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I spent a lot of the last week proofreading a number of transcripts, and I just posted these following 13 interview transcripts:

* John R. MacArthur, Harper's Magazine, Publisher
* Pamela Hess, United Press International, Pentagon Beat Reporter
* Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Host
* Robert Dreyfuss, Investigative Reporter, Nation, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone
* Jack Nelson, Los Angeles Times, Retired Washington Bureau Chief
* Lawrence Grossman, NBC News & PBS, Retired President
* Tom Rosenstiel, Committee for Concerned Journalists, Director
* Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media, Contributing editor
* Susan Moeller, University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Associate Professor
* Todd Gitlin, Columbia University Professor, Graduate School of Journalism
* John Prados, National Security Archive, Senior Fellow
* Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies, Fellow
* Karen Kwiatkowski, Retired Pentagon Policy Analyst, Near East South Asia

This is the audio from the speech by Scott Ritter that I heard on August 22, 2002 in Baltimore that really catalyzed The Echo Chamber Project. This was four days before the Bush Administration kicked off their PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq when Dick Cheney came out and said that "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." ...

Here is an interview with Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News from October 5, 2005 at the We Media Conference. Sambrook talks about the future of journalism and the latest experiments with citizen journalism by BBC. He also discusses UK press coverage during the build-up to the war in Iraq, and some differences between the US and UK press.

The BBC is subsidized by the UK government, and therefore is a lot more free to experiment with participatory media when there isn't an explicit business model attached. As a result, the BBC is shaping up to be a worldwide leader in "We Media" innovation, and making news a more collaborative process.

(19:41 / 5.6 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

Here's an interview with Doc Searls of Doc Searls Weblog & senior editor of Linux Journal on May 16, 2005 talking about open source communities, and how collaborative principles apply to the future of media, politics and culture.

Since I'm working on this open source documentary about the media, then I wanted to get some insight into what makes open source communities work.

Coincidentally, the group formerly known as Pajamas Media had their launch today and are now known as Open Source Media -- and I have a little rant about OSM™'s privacy policy which seems to be in complete opposition to the values of open source (via The Talent Show).

(24:42 / 7.1 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

I'm starting to specify specific feature requests for Drupal's playlist module, both Colin and Farsheed said that I should coordinate these requests through this Drupal feature request database.

If you have any PHP coding experience and are interested in helping expand this playlist module for other nodes and for collaborative film editing, then please e-mail me at kent@kentbye.com -- and I'll be sure to put you in touch with Colin and Farsheed. Or you can go through Drupal's tasking mechanism if you'd like, but drop me a line to keep me posted.

This is an explanation for how to edit together sound bite excerpts from longer MP3 files using something called SMIL -- or "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language."

I've completed some successful experiments with SMIL and Quicktime that provide a promising solution for collaborative editing. A browser-based editing system could use the playlist mechanism to create sequences of sound bites. I discuss this more in these conversations with Lucas Gonze, Colin Brumelle and Farsheed -- and in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

I'm passing along this information along so that some developers can add SMIL export functionality to the Drupal playlist module.

What does all of this mean?
I could upload the audio from the 45+ hours of interviews that I've conducted for this project, and then combine this SMIL mechanism with Drupal so that volunteers could start helping edit the film. This Collaborative Filmmaking schamatic has more details.

These volunteer edits would be dynamically generated online with SMIL, and other people could listen to them and rate them. The good edits could be translated into real offline edits via the IN and OUT times being exported through Final Cut Pro XML generated by Drupal.

SMIL is a pretty simple mark-up language similar to HTML that allows the creation of audio and video edit decision lists.

You can create a small text file that points to the IN and OUT times of audio or video source files, and then this SMIL file can then be played with Quicktime or Realplayer. It is a simple way to edit audio and video together using text mark-up language, which could easily be automatically generated from a playlist of sound clips.

Below are more details for using SMIL for dynamic editing of audio and video content...

A discussion with Farsheed Hamidi-Toosi about the Drupal playlist module. I also talk a lot about what I'm doing with The Echo Chamber Project.

(49:10 / 14.1 MB / Subscribe to the Community & Technology Audio Feed)

Click here to listen to the MP3

More details in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

Also mentioned in this podcast, is dynamic editing of audio files with SMIL.

Any PHP programmers interesting in helping add some this functionality to Drupal's Playlist module should also listen to the conversation with Drupal developer Colin Brumelle and discussion with playlist maven Lucas Gonze. Look to http://www.echochamberproject.com/volunteer for updates.

A discussion with Colin Brumelle about the Drupal playlist module. I talk about some of the features that I would like to see added to the playlist module, and explain more about what I'm doing with The Echo Chamber Project.

(26:29 / 7.6 MB / Subscribe to Community & Technology Audio Feed)

Click here to listen to the MP3

More details in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

Any PHP programmers interesting in helping add some this functionality to Drupal's Playlist module should also listen to the conversation with Drupal developer Farsheed and discussion with playlist maven Lucas Gonze. Look to http://www.echochamberproject.com/volunteer for updates.

A Discussion with Webjay.org's Lucas Gonze about his playlist community, and how playlist concepts can be applied to film editing and citizen journalism. Playlists being lists of songs, and Edit Decision Lists being lists of audio sound bites and lists of video clips. We also discuss reputation, identity, and distribution.

(51:08 / 14.6 MB / Subscribe to Echo Chamber Project's Community & Technology Audio Feed)

Click here to listen to the MP3

More details in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

Any PHP programmers interesting in helping add some this functionality to Drupal's Playlist module should listen to this as well as the next two discussions with the Drupal Developers Colin and Farsheed. Look at http://www.echochamberproject.com/volunteer for updates.

I've been using del.icio.us for a while to track the websites that cross the threshold of my attention stream -- a lot of these sites have to do with researching technologial issues and political issues surrounding the Echo Chamber Project.

I thought that this latest tagroll feature would be a good time to show a snapshot of my brain.

I'm also phasing over to feedburner feeds where it sends my latest tagged stories out through my http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProject RSS Feed -- which is the feed that will also contain my latest blog posts, video blogs, and all podcasts (both interview audio and community/technology audio).