Uncontrolled Vocabulary #1 - Poetry, Pure Poetry

The first episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary is now available. Here's a direct link to the mp3 recording. You can also listen to the show via the TalkShoe player embedded in the sidebar on this blog.

The live event was really a lot of fun and I hope the recording conveys at least some of that energy. Perhaps you'll be encouraged to join us next week at the same time, Thursdays at 10 PM EDT.

The show's podcast feed will be http://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss38665.xml

On the call:

Greg Schwartz, Louisville Free Public Library
Laura Crossett, Park County (WY) Library System
Joy Weese Moll
Joshua M. Neff, Johnson County Public Library
Michael Sauers, Nebraska Library Commission
Chadwick Seagraves, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana

In this inaugural episode, we discussed the following links:

Drug-users force closure of library toilets

Debut of the Espresso Book Machine

$75 for a session or $199 for the series ... ???
PUSHING IT FORWARD: TAKING YOUR LIBRARY TO THE NEXT LEVEL!
Giving and Taking

Aaron the Librarian » ALA Member Shushed by ALA Council
The Improve ALA Wiki

Threats Force SC Library to Cancel Summer Program
Diversity destroyers ruin it for everyone

Three ways to be there live

Thought it might be worth clearly laying out how one can join in the live experience either by calling in, listening and text chatting, or just listening to the live stream.

I covered the calling in instructions fairly succinctly in an earlier post, so I'll just reiterate.

1. Go to TalkShoe and create an account. When you do so, you'll create a 10-digit PIN. Remember it.
2. Download the Talkshoe Live! application from the site. I think this may happen automatically when you try to join the TalkCast for the first time, so you might be able to just go to step 3.
3. Go to the Uncontrolled Vocabulary page on TalkShoe and look for the Live Now! box. Click where it says "Listen, Text or Talk live." This will open up the TalkShoe Live! client and take you into the audio stream and chat environment.

Here's how you call in and join the audio conversation:

1. Dial 1-724-444-7444
2. Enter the show ID: 38665
3. Enter your 10-digit PIN, which will uniquely identify you and match your voice capability with your presence in the chatroom.

Note that you can call in to the show without running the TalkShoe Live! app, but you will need to create an account to create that 10-digit PIN. I do have one guest PIN if someone really doesn't want to create an account or I need to bring someone in on the fly.

The text chat is available within the TalkShoe Live! app, so simply running that without calling in will allow you to listen and be part of the text chat.

And finally, to just stream the show, you don't need a TalkShoe account or app at all. Just go to the TalkShoe page for the show and, if the show is live, there should be an option to listen.

10 PM EDT, Thursday. Hope you'll consider joining me.

The big day

Just a reminder that tomorrow is recording day. Please join me at 10 EDT for the inaugural episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Lots of good stuff to talk about and I anticipate some interesting voices in the mix. Yours could be one of them. Check out this post for the details. Hope to see you there.

How to call in for free (for now)

I mentioned in the first post that there are two ways to call into TalkShoe without paying the long distance charges. The first is by having free nights and weekends on your cell phone plan (or some other long distance bundle or whatever). The other is to use a SIP-capable VoIP client, of which there are a few. Skype is, at present, not one of them. Access to TalkShoe via SIP is free for now, but everything I hear suggests it won't stay that way.

Anyway, I wanted to explain briefly how to use Gizmo Project to call in for free.

Step one is to download, install and run the Gizmo Project client from the link above.

You'll then need to type the following into the address bar to the left of the call button (the green button with the handset): 123@66.212.134.192

Then you proceed as with a regular phone call, by first entering the TalkCast ID (38665) and then your 10-digit PIN.

It's really quite simple, but the info can be tough to find on the TalkShoe site.

Story ideas and suggestions

I've been thinking about ways in which I can both organize my own notes for shows and allow others to contribute and help build shows. My initial plan had been to wikify the experience, but that's proven to be a little too clunky for my taste.

Instead, I'm taking advantage of tagging with del.icio.us. Anyone who wants to suggest a story for us to discuss can send the URL to del.icio.us with the tag unvocab. If you want to peruse the stories that might be discussed, you can check out the page for the unvocab tag.

News contributions and discussion topics are always welcome. If you do tag something for us, please also consider joining the discussion live. In fact, do that anyway, whether you have a topic for us or not.

Announcing the pilot

I've tentatively scheduled the pilot episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary for Thursday, June 28th at 10 PM Eastern. I'm planning on letting the recording run about an hour.

