If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009’s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (”lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic spaces with Photosynth). This week I’ve got two more digital projects in mind for you, this time in the areas of podcasting and computer animation. Next week, I’ll finish up with maps and virtual worlds.

I’m writing this three-part column because I think it’s an exciting time for anyone who’s interested in consumer-level digital media tools. Not only are we seeing a profusion of inexpensive new gadgets for capturing media—witness Apple’s announcement Wednesday that the new iPod Nano will have a built-in digital video camera—but there are also many new Web-based services where creators can edit, enhance, share, and promote their media creations. The only way to keep up with all these new technologies is just to jump in and try them. So let’s get back to it:

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo

When podcasting first took off four or five years ago, most podcasters tried to emulate radio hosts, kitting out their podcasts with fancy musical intros and outros and other audio goodies. Just to experiment with podcasting, you needed a pricey microphone and recording rig, audio editing software, and a working knowledge of RSS, iTunes, and other distribution methods. But thanks to a bit of good old technological progress, the barriers are now much lower. In fact, producing a podcast these days can be just about as easy as making a phone call. Which means that dictating a few off-the-cuff thoughts on your mobile device and uploading them to the Web is becoming a realistic alternative to blogging and other more familar forms of Web-based communication.

This is precisely the point of AudioBoo, a UK-based service that I profiled in July. If you live in the UK (or if you’re willing to splurge on an international phone call), you can call AudioBoo from any phone and record some thoughts, then publish the the recording straight to AudioBoo.fm, which is basically a giant community audio blog featuring recordings or “boos” from all AudioBoo users.

But if you have an iPhone, you can use the nifty AudioBoo app to do the same thing, without the phone calls or the attendant charges. The app has a voice recording function that lets you talk for up to five minutes. It then uses your wireless data connection to upload the finished boo to the AudioBoo.fm, along with a photograph and a map of your location, if you wish. Fans can listen to your boos at the site, or they can subscribe and get new boos delivered via RSS or iTunes. The AudioBoo site also provides some handy code that you can use to embed your boos in your blog.

In fact, by doing a bit of social media marketing to promote your boos, you could turn AudioBoo into your own personal audio publishing empire. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t …Next Page »

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The human voice is making a comeback. For a while, it looked like e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, RSS, and all of the Internet’s other texty goodness might permanently eclipse the old-fashioned phone call and other voice-driven forms of communication. Even the spread of cell phones hasn’t halted the tide of text—more than a third of mobile phone owners use their phones primarily to send SMS text messages rather than making actual calls, according to research from Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo.

But a stream of new mobile-device applications designed for voice input might be restoring the balance. This month I’m excited about two examples in particular: the new Voice Memo app that showed up with Apple’s iPhone 3.0 operating system, and AudioBoo, a nifty audio recording app for the iPhone with a surprising origin: Channel 4, Britain’s publicly funded alternative television network. Along with several other programs, these apps are turning the iPhone into a handy platform for “personal podcasting,” an emerging genre of amateur digital publishing that’s as convenient and spontaneous as Twitter but, because it’s actually a person talking, feels more human.

[You can click here or skip to page 3 to hear an AudioBoo version of this article.]

No apologies, by the way, to non-iPhone owners. With iPhone 3G now priced at $99 and the 3GS starting at $199, there are fewer and fewer excuses for not trying out Apple’s marvelously powerful uber-gadget.

First, a word about Voice Memo on the iPhone. Many mobile phones come with a voice recording function these days, so it wasn’t a surprise to see Apple add one when it updated the iPhone operating system last month. It’s fairly basic: it lets you make new audio notes and review your old notes, all of which get copied to your iTunes library whenever you sync. There’s also a basic editing feature that lets you trim a voice memo by lopping time off the beginning or the end. Best of all, there’s a “share” button that lets you send out copies of voice memos via e-mail.

I really like the sharing feature, which is great for sending people quick voice messages, and has two advantages over conventional voicemail. First, the sound quality is far superior. Voice memos are monaural, but they don’t get compressed the way your voice does when you’re leaving a message for someone over a cellular voice network (compression that’s redoubled if the recipient is retrieving their voicemail from their own cell phone). Second, e-mailing a voice memo is a non-sneaky substitute for voicemail for those times when you want to leave a voice message but you don’t want to risk actually talking to the person. (Slydial offers a similar capability by connecting you directly to someone’s voicemail—but it’s not foolproof, as it sometimes makes their phone ring anyway.)

In a pinch, you can also use the iPhone Voice Memo app to record audio for publication on the Web. It clearly wasn’t designed for this purpose, as the app records memos using the relatively voluminous .m4a audio format, and doesn’t allow you to transfer memos over a certain size by e-mail. (I’m not sure what the limit is, but I was unable to send a 5-minute, 12-megabyte file.) Also, it buries the synchronized copies of your voice memos deep in the iTunes folder of your computer, where it’s difficult to find them. But as a test, I located one memo—a few thoughts that I recorded on a drizzly afternoon at the Japanese Garden at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—and used iTunes to convert it from .m4a to the more compact .mp3 format, which made it small enough to post on my personal blog at Tumblr.

