The 30-Minute Executive MBA
The latest issue of The Globe And Mail's Report On Business magazine features a special section, "The 30-Minute EMBA." It's a quick, useful and amusing guide offering useful advice for business execs. I wrote several articles for the guide, and have compiled them in a PDF for download. The articles include:
- PR/Media relations tips for talking to the press and public
- Executive style guide
- Mastering the all-important handshake, and avoiding inappropriate gestures
- Tips for running an effective meeting
- A guide to executive coaching
- A list of business buzzwords to ban
UPDATE: I just noticed that the content of this special section in now online here, though the PDF is a bit easier to read.
LibriVox and the power of distributed communities
I recently published a feature article in the Montreal Gazette about LibriVox.org and its remarkable growth. (I wrote a related piece for the New York Times in late August.) The paper decided not to put the story up online, so here is the full text of the piece, with three sidebars at the end.
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, October 7, 2006
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Hugh McGuire went online about a year ago to look for a free audio book recording. His surfing took him to Project Gutenberg, a free online repository of books and other works in the public domain - but he came up empty-handed.
"I went through the Gutenberg catalogue and found they had very little audio, which was a surprise," he says.
McGuire was searching for a recording of a Joseph Conrad novel whose copyright had expired, meaning anyone was free to make a recording of it. But no one had, and so McGuire, 32, a computer programmer and writer in Montreal, decided to fill the void.
He set up a blog to gather volunteers to record free audio books of works whose copyright had expired. McGuire called his project LibriVox and he then "emailed a bunch of friends and people doing literature podcasts and blogs to ask if they were interested in joining in," he recalls during the first of two meetings at a St. Laurent Blvd. cafe.
Within a few hours, McGuire had enough volunteers to produce a recording of the book.
McGuire, a soft-spoken man with glasses and a light beard, then picks up his coffee and casually delivers a massive understatement, "It was clear to me very early on that this was a very interesting project."
Though McGuire is loath to brag about it, LibriVox.org has in one year grown to become the single largest repository of free audio books on the Internet. Its roughly 2,000 volunteers have recorded over 150 books and more than 200 recordings of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. LibriVox offers works in French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Finnish, Latin, Italian and Russian, with recordings currently under way in Arabic, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese. (English is by far the dominant language.)
Every LibriVox recording is offered free for anyone to download, listen to, copy and share as they please. About 25,000 LibriVox books have been downloaded over the past year, McGuire says.
LibriVox's success is a study in how blogs and other collaborative Internet technologies are enabling large groups of people from all over the world to come together and build not just a community but also something tangible, a product or service.
In the case of LibriVox, they created a library of free audio books. A similar but much larger project, Wikipedia.org, is a massive free online encyclopedia with 3.8 million articles in more than 100 languages written and maintained by 48,000 volunteers.
McGuire doesn't hesitate when asked to pinpoint the moment he saw the potential for LibriVox to grow and create something special like Wikipedia.
"When we got BoingBoinged," he says. "That was the big thing that changed everything, that really blew it up."
People all over the world aspire to get "BoingBoinged."
That means you or your website/book/article etc. have been mentioned on and linked to from BoingBoing.net, a website ranked as the most linked-to blog on the Internet. The site is run by five well-connected, tech-savvy writers and businesspeople who post links or articles about interesting things or ideas they discover, or that have been sent in by their legions of loyal readers. BoingBoing's tag line is "A Directory of Wonderful Things."
And the site's stamp of approval means a ton of Internet traffic is coming your way.
On Sept. 12, 2005, LibriVox got BoingBoinged.
That day, Cory Doctorow, an author and BoingBoing contributor, posted a link to LibriVox, noting, "I love audio books, and the store-bought varieties are viciously expensive - an audio version of the Gutenberg Project would be a gigantic mitzvah."
The same day, McGuire says, "We had 10,000 visitors ... to the site."
LibriVox instantly went from a few volunteers to hundreds, and it kept growing. People began planning and producing recordings on their own or in large or small groups. (Some recordings are divided up by having a different person record each chapter.) The LibriVox message boards - where members organize recordings, answer questions and otherwise hang out - began filling up. Some volunteers started spending several hours per week helping with the website, moderating the boards, and working to integrate new volunteers.
What began with a simple idea, a blog and a few emails had, in the span of a few weeks, become a global community with dedicated volunteers and a growing reputation.
"The principles of the project are to be totally noncommercial, totally ad-free, totally volunteer and totally public domain," McGuire says.
Those principles are a major contributor to LibriVox's growth. They're why BoingBoing took notice, and why the project has managed to dwarf other older free audio-book projects.
One such project, Telltale Weekly, sells recordings for 25 cents to $8, but makes them available at no charge through its Spoken Alexandria Project after five years or 100,000 downloads, whichever comes first. Alex Wilson, a writer and actor in Chapel Hill, N.C., who founded the project, reads the vast majority of the works himself.
Another service, LiteralSystems, raises funds for its free recordings and hires professional-quality voice talent to read them.
Both projects predate LibriVox, yet because of their centralized structure and need for funding or revenue, they both have significantly fewer recordings available.
By contrast, LibriVox is an entirely open, volunteer system that requires no financial support. It's considered part of the world of Web 2.0 - a term used to describe new projects and technologies that enable people to create, share and collaborate in new ways online.
Jon Udell, a technology writer and the lead analyst and "blogger-in-chief" for InfoWorld magazine, says Web 2.0 projects like LibriVox and Wikipedia are helping realize the true goal of the World Wide Web.