Here's how you participate:

1. Go to TalkShoe and create an account. When you do so, you'll create a 10-digit PIN. Remember it.
2. Download the Talkshoe Live! application from the site. I think this may happen automatically when you try to join the TalkCast for the first time, so you might be able to just go to step 3.
3. Go to the Uncontrolled Vocabulary page on TalkShoe and look for the Live Now! box. Click where it says "Listen, Text or Talk live." This will open up the TalkShoe Live! client and take you into the audio stream and chat environment.

Here's how you call in and join the audio conversation:

1. Dial 1-724-444-7444
2. Enter the show ID: 38665
3. Enter your 10-digit PIN, which will uniquely identify you and match your voice capability with your presence in the chatroom.

You can also just stream the show without creating an account by going to the TalkShoe site, finding the show and clicking on Listen. But consider this my first of many attempts to get you to actively participate.

Once the show is recorded, it will be available here in the embedded player, via an RSS feed that I haven't settled on yet and from the TalkShoe page for the show.

Something a little different

OK, so I've had this idea for a podcast germinating in my brain for a while now. Inspired by the folks doing TWiT, I wanted to start something of a roundtable discussion about current events in librarianship. The concept was to get a regular group together, where each person brings a story or two to the discussion, introduces it and we bandy it about for a bit. Great plan, but it proved hard to do. Other priorities surfaced and the project never got off the ground.

Fast forward almost two years. The podcasting environment has changed some and there are many new tools available. One show I listen to regularly is Windows Weekly (part of the TWiT network of shows). In a recent episode, the hosts took live calls using a platform called TalkShoe. I was really excited by the prospect of unscripted live participation of the community at large and thought it would translate well to my vision of a casual regular conversation about library news. Participation, conversation, community, all the right 2.0 buzzwords!

Intrigued and inspired to dig further, I found that TalkShoe does two noteworthy things:

1. It provides a teleconference bridge for having multi-person live conversations, also providing audio streaming of that conversation along with a chat interface, so people have a variety of ways to participate.
2. It makes recording, publishing and podcasting of the audio conversations very easy.

Admittedly, as easy as it makes it for the host to produce and publish a live interactive show, it does present some obstacles for the participant. But you're all bright folks who can make magic happen, right?

Live participation in the show requires creating an account with TalkShoe. Why? Well, it allows you to download the TalkShoe client app and it provides you with a PIN number to use when calling into a show. You can participate live either by phoning in or in the text chat environment (or both).

In order to participate in the voice conversation, you have to make a phone call to Pittsburgh, so phone charges do apply. At this point, you can use a SIP phone client (such as Gizmo Project - Skype does not currently support SIP) to call for free, but this approach might not remain free. Of course, if you have a cell phone with free nights and weekends, this might not be such a problem.

The TalkShoe app that you download, which you do not actually need for calling into a show, allows you to follow the text and see who else is participating, both by voice and chatting. Voice callers can also use the interface to indicate a desire to chat and/or mute themselves. The chat is a little disorienting as it follows a horizontal model with which I must profess a lack of proficiency. See this screenshot. (The TalkShoe Live! app should work on Windows and Macs, but there is no official Linux support yet. I've seen mention on the forums of workarounds.)

It's really hard to describe the whole experience without checking it out for yourself.

It's not the only game in town. I also considered SkypeCasts and BlogTalkRadio, but found reasons to prefer TalkShoe despite its limitations.

So that's the deal. I'm putting together a just-about-weekly TalkCast (as TalkShoe shows are called) where we can chat about all things librarianship. My plan is to have some of the big "stories of the week" ready to talk about and leave things pretty open from there. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to join in and play along. I'll be announcing the first episode soon and I hope that some of you reading this post will be interested enough to listen along and ultimately join the conversation. Oh, by the way, if you didn't notice the blog title, the show is called Uncontrolled Vocabulary.

In the meantime, anyone with questions about TalkShoe or who's really interested in taking a more active role in planning and participating is welcome to contact me (try greg and then try schwartz @ gmail.com). Thanks for your interest.

Note: I should also note that TalkShoe has a dynamic ad placement technology and a sophisticated approach to sharing revenue with hosts. So I do expect some ads (they don't have many advertisers at this point, but I think they will), but with the trade-off of possibly recouping the costs of phone calls, equipment, etc. Not something I plan to apologize for, but that I do want to be upfront about.