But if you really want to use your iPhone as a tool for audio publishing, there are much simpler options.

For a long time, my favorite iPhone audio recording app was iTalk, the coolest feature of which is that …Next Page »

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Google’s YouTube makes it incredibly easy to share cool videos with your friends or embed them in your blog or website. The site’s friendliness toward viral distribution is probably why almost every video on the Internet ends up on YouTube sooner or later. But if big companies that publish a lot of Web video leave it to YouTube users to spread their media, they’re leaving advertising dollars on the table, argues Tom Wilde, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based video search startup EveryZing.

That’s why EveryZing is rolling out a new product today—a customized video player called MetaPlayer that helps video publishers give website visitors YouTube-style control over videos without sacrificing ad impressions.

“People want to clip, share, and read video content the same way they do with all other Web content,” Wilde told me last week. “YouTube makes it easy, so that’s where you see it happening most. The trick is balancing the need to respond to consumer requirements while still staying in business.”

EveryZing has focused to date on using speech-to-text technology developed at Cambridge’s BBN Technologies, which spun off the company in 2006, to create written transcripts of podcasts and video files. By publishing these transcripts on the Web as part of a file’s “metadata,” EveryZing makes it much easier for search engines to find the files, for advertising networks to attach relevant ads, and for viewers to jump straight to the segments within a video that interest them.

But up to now, most EveryZing customers had to go to third-party video hosting providers for the actual video player software that Web visitors use to watch videos. EveryZing client Boston.com, for example, turns to Cambridge-based Brightcove for its video services.

MetaPlayer, however, gives EveryZing customers an in-house option. The software offers several advanced functions, including thumbnail images that direct viewers to automatically identified “scenes” within a video, and time-stamped tags that make it easy to jump to the exact moment when a topic of interest is mentioned.

MetaPlayer also includes a clip-making tool that lets users pare down a video to their favorite section, then e-mail that custom clip to friends or embed it in their blog or social-networking profile. The key selling point for publishers: any “pre-roll” or “post-roll” advertising that came with the original video gets attached to the beginning or end of the customized clip.

“We’ve found that there are maybe three types of video users today on the Web,” says Wilde. “There’s the casual user who will just watch the video. Then there are the folks who want to get into it and navigate the video. Then there are the prosumers who want to use that video as part of their own publishing activities. Those folks end up being, in some ways, an extension of your own publishing capability, because they are taking videos and republishing them and getting you more consumption—and the key thing about MetaPlayer is that your pre-roll and post-roll and in-stream ads go with them,” bringing publishers more ad impressions and click-through opportunities.

EveryZing customers can also customize MetaPlayer’s look and feel (its “skin” or “chrome,” to use the industry terms). The Dallas Cowboys, for example, have created a blue, gray, and silver version that fits with the team’s extensive multimedia website (see image above).

MetaPlayer also plays well with video players from other Web video destinations, including YouTube. That means EveryZing customers can show material from YouTube inside their own branded players—tapping into YouTube’s deep pool of videos while avoiding the “lumpy” look, to use Wilde’s word, that comes from using multiple players from different companies.

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Last Saturday I attended Podcamp Boston 3, a social media conference held at Harvard Medical School’s plush Joseph Martin Conference Center. Podcamp is hard to describe because it’s more like a Web 2.0 meetup or flash mob than like a real conference. The attendees themselves make up the agenda and lead the sessions, the audience is encouraged to drift in and out of the meeting rooms at will, and impromptu gatherings are always forming in the hallways. Most of the sessions were led by podcasters and focused on how to make better audio or video podcasts, but even that wasn’t a hard-and-fast theme—there were also sessions about politics, the arts, Web design, and marketing.

My favorite session was led by Stever Robbins, also known as the Get it Done Guy from the Quick and Dirty Tips network. If you’re not familiar with Quick and Dirty Tips, it’s a delightful online advice network founded and headlined by Mignon Fogarty (a.k.a. Grammar Girl) and owned by New York’s Holtzbrinck Publishers. Robbins, a Cambridge, MA-based executive coach and motivational speaker, produces a weekly podcast for the network called the Get It Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More; if you check it out, you’ll enjoy Robbins’ six-minute compendiums of sage, original advice on topics like delegating, coping with e-mail overload, having more productive meetings, and dealing with your boss.

Robbins’ session at Podcamp, called “Grab, Hold, and Grow a Loyal Audience,” wasn’t technical at all. Rather, Robbins walked his rapt listeners through the best ways to keep podcast listeners (and any audience, really) coming back for more. Among his suggestions: put emotion into your voice, use stories about people, ask questions that listeners can relate to their own lives, and don’t be afraid to use gossip and humor.

