Bernadette Clavier, Executive Producer of our Social Innovation Conversations channel, says we just passed the one-million audio download milestone over there. Congratulatons to Bernadette, Leah Silverman and the rest of our SIC producers, writers and engineers.
Team ITC
A blog category and RSS feed for the members of Team ITC.
New SpokenWord.org Groups: APIs and the iTunes Connector
I’ve just created two new Google groups for SpokenWord.org users:
- The API Group is where we’ll be discussing the design of APIs for SpokenWord.org.
- The iTunes Connector Group is for those who want to be alpha testers of a new utility we’re developing to sync iPod/iPhone/iTunes data (ratings, etc.) with their SpokenWord.org collections.
I encourange you to join one or both.
The Conversations Network: Board Meeting Report
What an amazing Board of Directors we have. In addition to Jon Udell, David Weinberger and Jake Shapiro, today we elected Brian Gruber of Fora.tv to the board then spent the rest of our time in informal session. Discussion highlights included:
- PodCorps.org is not being used. We may put it into cold storage until we can find someone or some organization to champion it.
- What’s the 3-5 year strategy? Should The Conversations Network merge with another compatible non-profit?
- Our traditional channels (eg, IT Conversations) are solid and stable.
- SpokenWord.org is the future growth of The Conversations Network.
- How can SpokenWord.org best serve the public? Academia? The press/media? Libraries?
- Should we exercise more of our own curatorial control and influence? Serendipity only goes so far.
- How are we better than any other aggregator? Open APIs are critical to creating value.
- What benefit do we offer our content provider/partners?
Yes, we asked more questions than we answered, but that’s what a good board meeting is all about.
Preliminary Survey Results
We’ve only been running our annual survey for a few days, but we’ve already had 389 responses. Some early highlights:
- 47% use iTunes on OS X or Windows.
- 63% subscribe to one or more of our RSS feeds.
- 89% are male.
- 41% have a Master’s degree or higher. (This has been consistent year after year and still surprises me.)
- 55% are in the U.S.
- 38% didn’t realize The Conversations Network was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Everything (!) About Recording Phone Calls
When it comes to information about audio recording hardware, software and techniques, no one does it better than Jeff Towne, the tools editor at Transom.org. Their microphone shootouts, for example, have become true classics. Now Jeff is back with another “everything you every wanted to know about” article on Recording Phone Calls. As always, extraordinarily thorough. Destined to become another online classic.
