As a quick glance at the links on the right hand side of this weblog clearly shows I like listening to speech online (or rather I like using Total Recorder to transform realaudio streams into MP3s which I then listen to on my MP3 player). So the increasing prominence of podcasting should be a godsend for me you’d think. Indeed, a few interesting programs I already know like Go Digital have embraced podcasting. But I’m still finding it hard to find anything much out there I want to listen to – I haven’t found a good trusted source to guide me through the profusion of sources out there.

There are 437 “audio blogs” registered with the iTunes podcast directory (which you need iTunes to visit), and hundreds of “technology-related” podcasts, plus 191 “politics” podcasts and 134 movie and television podcasts but seemingly no way of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Apple provides a Top 100 podcast list but without reviews, and there is seemingly no way to get to their list of “top n” by category (plus there is some suggestion the ‘top lists’ can be manipulated). Random sampling of ‘top’ podcasts recommended by sites like Podcast Alley was at first disappointing.

Fortunately, I have started to find the odd interesting podcast at last. Resonance FM an experimental station in London featured quite a funny mock-lecture by Kevin Eldon, This is England by a pair of Brits features interviews with random people doing interesting jobs in the English countryside, “Escape Pod” – a podcast of SF authors reading their short stories (excellent idea – I want to find more free short story feeds – preferably of classic and/or out of print authors) and best of all Ewan Spence and a gang of colleagues are doing a daily podcast from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival which will be very useful for keeping up with what’s hot and not over the coming weeks.

I would be interested in anyone else’s recommendations either for individual podcasters or for sites that help you find the best ones. It will be interesting to see whether podcasting gets to be as big a phenomenon as blogging. Speaking seems to be a more ‘natural’ way of communicating with people than typing does but it turns out that making something that people will actually want to listen to is even more difficult than writing something because editing audio is a lot harder to do…
Podcast Review

As Salon pointed out to me, the wonderful folks at the Internet Archive have 150 tracks of Caruso singing – part 1 and part 2 – turned from 78s into MP3s. Download what you like before some idiot lengthens the term of copyright even more and it goes out of the public domain again…

And along similar lines, I was encouraged to learn that the BBC’s recent experiment with free Beethoven downloads garnered millions of downloads – many more than any commercial single sales.

I just heard about the Blogathon. On August 6th, bloggers will participate in a 24 hour marathon of posting for charity – one post every half hour. I think this is a nifty idea and there are some good charities on their suggested list (though in fact you can blog for any charity you like). I encourage anyone reading to participate themselves, though it turns out I can’t do it myself.

If you are thinking of doing this yourself and trying to find a charity to support, I did some investigation and chose wateraid as my potential beneficiary (when I thought I might participate in the blogathon) because potable drinking water is a basic necessity without which it’s hard to do any further development and the organization appears to be doing good environmentally sensitive and sustainable work in this area.

Wouldn’t you know it I ended up in Bloomsbury where two of the blasts occurred and suddenly it seemed like everywhere I looked were police cordons and other things that reminded me of the bombs. I have put up a few pictures on Flickr that I took using my mobile phone’s lousy camera and added them to the London Bomb Blasts pool there.

A friend suggested that someone should make “an ‘eyedropper’ style tool so I can click to select a location and drag the lat/long onto one of my photos to geocode it with the location information.” (In Flickr, please).

I pointed out LazyWeb exists to help dreams like this come true!

I’ve taken a few pictures of our trip to Geneva and uploaded them here. It’s hard to go wrong when taking pictures of the alps…

Flickr would have been a better place to put them (it offers more flexible organization, easy commenting tools, more storage etc) but I have exceeded the meagre 20Mb a month limit on uploading pictures to their free account. If anyone reading would be willing to donate $25 or a reasonable fraction thereof to buy us a year’s Pro subscription as an unbirthday present, I would be grateful…

While Skype (which I am using extensively these days) makes it easy to call your Internet-using friends for free you normally have to pay something if you want to call a conventional phone using a voice over IP service (BBC hype notwithstanding). One organization, however, is enabling completely free of charge phoning – the fwdOUT Network. The catch is that you have to be running a Linux-based PBX on your own phone (thus enabling others to share your line) in order to participate.

Free World Dialup (by some of the same people) used to offer free calls to a number of locations around the world to anyone using an IP phone but I guess that wasn’t economically viable and it now offers straight computer to computer telephony….

Just a quick note to mention to any of my friends or fellow academics that read this that I am often logged into Skype these days (now that I have a laptop with built in mic and speakers). For those who don’t know Skype is a mixture of instant message application and Internet telephone). My Skype ID is, unsurprisingly, “DavidBrake”. If I don’t know you please let me know why I should let you connect to me (I set my Skype to “contacts only”).

Update: That’s “DavidBrake” not “David Brake” as I thought…

“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.

“Eszter Hargittai”:http://www.esztersblog.com/ just suggested I look at Stever Robbins’ column – Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload – which was written in a Harvard Business School alumni publication. It is a very useful compilation of hints and tips. So useful in fact that for a minute I was sure it was cribbed from my own book “Dealing with E-mail”:http://www.well.com/user/derb/dealingwithemail/ or my weblog or something. But on going through it again it seems to be a case of great minds thinking alike. In any case it is well worth taking a look at if you are deluged by email.