I have just found this service which should do it:

Please let me know via the comments if you have any trouble with it.

While reading a New York Times article about voice recognition and speech synthesis I learned about a new audio and video search engine, Everyzing. While the search engine itself was interesting, I was struck by the fact that the first thing you find in searching for Everyzing and in visiting their website is not the search engine page itself, but a page about the company’s business. And it is not centred on the user - it’s centred on the content providers. Specifically, the company is touting its skills in search engine optimization of audio and video content. So even before it hits the mass market it is already planning to make money by helping deep-pocketed media companies to get their media found by searchers ahead of others who don’t have those resources.

I tend to think of search engine companies and search engine optimization companies as being enemies but this reminds me that the relationship is a lot more complex.

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”

I don’t usually announce new blogs here but Ideas for Development is a new groupblog with a worthy goal and unusually high profile participants:

- Kemal Dervis, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme,
- Abdou Diouf, Secretary-General of La Francophonie,
- Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank,
- Pascal Lamy Director general of the World Trade Organization,
- Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
- Jean-Michel Severino, Managing Director of the Agence Française de Développement,
- Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme.

And guest contributions from several leading NGOs and academic instutitions.

The invaluable Pew Internet & American Life Project has just completed some more research trying to come up with a typology of American Internet use. You can fill out your own David Brake

I have mixed feelings about writing this but it is dawning on me that LibriVox - a group of public-spirited people making out of copyright texts into public domain audiobooks by reading them - could be one example of a problematic trend enabled by the Internet. That trend is - as the subject line suggests - the manner in which the Internet enables the free distribution of ‘good enough’ products at the expense of paid-for content.

In this case it concerns me that the existence and growth of free public domain audiobooks read aloud by members of the public could make it increasingly unprofitable to put out paid-for audiobooks of public domain material. This would be a shame because the quality of the readings is so variable. I find myself listening along happily to a work like F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin only to be brought up short by a weird mis-pronounciation by one of the volunteer readers.

In principle there is no problem here - if listeners find such a problem they might complain and someone from the Librivox community might volunteer to re-read the offending chapters. Unfortunately the work of reading audiobooks isn’t easily editable once complete as a textual composition is, which means to fix even a simple problem (like someone persistently mispronouncing the hero’s name) you would have to ask someone to spend at least a half an hour re-recording a whole section (or would have to do it yourself). Unfortunately also I imagine volunteer readers would not take kindly to having their public-spirited work criticised - everyone thinks they can read aloud. So it seems likely such problems will go largely unremarked and un-addressed.

I wouldn’t want to put you off trying out Librivox - their hearts are definitely in the right place, the results are mostly at least adequate and if you want something a little different to listen to on your iPod it would be well worth checking out their growing catalogue for yourself. But if you have the cash and want to listen to something public domain that you really expect to enjoy and attend to, I encourage you to check out commercial sites like Audible and keep the professional audiobook industry in business.

David Brake

As you will see in our link sidebar at R there are two new blogs - Media Policy and Law@LSE and Virtual Law@LSE. So if you have been mainly reading our postings about media regulation or politics or privacy you should definitely be bookmarking these two newcomers (both of which feature postings by Damien Tambini, a lecturer here in the media department).

I have just learned that those with valid university email addresses (not just US ones, UK ones seem to work too!) can get free access to the New York Times’ TimesSelect service (which allows you to read the columnists which are normally password protected and lets you look at articles from their online archives). Handy! Thanks Kathleen and Chuck…

So far there are just four public lectures available (most on foreign affairs) but more are promised. See this page about podcasts.

PS While on the subject of podcasting I recently came across an extensive podcast archive of audio and video lectures from Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science.