This Friday, Tom Peters and I will sit down together (yet hundreds of miles apart) and have a Casual Conversation. Time is 2:00 EDT. Not entirely sure what Tom’s got on his mind to chat about, but I’m sure it will be worth your time. Or at least mine.

Here’s the promo from the OPAL site:

Friday, July 11, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 1:00 Central, noon Mountain, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, and 7:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

A Casual Conversation with Greg Schwartz

Greg Schwartz is the Library Systems Manager at the Louisville Free Public Library, a blogger at Open Stacks, and the host with the most at Uncontrolled Vocabulary, a live weekly Internet-based audio program.The Casual Conversations series is designed to be up-close and personal from a respectable online distance. While there are many conferences (in-person, online, and in-world) where librarians can hear leaders in the field make formal presentations about interesting projects, there are few opportunities to hear these same leaders discuss informally what they currently are working on, their future plans and goals, the challenges and opportunities facing librarianship, their personal pet peeves, etc.

Host: TAP Information Services

Location: OPAL Online Auditorium
 

Between my recent vacation and the scurrying required to resume functioning after said vacation, I almost forget to mention that I’ll be in Columbus this weekend for PodCamp Ohio, which takes place Saturday, June 28th.

It looks like a decent lineup of presentations, but I’m mostly going to take in the PodCamp experience and connect with other podcasters. Since I’m not so concerned with the presentation content, I’ll be volunteering, probably at the registration desk or in the halls helping people find sessions. If it happens that you’ll be there, drop me a line and let’s connect in Columbus. You can also find me on Twitter with a new username: gregschwartz

Luke Armour from BlogTalkRadio stopped by to let us all know about another library-flavored show that just rolled out yesterday. It’s called I Love Librarians. Here’s the description from the host:

I am the Director of Library Marketing at HarperCollins Publishers and I love librarians. This show will bring librarians, authors and the publishing world together in conversation. We’ll chat with authors about their upcoming books and with librarians about what they’re reading now – and what they recommend.

The first episode is called Library Lovefest #1 and features a discussion with Nancy Pearl and an interview with Garth Stein. Sounds great!

Thanks to Connie Crosby for highlighting a new library-related phone-in show that’s piloting today. It’s called Legal Bib and Library Law Talk, hosted by Brian Striman and Rich Leiter. You can find out more info via Connie’s post on the Slaw blog. Unfortunately, 3 PM Central on a Friday is a terrible time for me, so I won’t be able to tune in live. I’ll be looking forward to the recording, mostly to see how the live call-in format works for them.

They’ve chosen to use BlogTalkRadio as the platform for their show. I considered BlogTalkRadio for Uncontrolled Vocabulary, but it had one limitation that I found off-putting for my purposes: Only five people are allowed on the call at once, including the host. Deal breaker.

The hosts are not committing to anything beyond this pilot at present, so I hope some folks will participate and encourage them to keep going with it. It’s encouraging to see library people experimenting with these tools that are designed with active participation from the intended audience in mind. Very encouraging.

The CommonCraft Show is a series of engaging videos explaining Web 2.0 technologies. They’ve finally tackled podcasting:

It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to rant about the misuse of the term podcast. But I’ve got a good one and can’t seem to help myself. I suppose I’m something of a podcast bigot when it comes to my staunch defense of what makes a podcast a podcast.

What makes this rant particularly special is its basis on a piece that appears in the April 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries magazine. This issue contains an article entitled “Creating Communities With Podcasting” by Angela L. Jowitt, who is at the library of the Universal College of Learning in New Zealand.

The article starts innocently enough with a basic description of how the author came upon podcasting and how it fit into the overall 2.0 mentality that the library was trying to embrace. She then moves on to discuss recording and publishing “podcast files” on a trial basis. The use of the phrase “podcast files” should have been a red flag, but I read on blindly.

Here’s where I gasped openly: “As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up.”

Come again? We’re podcasting without an RSS feed? I was so stunned by this unexpected twist in the article, I didn’t actually read the following sentences. We’ll come back to those.

Instead, my eyes were drawn to a small screenshot of the “podcast” page on the website. The lead sentence reads “Podcasts are digital audio recordings made available over the internet.” I’m hoping that the audience of this blog does not need me to identify the shortcomings of this statement. Suffice it to say that making a digital audio recording and sticking it online does not a podcast make. Wanna read more about that? Check here or, better yet, here. Or the latter part of this post. And then of course, there’s the whole ALA 2.0 Bootcamp mess. I’ve been beating this drum since March of 2005.

