Demoing Utterz for NPR's Morning Edition!

Right now I'm recording a demo of Utterz with a producer from Morning Edition. We just posted question to Twitter - "What are you doing for New Years and what do you wish you were doing?" - and we're asking it on Utterz as well to see what kind of replies we get in the next 24 hours. Please keep your responses clean as we may use them on air. Thanks!

Mobile post sent by acarvin using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Immigrant Rights Podcast, Part 2

My second mobile phone podcast today, recorded during the immigrant rights march from Cambridge to Boston. -andy

Immigrant Rights Podcast, Part 1

Here's a podcast I recorded over the phone just prior to the immigrant rights rally at Harvard. -andy

Hurricane Katrina Mobcast Launched

I've just launched an open blog and mobcast for people interested in following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

http://katrina05.blogspot.com/

The blog is set up so that anyone can post a blog entry, podcast or photo to the site. I'm particularly hoping that residents of the Gulf Coast will be willing to call in and let people know how things are going for them. Similarly, anyone who would like to share ways to help out, or wishes to share their thoughts on the hurricane, may post as well.

Here's how to participate.

Post a blog entry:

Send an email to katrina2005.comments @ blogger.com. The title of your email will be the title of the blog entry, and the email body will be the blog entry body. If you don't want your contact information, you should remove your signature file. Attachments will not be posted.

Record a podcast:

• Dial 1-415-856-0205
  
• Enter login 515-515-5555
  
• Enter PIN code 2005, then the # key
  
• Record your message
  
• Press the # key to save, then the 1 key to post

Post a photo:

The website is collecting photos from Flickr.com that are tagged with the word hurricanekatrina. Simply log on to Flickr (or create an account), upload photos, and use this tag. Photos appear in the right column of the blog's homepage.


I've also set up a "tag-o-rama" inside the right column of the blog. It displays links to relevant key words like hurricane, katrina and new orleans, linking to tagged content from Technorati (blogs), Flickr (photos) and del.icio.us (websites).

Please feel free to share this information with anyone who might be interested in participating. -andy

Launch of the Mobcasting Developers Forum

Because of the positive feedback I've received around the creation of a low-cost, open source strategy for recording and receiving podcasts over mobile phones, I've set up a new email list and Web community for people interested in making this happen. There are already free tools like audioblogger and audlink that will let you post podcasts from your phone, but both require a long-distance phone call to the US, and neither let you listen to podcasts from your phone. I want to develop a tool that can be installed anywhere in the world, so all of this can be done on a local phone call.

To learn more about mobcasting, please visit this blog entry I wrote last January, entitled When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting to see where this all got started.

The email list will be focused solely on this project; people who join the list should be interested in mobile phone podcasting and be willing to help us make this project happen.

To join the list, please send an email to mobcasting-subscribe [[at]] yahoogroups . com, with the spaces and brackets removed. Or, you can visit the Mobcasting list homepage.

Meanwhile, I've also created a DDN community that we can use as a workspace. The workspace has bulletin boards, document sharing and blog posting. Group members are welcome to post web resources, blog entries or files to this public page. We can also add news, events and feature stories to the site if they become useful at some point.

Looking forward to making this happen! -andy

Asterisk as a Mobcasting Tool?

Over the last few days I've been trying to learn more about various types of open source telephony software to see if any of them could be built upon as a mobcasting interface -- voicemail software that could allow someone to call a local telephone number and create, as well as listen to, podcasts. I've written a lot about my experiments with audlink.com and audioblogger.com as mobile podcasting tools, but they both require you to call a long telephone number in the US. Ideally, we really need to have a tool that could be installed at low cost on a local server, anywhere in the world, and allow people to make a telephone call to post or retrieve podcasts from it.

That's why I'm really curious about an open source software package called Asterisk.

Asterisk is a fully functional open source PBX system with VoIP capabilities. It supports voicemail, call directories, conference calls and many other features, and allows users to build new scripts to connect it with the Internet. It was primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86, but apparently runs on GNU/Linux for PPC along with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OSX.

To be honest, I know almost nothing about PBX systems, so I'm hoping some of you might be able to help me evaluate it, and perhaps test it out. Participants in one of the Asterisk user forums seem to think it would be easy to set up a script to connect it with a blog, but from a technical point of view, this is way over my head. I'm hoping some of them might volunteer to help me, but we'll have to see how that goes.

So, for those of you who are interested in mobile phone podcasting, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, particularly if you know a lot about PBX systems, VoIP, etc.

Gates Mobcast Covered in NY Times, Wired

My new "open blog," The Gates @ Central Park got a nice boost in site traffic today because of references in today's New York Times and Wired magazine. Wired even featured some of the photos posted on the site. Hopefully the press will help send more contributors to the site as well. There are definitely more photos and emails posted to the site, though not much has happened in terms of podcasts. Hopefully that'll change in the coming days.... -ac