Topics for tonight’s show likely to include (although subject to change):

• Libraries want a bailout too
• Nashville Mayor Proposes Public Library Run School Libraries
• Neil Gaiman On The ‘Obscenity’ Of Manga Collector Christopher Handley’s Trial

To join the conversation:

1. Dial +1 724-444-7444

2. Enter the show ID: 38665

3. Guests: Dial 1#
TalkShoe members: Enter your 10-digit PIN

Don’t forget that you can also call in for free using Gizmo Project.

Participate in the text chat by visiting our TalkShoe show page.

So we had a visit from Windstorm 2008 in our little chunk of southern Indiana. As you can see, it took its toll. Our town is largely without power, we are on a boil water advisory and internet access where there is power is spotty at best. Thus, I’m going to cancel this week’s show and hope things are back to normal next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

While you’re glancing at the sidebars, take a look at some of the other nifty stuff, like our Cafepress store, Facebook page or nascent MyBlogLog community.

When the audio search engine known as Podzinger disappeared and relaunched as EveryZing, I was under the impression that it was a enterprise-oriented audio search tool. But apparently you too can access the power of machine-transcribed searchable audio. Check out David’s post for more details.

I likely won’t get to listen to the show and create a proper post until I return next Tuesday. My apologies for that. I plan to return to my normal hosting duties next Wednesday. Many thanks to Mary Carmen for taking care of business in my absence.

You’ll find the most recent episode of our show here. Feedback, conversation, greetings, introductions or any other form of engagement welcome. Tell me something good (or bad or otherwise).

Update: If I use the ?feed=rss2 syntax instead of wp-rss2.php, it seems to work fine, so the Feedburner settings have been updated accordingly and you shouldn’t miss a thing. If anyone has any clue why this might be, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

Now for the rest of the story:

As many readers of this blog (and listeners to the podcast) already know, I’ve had a Facebook group for this show almost as long as the show has been extant. I’ve sent weekly messages to the members of that group at the same time that I post my weekly reminders of upcoming shows on this blog.

Last week, I was compelled to try a newer option, known as a Facebook Page. These didn’t exist when I launched the group. It’s a little different in structure and has a bit more flexibility compared to a group page. For example, it was quite simple to add the MP3 app and the TalkShoe app right to the page, so that you can listen to the show or join the call right from there. That wasn’t possible (at least not obvious to me) with the group page.

The page been up for a few days now and, as of the time of this post, there are 38 fans of the show. Thanks to the early adopters. The “problem” is that there are currently 266 members of the Facebook group. And I just plain don’t want to maintain two presences for the show on Facebook. So, to be blunt, I’m asking and encouraging group members to switch over and become a fan via the Uncontrolled Vocabulary Facebook page.

For those of you who get annoyed with my weekly reminders showing up in your inbox, this is a no-brainer. Instead of an email, the show notices appear up as an unobtrusive update at the top right corner of your Facebook home page. A number of people have already expressed a preference for this.

For those of you who really like getting email reminders of the show, I encourage to sign up for email notifications from this blog using the form at the bottom of this post. [If you read this via RSS and yet for some reason would like email notices too, you may need to click through to the post itself to see the sign up form.] This will give you not only the reminders, but the actual episode posts as well (along with notices like this one).

I will continue to send out show reminders to the Facebook group for the next few weeks, while encouraging people to make the transition. I don’t expect to do that for long, unless a bunch of people tell me they like getting the Facebook email reminders.

I thank you in advance for your willingness to embrace change. If you have any thoughts, leave a comment on the blog or use the contact form.

Update 4/21/08 6:30 AM: It has come to my attention that it’s possible to ask Facebook to migrate members and content from a Facebook group to a Facebook page. At present, I do not plan on doing that, as I’d prefer to let you take whatever action you are comfortable with. Some people will stay part of both the group and the page, which is great. I’d never discourage that.

So I’ve enlisted the help of Mary Carmen Chimato, who you may remember as the host of Episode 7 and Episode 8. She’ll be handling the hosting duties tonight and I am immensely grateful for her willingness to step into this role at the last minute. So be nice to her. You’ll be in good hands.

As you’ll immediately notice, my design skills are pretty limited, although not bad for 1 AM. All the shirts are the same, with the Unvocab notebook logo on the front and a “No Censors No Shushers” message on the back, along with the site URL.* If you are feeling generous and are inclined to improve upon my work, drop me a line.

In case you’re wondering, all CafePress merch has been marked up exactly one dollar. Where does that dollar go? Well, in the spirit of transparency, I’ll admit that costs to run this show are pretty low with help from LISHost and TalkShoe. It would most likely help offset the costs of purchasing/renewing the four domains that support this site (.com, .net, .info and .org). If, for whatever reason, the store proves wildly popular, then I’d put any additional money into a better headset. But I’m no fool. I’ll be happy (and a bit surprised) if anyone besides me wants one enough to actually pay for it.

That said, if you want a shirt and want it in time for CiL, get your order in. I ordered last night and with economy shipping the expected delivery date is April 1st or 2nd.

I may also throw a Paypal donation box up on the blog, in the event that someone wants to support the show, but doesn’t really need a material incentive to do so. My sincerest thanks for your support of the show in whatever form it takes, whether you tell your friends, participate in the live show or just listen every week.

* Correction: The “Value T-shirt” does not have anything printed on the back.

Update 10:24 PM: Alas, too many problems to overcome. The show will go on tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10 PM. My sincerest apologies for this nuisance. Thanks to everyone who turned out tonight. Hope to hear you all tomorrow.

Thanks. I’m looking into removing the TalkShoe feed from iTunes, but I have to get TalkShoe involved in that and I haven’t heard back from them yet.

* To check, go to the Podcast area in iTunes, right click on the feed title and select Show Description. You’ll see the feed URL toward the top.

If I don’t have someone lined up by tomorrow night, we’ll take a break and resume production on October 17th.

Sorry for the late notice and thanks for your understanding.

1. You don’t need to sign up to call in.

For those of you who cited unwillingness and/or disinterest in registering at TalkShoe as a barrier to participation in the live call, hesitate no longer. Anyone can now call in without a TalkShoe account. You’ll dial the same phone number (724-444-7444) and TalkCast ID (38665), but instead of the PIN, you’ll dial 1# and be brought into the call just as if you were a TalkShoe member.

2. The built-in ShoePhone VoIP client is now available and FREE.

This is for the folks who don’t have unlimited calling plans on their cell phones (like me, for instance). In order to take advantage of this free VoIP call into the show, you will need to sign up at TalkShoe, so that you can download the TalkShoe Live app. Then when you join the show from the website, the Shoephone will be available from within the chatroom. It’s one-click simple and worked well in my testing.

There are some other interesting upgrades to the TalkShoe Live client that will be obvious to people who’ve participated in the past. In fact, those of you who participate in the live show via the TalkShoe Live app might want to trying joining in a different TalkCast this week, just to take care of the auto-updating before next Thursday. I could also set up a dummy call that would give folks the opportunity to update and check out the new client. If I sense any interest in that, I’ll post here.

The good news is that I’ve found a top-notch guest host in Mary Carmen Chimato. Many thanks in advance to Mary Carmen for taking on this responsibility during my absence. You’re all in good hands.

At present, I anticipate no interruptions in the weekly conversations and I look forward to returning in a few weeks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.