What fascinated most me was how Robbins did all of these things in his own presentation. And how—unlike some people in the life-coach industry—he was able to pull off this maneuver while still coming across as genuine. I admired his communications skills, and I was also interested in how he’d become a podcaster, so after his session I introduced myself and asked whether I could interview him sometime for Xconomy. “How about right now?” he answered.

That was when I learned about the boyish-looking, 40-something Robbins’ real background as an MIT computer-science grad, a Harvard MBA, and a veteran of nine Boston-area software startups, including FTP Software, Building Blocks Interactive, Zefer Corp., HEAR Music, Userware International, and Intuit, where he co-led the development of the Quicken Visa card.

These days Robbins works mainly with entrepreneurs at high-growth startups, helping them to overcome business or personal obstacles, but he’s also experiencing growing success with his Get It Done Guy podcast, which spent six weeks atop the iTunes business category and recently had its one millionth download—and which he’s now turning into a book, due out in 2009. In our interview, Robbins recounted how he made the shift from entrepreneurship to coaching and podcasting, and offered some intriguing thoughts about the factors that keep many talented, hard-working entrepreneurs from achieving happiness in spite of all their accomplishments. He also shared some opinions about the relationship between technology, productivity, and gadgets like the iPhone—and had some surprisingly harsh words for the venture capital community, whose interests, he believes, are “fundamentally misaligned” with those of most startup entrepreneurs. Here’s an edited transcript.

Xconomy: How do you describe yourself?

Stever Robbins: I am someone who helps people find happiness in the 21st-century world.

X: What keeps people from being happy in the 21st-century world?

SR: Information overload, and a fundamental confusion between progress and quality of life. We define progress as technological progress. We do not define progress as reaching our goals or being happy and having meaningful, satisfied lives. First of all, most people are unclear on the distinction. Second, we raise people with an utterly unrealistic set of expectations of how the world works. And third, we spend about a trillion dollars a year on an activity designed make people feel bad about their lives—and we call that trillion-dollar expenditure “marketing.” The whole message of any marketing campaign is that your life is not complete without our product. I’ve you’ve been bombarded with 20,000 ad impressions, you’ve been bombarded 20,000 times with the message that you’re not adequate. And we don’t bombard people at all with the message “This is what makes a satisfying life” or “You already have it within your grasp to have a satisfying life.”

X: You’re a technology guy and a business guy by background. How did you make the move from serial entrepreneurship into executive coaching?

SR: What happened was I hit middle age and I suddenly realized I didn’t feel like a success. I called up my friends and said “Do you feel like a success?” and they said “Sure–I have a big house, a big car, a beautiful wife.” I would say, “That’s really nice, but do you find your life to be fun? Do you get up excited in the morning?” And most people said, “No, most of the time I just want to kill myself.” I just noticed most people are not very happy, even when they are achieving the things they are supposed to want to achieve.

By pure coincidence one day I was talking with a friend. He was an entrepreneur, and I was an investor in his company, and I was advising him. And he said “Do you realize I would pay you $3,000 for …Next Page »

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I drove from Boston to northern Michigan last weekend to hang out with my parents over the 4th of July. It’s a 15-hour trek—plus another two or three hours if you forget your passport and you have to go south around Lake Erie instead of straight through Canada. But I didn’t mind the drive, because I had an iPod full of Radio Lab podcasts to catch up on.

Radio Lab, a production of New York’s flagship NPR station, WNYC, isn’t just the best science and technology show on public radio. I think it’s a contender for the best contemporary radio show, period. I discovered it in 2006, when it was already in its second season. But thankfully, MP3s are available at iTunes and at the show’s website, and because there are only five new episodes per year, I had plenty time in the car to get through the show’s entire third and fourth seasons.

If you asked me to say what Radio Lab is about in one word, I would say “perception.” Jad Abumrad, the show’s lively host and producer, is the son of an endocrine surgeon and a research biologist, a graduate of the music and creative writing programs at Oberlin College, and a longtime radio journalist. Clearly, the only fate open to a person with a background this eclectic is to invent new interviewing, storytelling, and sound-editing techniques to explore big questions at the boundary of neuroscience, evolution, and philosophy—questions like, Where’s the part of my brain that’s me? Why do some songs get stuck in my head? Where does guilt come from? What makes placebos work so well? Can we erase memories? Why do we find zoos so fascinating? Why are people who deceive themselves more successful than those who don’t? Why do we sleep/dream/laugh/lie/age/die?

