And here I thought Spell With flickr was the best thing since milk bones– that ‘s nothing compared to geoGreeting, which converts a string of text into one built form letters formed from the shapes of streets, buildings, landforms found from images in Google Map satellite views. You just type the message, and geoGreeting generates […]

Thanks to a del.icio.us for:cogdog tag from Scott Leslie, I took a quick peak at the Levelator, a free tool offered from GigaVox Media. It’s a tool developed and applied by the pros at ITConversations, designed to adjust audio levels common in interview situations where one person’s audio levels are much higher or lower than […]

Very cool– after reading on TextCrunch about Introducing SlideShare: Power Point + YouTube I checked out the site to see its one of those betas. But you can ask to get in, adn I got an account before I had finished lunch. TextCrunch is right- this is YouTube for PowerPoint, even the interface is a […]

It’s easy to blog about bad tech service/support and even easier to glaze over when it goes the opposite way. I’ve had flaky experience with my satellite internet connection at my cabin (the last time I even tried customer support, I was 2 hours on hold before expiring from fatigue). So I was ready for […]

This is a miniscule point, but the things I like about the features rolled out by sites like Google, flickr, etc, is that sometimes they just slip something in like a surprise… the biddy post I made about the Google Home page adding tabbed navigation caught my eye, only because I whizzed by the page […]

I’ve had the personalized Google home page set on all my browsers for a while, but just recently noticed that you can now add tabs to organize and spread out the different tools and feeds you can use. So I gleaned a few off the front view, leaving my flickr wallet,Gmail inbox, delicious tagged sites, […]

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):