Today we opened an account on Twitter. You can follow us at @wmfhlp.

The crowd-funding thing is interesting. It seems to me like a slam-dunk that 15,000 people out of 300 million would be willing to drop $1 on our project, or almost any given project for that matter.

So the issue comes down to marketing – getting your project in front of the most people and find those folks out there with a spare dollar and enough gumption to click on “contribute now”. Or so it seems.

Our Twitter account will, we hope, add substantially to the number of people who could see our appeal.

We are having a bit of trouble getting Twitter and Facebook to talk to each other. But we will eventually get that worked out. That part is really a convenience for us since it means one entry in Twitter is echoed in Facebook.

The whole new-media thing is exciting, interesting, and sometimes frustrating!

We are continually adding content to our broadcast system library.

First, I find things on Librivox.org that look interesting.  I have been getting a lot of good short-length pieces from a series of anthologies of short poetry and short stories.  And from there I branch out to what sounds interesting to me or I may look up some other works which were performed by a particular volunteer reader.

Each item comes as a zipped collection of .mp3 audio files.

I have a little script which unpacks the zipped collection and then runs the loader program to put all of the .mp3s into our automation system.  The script loads everything into a classification called ‘NEW’.

After that I go through and check out each one.  I trim the beginning and ending.  Most of the items begin with a statement about the Librivox project, so I trim that off.  And most have “end of chapter 1”, stuff at the end, and I trim that off. I classify the selection roughly by type (fiction, poetry, biography…) and by it’s  time-length.  And I try to check the audio level so that it isn’t too loud or too soft.

In some rare cases there will be something about that particular track which makes it difficult to understand.  If it is part of a short-piece anthology I put just that track  into a different classification to look at later.

We have about 1500 items in the library so far.  Most of those are short pieces.  Last night I spent a couple of hours and trimmed and classified about a hundred items.

Our page at indiegogo.com is up and running and we have a brave soul who started us off with a Kick Off contribution.  Thank you kind benefactor.

Did you ever have that dream in school, the one where you realize at finals exam time that you had never attended the course and didn’t know any of the material?  We were having something similar about our project starting up and wilting like week-old flowers in a vase for 45 long days while nothing happened.  But you rescued us from that fate and we are grateful!

I have to re-post here my 50 seconds of fame (our project explanation video).  No, it is not a great video.  It is better than the first one I did.  But it made my wife laugh for about 10 minutes so I figured it must not be too bad.