviews with the artists and read several blogs by performers and critics but we can access the invaluable reviews by the Scotsman and others mixed in with the comprehensive listings for all five of the currently-running festivals, and read comments by fringe festival-goers as well on the Fringe Festival’s own site. The latter even offers SMS voting for shows. The Stage also has a pretty comprehensive Edinburgh review festival and fringe reviews and listings site. This way we can get some idea of the ‘buzz’ around shows before we take the sleeper up and book what we are interested in - which is just as well since I’m sure a lot of the best stuff will already be sold out for the rest of its run…

To my small collection on Flickr. I have to say it’s pretty astonishing to me that my 44 pictures (mostly pretty rubbish or unlikely to be interesting for anyone but myself and family) have been viewed altogether 2153 times to date. Of course several of them were taken at a wedding which would help boost pageviews…

“A home for all your digital media”:http://ourmedia.org/ - for free and forever. A very exciting prospect! See my posting on the LSE group weblog for more details.