The conversation was frank and informative and it was nice to reconnect with the likes of Julien and Charles who I haven’t seen in a while.

After much conceptual talk in the morning session about context and content and connections, Hugh McGuire did a great job “rebooting” our conversation when he led off the afternoon with a poignant reminder of why, I think, most of us in the room choose to spend the entirety of a Sunday in November sitting on the floor — lovely as the plush red carpet was — talking about podcasting.

Hugh played a clip from well-known Canadian podcaster Scarborough Dude which very effectively reminded us it’s about the audio; that audio, whether it’s online, on the radio, or on a portable device … that audio has a way of communicating to us, of engaging us, of captivating us in a way that the written word or visual media simply cannot.

Chalk it up to the primacy of language, the power of the spoken word, or the theatre of the mind, the fact remains, audio is the most powerful form of communication we have.

And our love of audio is why we choose to spend 6 hours numbing our butts at the NAC yesterday.

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

LibrVox founder, Hugh McGuire has posted some of his personal Librivox recommendations to his blog. The list which includes works such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, Heart of Darkness and War of The Worlds, makes a great place to start discovering LibriVox audio.

[link]

Download free audiobooks at LibriVox

Here’s hoping the LibriVox servers can handle the deluge of traffic.

Listed are scores of podcasts on arts & culture, audio books, languages, even full semesters of university lectures from the likes of Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard. Each podcast is listed with its RSS, iTunes, and website links.

Sadly, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.