In the end, all of these questions are about how we see the world. And it doesn’t take a PhD to ask them—just a notebook or a microphone. Abumrad has said in interviews that he only became interested in science a few years ago, and that he often embarks on making an episode with only a “Time magazine-level” understanding of his subject matter. I think that’s actually one of the show’s main strengths. If you’ve studied science too long, or spent too much time around scientists, you lose the ability—or maybe just the courage—to ask big, silly, impertinent questions.

Part of the trademark Radio Lab approach developed by Abumrad and his jovial and mischievous co-host, ABC science correspondent (and fellow Oberlin alum) Robert Krulwich, is to stumble around behind a scientist in his or her lab, posing questions a third-grader might ask, professing astonishment and disbelief at the answers, and nagging for clarifications and simplifying analogies. Of course, it’s all an act—Abumrad and Krulwich know exactly what they’re doing as they maneuver scientists into dropping their professional reserve and showing their unedited, human passion for their subjects.

One of those passionate researchers is Diana Deutsch, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the psychology of music. Deutsch, whose lilting Oxford-accented voice is somehow both playful and extremely serious, has uncovered some very strange things about the sounds of language by studying looped recordings of human speech. It turns out that certain phrases, if you listen to them over and over, start to sound like music, complete with rhythm and melody—which raises some big questions about what music really is, in neurological and cultural-linguistic terms.

Is it possible, for example, that children who grow up speaking tone-based languages like Mandarin are better equipped to become great musicians (thus accounting for the frequency of Chinese violin prodigies)? While investigating such ideas, Abumrad and his colleagues deftly use digital sound editing, actual music, and even, from time to time, hired singers and actors to raise material like Deutsch’s tape loops to the level of performance art. If you just listen to the first few minutes of the Season 2 episode “Musical Language,” you’ll understand what the heck I’m talking about.

Two more of the show’s unofficial scientists-in-residence are neurologist Oliver Sacks, surely one of the three or four best physicians writing in English today (along with Sherwin Nuland, Atul Gawande, and Abraham Verghese), and theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe and surely the world’s most understandable string theorist. These folks pop in every so often to share earth-shattering yet deadpan observations—like this one from Greene, in a Season 1 episode called “Beyond Time“: “In quantum theory, some have suggested the so-called ‘many worlds’ interpretation—that the universe is not a single entity, that there are many universes and each of the choices you make is borne out in one of these copies…The fellas that believe this say, ‘I chose vanilla [ice cream] in this world but there’s another version of me that’s now eating chocolate.’”

As you listen to the show over time, you start to feel toward these guests as you might toward that wonderful, itinerant aunt or uncle who’s always stopping by between their European lecture tour and their Australian scuba safari, just long enough to take you to the planetarium and drop off their latest manuscript on neurotransmitters and quantum teleportation at the publisher’s office. The genius of Radio Lab is that Abumrad and Krulwich play the role of the wide-eyed nephew/niece so convincingly while—behind the curtain—they’re also operating the whole glorious Wurlitzer.

A few months ago, Jesse Thorn, the host of another very good public radio show called The Sound of Young America (which happens to share Radio Lab’s time slot on WNYC), interviewed Abumrad and Krulwich about their work. Abumrad said part of the show’s goal is to liberate science from the textbooks and the gray newspaper columns. “Scientists are often talked about as people who know stuff—as, like, esteemed elders who have some knowledge to bestow upon us unwashed masses,” Abumrad said. “When really they are just people who are passionate about what they do. And they stay up really late doing these experiments, 99 percent of which don’t work, and they are as crazy driven as the rest of us are. It’s about putting your finger on the person, the humanity.”

That’s a great thing for public radio to do—and I can’t wait to hear how Radio Lab keeps doing it.

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The Kraft Group in Foxborough, MA—which not only owns the New England Patriots but invests heavily in technology ventures such as the Matchmine recommendation engine and the Patriots’ own media-rich website—is the lead investor in a $4.6 million Series A funding round announced yesterday for New York-based social media site BlogTalkRadio.

BlogTalkRadio’s Web-based software allows users to conduct their own free, live, call-in talk shows. The shows are also automatically archived and published as podcasts. The company says that 3.2 million people listened to its shows in May, and that users launch 400 new shows every day.

“This round of financing further validates BlogTalkRadio as a powerful, new platform,” Alan Levy, CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, said in a statement. “Given the broad number of opportunities our platform presents to marketers and advertisers, and those who are already using BlogTalkRadio, such as Sun Microsystems, Hachette Book Group, J. Wiley and Sons, Intel and the Department of Defense, we believe this is the right time to strengthen our capital base.”

Former hedge fund manager Scott Sipprelle and other private investor joined the financing round, which the company says it will use to hire sales and marketing staff, strengthen brand awareness, and develop new content.

In a post yesterday, New York Times blogger Brad Stone used BlogTalkRadio’s own platform to interview Levy. “What blogs have done to newspapers and magazines, I think companies like BlogTalkRadio can do to talk radio,” Levy told Stone.

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