For our hundredth anniversary episode, the digital history fellows divided up the 2007 episodes of Digital Campus and picked their favorite bits — listen to the result if you dare, and be transported back to the days when the iPhone was brand new, when Second Life was the Next Big Thing, and when you had to have an email address with a .edu TLD in order to use Facebook. Good times.

Many thanks to digital history fellows Ben Hurwitz, Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, Amanda Morgan, Amanda Regan, and Spencer Roberts for choosing the clips, and many many thanks to audiovisual guru Chris Preperato for stitching them together.

Running time: 58:13
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Steve Ramsay joins us on the podcast as we scratch our heads over some strange decisions by the big tech companies, namely Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype and Google’s entry into the netbook (or “Chromebook”) market. We also mourn the death of the Flip camera, killed by its similarly unlikely owner, Cisco. To end the show we return to our bread and butter of digital libraries to catch up with the Digital Public Library of America, which announced a summertime “beta sprint.” Perhaps they heard our frequent pleas for “less talk, more grok” and “less yak, more hack”?

Additional links related to the podcast:

Flip Video Vlog: A Tale of Two Formats

Digital Public Library of America: Prelim Plans for “Beta Sprint” Released

Will Chromebooks for Education be a Good Deal for Schools?

Running time: 56:14
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What would Google eBooks do? Nothing that involves human beings, says Dan: don’t look for “staff picks” from this long-awaited “cyberinfrastructure for distributed e-book sales” (which used to be called Google Editions). Your local independent bookseller will be more than happy to give you recommendations, but Dan and Tom are still worried that Google eBooks might hurt indie booksellers and university presses — though perhaps no more than Amazon already has. Mills, meanwhile, as befits a true “podcast intellectual,” can and does give many good reasons why keeping government documents secret for twenty-five years hurts historians and public policy makers; maybe if the U.S. government declassified things earlier, there wouldn’t have been such a frenzy over the illegally downloaded diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks. In any case, the cables are pretty mundane — if you consider acute analysis of diplomatic affairs mundane — and chances are that there’ll be even less salacious gossip in government correspondence from now on. Thanks a lot, Wikileaks. Finally, Tom wonders why the heck we need Chrome OS when we have Android; Google’s announcement that they’re releasing a Google Chrome notebook seems to have missed out on the fact that we’ve had a tablet revolution. Still, maybe students will like it. Students in first grade, that is.

Oh, yes, and Amanda hosts the podcast for the first time, in which multitasking capacity she expresses few opinions about anything. That loud typing is hers. Sorry about that.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Google Enters the E-Book Market at Last
Amazon enhances Kindle for the Web
Why Wikileaks is Bad for Scholars
Google shows Chrome notebook, Web Store

Running time: 51:11
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The Digital Campus crew was lucky to be joined by Bryan Alexander, the Director of Research of NITLE, on this episode. Bryan tracks emerging trends in technology and higher ed, and gives us the inside scoop on what’s up and coming for the 2008-2009 school year. Our wide-ranging discussion in that feature segment and the news roundup covers the latest in mobile technology, ebooks, digital scholarship, course-management-systems, virtual worlds, gaming, and audio, video, and image-sharing, among other topics. We also obsess a bit about the significance of Google’s new web browser, Chrome. Join us for another year of Digital Campus!

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Making the History of 1989
Synthasite
Jason Calacanis on demoing digital products, part 1, part 2
NITLE Prediction Markets
The Shadow IT Department
Google Chrome

Running time: 1:05:53
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As forms of scholarship move from the analog world of paper to the digital realm of the web, a debate has begun about how to give credit—if at all—to these new forms for the purposes of promotion and tenure. What will happen to peer review? What kinds of digital work should “count,” and how? That’s the featured discussion on this episode. We also cover the launch of Firefox 3, university presses putting their books on Amazon’s Kindle device, and the release of better copyright records.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Google publishes copyright status of books from 1923-1963
U.S. Copyright Office Record Search
Mills on “Making Digital Scholarship Count”
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
Creative Commons Case Studies
MozillaZine on “about:config”

Running time: 44:02
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On our first podcast of the new year, we look at the rise of the small, cheap laptop and its significance for education and cultural sites. In addition to a full rundown of the latest news about the One Laptop Per Child project and its $188 XO laptop, we cover the wildly popular Asus Eee PC and the forthcoming Everex CloudBook, both costing under $400. In the news roundup we note the end of the line for Netscape, mention the darker alleyways of social networking, and congratulate ourselves for predicting the decline of Second Life. And at the end of the podcast we highlight a great new word processor for the Mac, a service to print out-of-print books, and the digitization of a gigantic medieval bible.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
One Laptop Per Child
Pixel Qi
Asus Eee PC
Everex CloudBook
Scrivener
Codex Gigas
Public Domain Books Reprints Service
THATPodcast
THATCamp

Running time: 45:48
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