LibriVox: Free audiobooks from the public domain

LibriVox.org is an open source project that provides free audiobooks from the public domain without any advertising. To pull that off, LibriVox enables volunteers to record chapters of books and then upload the audio files as .MP3 and .OGG files back onto LibriVox, where they are then listed within the online catalog. LibriVox’s stated goal is to make all public domain books available as free, downloadable content. We wish them luck! If you would like to help, it’s easy to volunteer. Don’t worry — quite a bit of Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains to be recorded, along with numerous works of Shakepeare, if you’re feeling your thespian oats.

Free online courses from the Ivy League

Yale University has announced that it is offering publicly-accessible digital videos of several courses on the Internet for free. While the courses can’t be counted towards a Yale degree, Yale did gain the distinction of being the first member of the Ivy League to focus on video lectures. Princeton and Harvard Law School have already made course materials available for free online, even offering virtual courses in Second Life. MIT, while not an Ivy, has taken the step of making all of its courses freely available to netizens.

Yale’s pilot project features seven courses, all beginning in the 2007 academic year. Examples are “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Fundamentals of Physics” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.” Transcripts, rendered in several languages, are available for download. This PDF describes the program in more detail.

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools is is a Web site owned and operated by, of all people, Kevin Kelly, one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine way back in the 20th century. He writes about different “cool tools” weekly on his blog as well as other interesting topics in technology and culture in general, as one might expect from Wired’s “Senior Maverick.”

Memeorandum: Stay on top of the conversation in the blogosphere

Memeorandum.com offers the reader a window into the online world of news, focusing primarily on U.S. politics and current affairs. Memeorandum auto-generates a news summary every 5 minutes, drawing on experts, pundits, insiders, outsiders, media professionals, amateur and professional bloggers. For those who want to focus in on technology-specific news and commentary, TechMeme, in the words of its creater, Gabe Rivera, “surfaces relevant links” and aggregates them in the same way, in real-time. For many tech bloggers, getting onto the front page of TechMeme has become a highly-desirable goal because of the influential readership of “A-list” bloggers.

Podzinger: A new way to search for content within podcasts

Podzinger distinguishes itself in several areas of innovation, including an embedded media player that allows a user to play a podcast directly from within search results. This removes the need to download a podcast before listening to it. Additionally, Podzinger lists excerpts from the podcast that its algorithms have converted using speech-to-text technology, displaying the time and context of each occurrence of the term that was entered into Podzinger’s search engine. These excepts are linked directly into the podcasts, enabling a user to click directly to the time(s) in the podcast where the term occurred. It’s easy to add a podcast to your subscription lists on either iTunes or Yahoo!. It’s also possible to create and save searches for specific terms, allowing you to add that feed to whichever RSS reader you use and keep up to date easily on that topic. Podzinger has added the ability to search within video content to its offering as well, making it rather useful for finding keywords within your favorite iFilm or YouTube content.

LonelyGirl15

The screen name “LonelyGirl15″ has officially entered the annals of Internet lore. For a time, LonelyGirl15 was the most subscribed to channel on YouTube.com. Even if she’s been unmasked as a twenty-something actress from New Zealand instead of a child of a repressed religious family, her episodic video diary posts on YouTube, Revver.com and elsewhere created a genuine Internet phenomenon for the four months the mystery lasted, spawning its own cottage-industry of online investigators working to uncover the truth behind the lonely girl on all of our screens. Even after the Net’s discovery of her true identity and the production staff behind the series, LonelyGirl15 was one of the finalists in YouTube’s first video awards, making it to #4 in the user-moderated forum for best series before losing to Ask A Ninja comedic stylings.

Welcome to the new version of Our Latest Discovery, the WhatIs.com editorial blog!

Hello, world! This is the inaugural post in our first “official” blog. If you’re not sure what that is, make sure to read our definition for blog. Unofficially, of course, we’ve been blogging over at Blogger, in one form or another, for years. With the help of some talented folks on the back end, we’ll now be posting on WhatIs.com, using Wordpress MU. Check back frequently to find new posts from Alex, Ivy and Peggy on the things that amuse, enlighten and educate us on the wide world of IT, the blogosphere and the Internet.

Along with highlighting Web sites and software that have landed a WhatIs.com Editor’s Award, you can expect some additional commentary about new definitions or podcasts from WhatIs.com, interactive learning features or particularly insightful posts from blogs on our sister sites within the TechTarget network, many of which are listed on our blogroll. This will also be the venue for you to share your comments and questions whenever you feel inspired.

Our first sixty posts or so will reintroduce the discoveries we’ve made over the past year (helpfully tagged rediscovery), in each case providing an update to our original comment. After that, we’re off to the races. Ready…set….blog!