There was a glimmer of hope as I returned to the article where I left off:

As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up. However, we are now working on this in order to turn our digital audio files into true podcasts, which are files broadcast or published over the internet. This will also make our podcasts available for subscription using a podcatcher, which is an RSS aggregator.

Sigh. I enjoy the distinction made between podcasts and true podcasts. Why not entitle the article “Creating Communities with Something Like Podcasting but not True Podcasting”* or somesuch? But anyway, I was given some glimmer of hope that a “true podcast” would emerge from this initiative, even if it didn’t in the article.

Before I go on with my rant, I want to make sure you understand that the approach that UCOL is taking in their podcasting initiative, as far as starting modestly and soliciting feedback, is great. And the content, although I haven’t listened to it, appears relevant and worthy of production. I’m not intending to condemn their efforts here.

The real reason this irks me so much is not because this group of librarians doesn’t quite get it. It’s because a major library magazine devoted to technology initiatives in libraries fails to see the problem and thus disseminates piss-poor information throughout the library community. A magazine that lends its name to a conference where I’ve presented on podcasting multiple times. How does this happen and what can I do to prevent it from happening again? Your feedback is welcome.

And again, I don’t want to overstate my issues with the article on the whole. There’s a lot of good information about recording library content for distribution online from a beginner’s perspective. But the fundamental misunderstanding of what RSS brings to that distribution effort makes me shudder.

So, as I said before, I had a glimmer of hope that there would be a podcast in the end. So I visited the library podcast page pictured in the article. Sure enough, there’s a nice prominent RSS symbol on the site, leading to an RSS feed. Great!

Good news is that the feed works and, in the end, UCOL is in fact providing a “true podcast.” They haven’t updated it since January, which is a strange thing to do if you know that an article about you is going to appear in a widely distributed magazine in April, but hey, that’s not my call.

Bad news is that there’s no explanation on the page of the role of this RSS feed or anything about subscribing to it. So in the end, they really aren’t doing anything to highlight the very thing that allows them to properly call it a podcast. And thus, the diffusion of confusion continues.

</podrant>

* It’s also worth noting that the article in no way, that I can see, discusses the building of a community through podcasting.

Update: My good friend Dgold notes in the comments that it is inaccurate to limit the definition of podcasting to content syndicated via RSS. He highlights ATOM as another specification that allows for syndication of media content. In this regard, he is absolutely correct and I thank him for pointing this out. I tend to use RSS as a euphemism for all syndication formats, but that’s kind of like referring to all online audio files as podcasts, isn’t it? Check the rest of the comments to follow the discussion.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of fanboy giddiness when people that I respect outside of the library blogosphere (and even oftentimes within it) notice what I’m doing. I was pretty excited when Jason Calacanis twittered/tumbld about his consumption of Uncontrolled Vocabulary, specifically the episode where we discussed Mahalo. And, from what I can tell, just about anything Jason mentions becomes a page on Mahalo.

Today, I got to revisit that same sense of giddiness upon discovering that Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV discussed Uncontrolled Vocabulary in her presentation to the Texas Library Association. It sounds like her experience was something of a disaster, so I particularly appreciate that she managed to fit the show into her session and the notes for the presentation.

So thanks, Cali. Go check out GeekBrief.TV, if you haven’t already. It’s a tightly-produced three to five minute videocast, released four times a week, covering “news about technology, consumer electronics, and Web 2.0 projects.” You may as well start with GBTV #346, where Cali makes her apology to the Texas Library Association.

As I suggested in an earlier post from last week, the Pecha Kucha session at Computers in Libraries was videotaped by Michael Sauers. That video is now available at blip.tv.

But let’s try to embed it here:

It’s almost an hour long, but well worth your time. As far as my presentation is concerned, which is second of the six, the video recording solves the two primary problems of the screencast: the low volume of the embedded audio clips and the lack of audience response. So even if you watched the screencast, I strongly encourage you to check out the video. Be sure to watch Greg Notess’ response as the skeptic (last of the six presentations) and stick around for the Q&A.

Unsure what was going to happen to the video recording of the Pecha Kucha, and wanting to share it with those who couldn’t be at Computers in Libraries this year, I went ahead and recorded a screencast of my narrative along with the slides and embedded audio clips. It loses a little something without the live audience, but you’ll get the basic idea.

Let’s try to embed the YouTube version below. The video in avi format at blip.tv is actually of superior quality, but I can only figure out how to embed the flash version and blip.tv’s doesn’t work for most people.

I have since learned that the original Pecha Kucha video is going to be posted on YouTube soon, so I probably spent more time on this than it was worth. Good practice, I suppose.