At least once a week we get a request here at IT Conversations to record and publish some terrific tech event. Most of them are of the users-group variety, some of which have some awesome speakers. I used to do some local recording here in the San Francisco area, but now I just don’t have the time and I certainly can’t justify recording something that’s not within driving distance. It’s a shame that we can’t capture these terrific presentations and that they’re lost forever.

To address this, we’re creating a new position on Team ITC: Recording Stringer.

At the very least you should be able to take a feed from a mixer or distribution amplifier (DA), and record sessions of at least two hours without a media change. (MiniDisc and DAT work great.) If you have microphones and a mixer as well, you may be able to handle even smaller events. Check out our submission standards for more info on the technical requirements.

If you have the time, equipment and skill to record events in your area, please let me know. (doug@itconversations.com) Please include your location and ZIP or postal code.

Our friends over at the Public Radio Exchange are distributing a terrific week of audio programming:

Hosted from London, Boston and Los Angeles, and reaching audiences on five continents, this special two-hour call-in program will explore the impact of globalization on your way of life, wherever you live. Hosts Robin Lustig (BBC’s Talking Point), Dick Gordon (WBUR’s The Connection) and Larry Mantle (KPCC’s AirTalk) will guide a lively global conversation between experts from around the world and listeners who call, e-mail or send text messages.

But of course, they’re also producing the podcast version for those of us who live time-shifted lives. [Source: Steve Schultze]

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Karl de Abrew and Sam Chandler — Nitro PDF (rated 2.9 by listeners)
• Bart Feder – FeedRoom (3.3)
• Clay Shirky – Phone as Platform (3.4)
• Elizabeth Holmes (3.5)
• The Platform Revolution – Web 2.0 (3.6)
• Larry Augustine – Open Source Applications (3.8)
• Larry Magid- Internet Child Safety (3.8)
• John Markhoff (3.9)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Paul Graham (3.8)

Okay, I’ve been caught playing hookey. Instead of working one of my usual 12-hour days on Monday, Philip Greenspun and I went flying. The aviation weather forecast Sunday night looked pretty bad, but thanks to a big oxygen tank in the back of the Bonanza, we were able to fly high and managed to thread our way around the thunderbumpers all morning, thenflew underneath them on the way home. We landed at Castle Air Force Base for a tour of their WWII warplane museum. Philip is taking his Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) checkride next week, adding that to his fixed wing, helicopter and instrument ratings. He shouldn’t have any problem passing. I tried to get him interested in adding a glider rating, too.

We ended the day, back in Mill Valley, at In-N-Out Burger — arguably better than the Bomber Burgers we passed on at Castle.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Justin Kitch – Homestead (rated 2.6 by our listeners)
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger – IT in an On-Demand World (2.8)
• Peggy Lemaux (2.9)
• Geoffrey Nunberg (3.4)
• Dan Gillmor at SXSW (3.6)
• Jeffrey Rayport (3.7)
• The SXSW Podcasting Panel (3.7)
• Lawrence Lessig at Web 2.0 (3.7)
• The O’Reilly Radar – News from the Future (3.7)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Doc Searls (3.8)

We received donations of nearly $2,000 in the IT Conversations Tip Jar during the month of April, and this week I’ll be distributing those proceeds to Team ITC. But in the past two weeks, those donations have started falling off and already May is on a track for far fewer dollars to feed the machine.

We thank all of you who have contributed to our team of volunteers who produce most of IT Conversations’ shows in their spare time, and hope that the rest of you will dig into your pockets to help keep IT Conversations able to bring you our programs.

It took much longer than I hoped, but the first (May 1) IT Conversations Media Kit is now available to qualified underwriters and sponsors. If you’d like to support the #1 audio tech network, please send email to doug@itconversations.com.

As I mentioned three months ago, it looks like we may have to stop delivering .m4b (AAC) versions of IT Conversations audio files. Only about 10% of listeners download the AAC files, and the only significant benefit (other than a slight increase in quality as compared to the MP3s) is that they can be bookmarked on iPods and in iTunes. Unfortunately we have not been able to find an AAC “joiner” that will allow us to splice together already-encoded files as we can do for MP3s. (Does anyone know of such a utility?)

A solution would be for one of our enterprising listeners who knows AppleScript to develop a script that automatically converts files of Genre=Podcast to AAC within iTunes, then deletes the originals. A script like that would be great for iTunes/iPod users for all podcasts, not just IT Conversations.

To be honest, the bookmarking functionality should be built into every player, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be implemented for MP3 files as well.

Congratulations to Cory, the rest of EFF and everyone else who has fought agains the Broadcast Flag. As Cory reported on BoingBoing and Ernest Miller described in more detail, “the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down the loathsome Broadcast Flag, ruling that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they’ve received them.” This is an important decision in the fight against the copyright cartel.

I was honored to be a guest today on a new public-radio program hosted by Christopher Lydon. It’s called Open Source and we recorded the pilot this morning with Chris and the production team at the WGBH studios, and we guests scattered about the pod/blogosphere. Chris’ voice has been absent from public radio for far too long. [MP3 audio]

Chris has long been one of my personal heroes, although we’ve never met. And though very few people know (or acknowledge) it I believe that Chris, with help from Dave Winer, was the very first podcaster. That is, Dave put together the first RSS feed with MP3 enclosures, in this case Chris’ superb interviews. I copied the RSS syntax a few days later and launched the podcast edition of IT Conversations on 9/24/03. The name “podcast” hadn’t been coined at that time and didn’t become prominent until nearly a year later when Adam Curry began his Daily Source Code show.