"From my perspective, the key value of this is in changing people's expectations about the relationship between being a consumer and being a producer," he says. "For several generations we've been trained to be consumers ... the option to be a producer in a variety of ways doesn't even occur to people."
He continues, "The entire bunch of awkward terminology you hear like 'Web 2.0' is expressing what the original purpose of the WWW was. It was designed to be a two-way medium where there was symmetry between readers and writers and producers."
The concept is also expressed in how McGuire responds to those who say they don't like a particular LibriVox recording: "If you think a recording is done badly, then please do one and we'll post it as well."
They often take him up on the offer, and thus the growth of LibriVox continues.
One of LibriVox's most dedicated volunteers and prolific readers is Kara Shallenberg, a married mother of one in Oceanside, Calif. She has read more than 200 individual chapters and six novels for LibriVox, in addition to shorter works. Shallenberg joined LibriVox after she had already been making home recording of books for her audio book fan son, Henry.
"Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted," she says, adding that she was frustrated she couldn't share those works. "The idea of creating audio books that other people could enjoy was exciting."
She has since turned Henry, 10, from an audio book lover to a budding voice talent who has recorded some of Aesop's fables.
"I would be surprised if he didn't keep doing recordings, because he loves audio books," she says. "When you love something that much, you want to get involved."
Another LibriVox volunteer, Gord Mackenzie, is a Canadian working in Detroit. He was drawn by a more philosophical reason. Mackenzie says he is concerned about the "dearth of material from the 20th century entering the public domain."
For him, LibriVox is a way to make the statement that works in the public domain can be used to benefit society. (In Canada, copyright applies for the author's life plus 50 years after their death, at which point the work enters the public domain. In the U.S., where LibriVox is hosted and administered, the general rule is that works published or registered for copyright before 1923 are now in the public domain.)
Both Shallenberg and Mackenzie came to LibriVox via BoingBoing. McGuire estimates that there are only "10 or 15" Montrealers involved in the project, most of whom are friends he contacted in the early days.
"LibriVox went global before it went Montreal," he explains.
Robert Foster, a 59 year-old semi-retired technical writer in Senneville, started recording for LibriVox this past spring and has completed one full solo recording of Aristotle's Poetics, along with three individual chapters of other recordings.
Like many LibriVoxers, he uses a basic microphone that plugs into his computer in conjunction with affordable sound recording and editing software. Recording software is also available for free on the Internet.
"It's a way to volunteer and do it from your home," he says, "I'm trying to get my son to do it as well. I think it's also good for voice training."
LibriVox's volunteers are restricted in their material only to previously published works in the public domain in the United States. McGuire says this open policy has let the personal preferences of volunteers shine through.
"If someone turned up with a smut book from 1850, we would do it," he says. "We did Fanny Hill, which is an early erotic Victorian book. Everyone was laughing in the discussion forums about having to keep quiet while recording so their kids wouldn't hear them."
Other LibriVoxers have proposed reading the Koran (some have already read chapters of the Bible), recording Supreme Court decisions and reciting pi to an unknown, but you can assume lengthy, number of digits. A multilingual recording of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is under way, as is a full cast recording of The Pirates of Penzance.
Still, there's no lack of notable authors in the LibriVox catalogue. Some of the most recorded include Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Lucy Maud Montgomery.
At its worst, a free LibriVox audio book can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high-school English class. At its best, it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.
Udell, who has downloaded from LibriVox, says the range of recording and reading quality only adds to the appeal.
"The advantage is that when I listen to a LibriVox recording I know the person who made it did so purely for the love of the work and for the desire to share that work," he says, adding the recording quality will continue to improve as LibriVox grows and volunteers gain more experience.
Shallenberg says her pet parakeet often makes unscripted contributions to her recordings, and she's happy to leave him in.
"We're just regular people, we're all volunteers," she says. "If his were a for-profit situation (requiring rigid quality control), the fun would be gone really fast."
As would Shallenberg, her son, and her parakeet, no doubt.
SIDEBARS
A growing appetite for audio books
The audience for audio books - both free and paid - is growing as more people download works to their digital music players and listen to CDs in their cars.
The North American audio book industry, which typically sells recordings for $15 to $30,
released 3,430 titles, taking in $832 million U.S. in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. By comparison, Hugh McGuire says, over the past year roughly 25,000 LibriVox audio books have been downloaded.
"Readers are increasingly turning to audio books as a way to supplement their reading time, and publishers say it's now expected that an audio book will account for 10 to 15 per cent of a book's overall sale," according to a report from the Audio Publishers Association, a trade group.
Downloadable audio books are especially on the rise. Audible.com, a major seller of downloadable audio books, had sales of $5.1 million U.S. in 2001; by 2003 its sales totalled close to $18.5 million.
According to a 2001 APA survey, 76 per cent of American audio-book listeners are female and 24 per cent are male. For women, the average listening age is 45. For men, it's 47.
LibriVox Top 5
Here are the five titles most frequently downloaded by visitors to
LibriVox.org
1. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.
2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain.
3. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
4. Call of the Wild, by Jack London.
5. Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
On the web
Audio books
librivox.org
literalsystems.org
spokenalex.org
Easy entertaining from Chocolat magazine
Rogers, the largest magazine publisher in Canada, recently launched Chocolat, a new home shopping/lifestyle magazine. I contributed an article about planning an easy, fun cocktail party, also known as a 5 à 7 in Quebec. The article features some tips and suggestions, along with some great recipes (from a chef, not me). Download the PDF.
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
Recent Writing/Work