So the idea was to have a little holiday for LibriVox, a break from December 26 to Jan 2, to let some of the busy volunteers, admins, and moderators have a breather from all the energies we (gladly) put into LibriVox, which for many, has become a labour of love. An addictive, wonderful, exciting, all-day-consuming, labour of eyeball-drying love.
Well it didn’t quite happen that way. Our “holiday” was probably the busiest week LibriVox has seen yet. First, there was an interview with Jon Gordon on the Dec 27 edition of Future Tense, a radio program aired on 100 stations across the US (mostly NPR). You can find the Real Audio here.
That sparked a huge uptick in traffic on the site and the forum. Then we got picked up by a number of popular blogs and sites: Tech Crunch (“I think this is a terrific project, and the content will be very welcome on my long drive back to the bay area this week from Seattle. I also plan to volunteer and read chapters.”); MetaFilter; Smart Mobs; B2Day; MSNBC picked us up on their Clicked column; and Solidot, the Chinese Slashdot, posted about us. We have no Chinese volunteers yet, but we hope to soon.
Probably the most exciting for me personally was when Dave Winer, inventor of RSS, and one of the founding fathers of podcasting, linked to us in Scripting News.
That was followed shortly by an incredibly enthusiastic spot about us in podcast-evangelist Adam Curry’s show, Daily Source Code (check around minute 12:50); Adam has promised us a solo book too!
Well, all that created something of a traffic jam on our forums. We’ve added a hundred-ish new volunteers to the forum, so we’re currently 395 LibriVoxers. And to help with the increased traffic, our moderator ranks increased with Thistlechick (Betsie), LibraryLady (Annie), and Gesine all joining our ranks and helping manage the increasingly-hectic behind-the-scenes work at LibriVox.
We’ve got a few German-language projects on the go now, an Italian book in the works, and possibilities of Finnish and Persian also. So if you want to record in a language other than English, please stop by and let us know.
For the techhies, Bit Torrents are on the way. Speex format, we hope, will be part of our offerings; in addition to mp3s and ogg vorbis. Our cataloging platform is almost ready from pre-prime time. And we continue reading, all around the world.
Whew. Nice holiday! Happy New Year everyone.