SocialMeter looked interesting- enter a URL and it pulls some stats from major services like del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Yahoo, technorati for how many times the URL has been bookmarked. It returns a total hit count, and you can click each service to yank up its results. Of course, just like one’s first foray when […]

… though it may not be the best of ideas.

As described a few barks back, in my work at NMC we’ve been exploring some audio technologies, primarily to bring live audio into our Second Life Campus. Because the audio channel in SecondLife that is tied to the “land” needs to be an MP3 url, you can either attach a fixed URl for a song/podcast you want everyone to hear, or have a live stream come in from a server.

What may not be widely known, is that there are free / low cast software programs you can install on a computer that allow you to “broadcast” audio from your computer out to the net. The limiting factor, before you start asking for URLs, is that very, very few of us have the connectivity that could reliably support more than 3-4 individual streams, so this way out in the long tail of the internet audio spectrum.

What we are doing involves connecting audio sources (teleconference calls, Skype conference calls, pre-recorded audio, spoken word) into a computer, using said software to send one stream to a content delivery network (someone we pay that provides the connectivity to many connected listeners). I’ll outline some of the pieces below, starting first with a diagram hastily tossed together in Gliffy (love the tool love the tool):