Radio EPrints

I have just found out that UMAP 2009 is publishing MP3s of all its conference abstracts before the conference starts. I'm going to keep a weather eye on how this goes, because the organisers clearly think that this is a way of getting the message out about their work.

This isn't particularly new: in the 1980s the cool Mac crowd were using HyperCard to record Usenet messages to listen to in the car. But when proper conference organisers (rather than maverick geeks) start to invest the effort to do it for their conference, then it is more serious. After all, these guys have a conference to organise!

Is this the right time to take the step and do similar for our repositories? Record summaries, commentaries or adverts for each of our papers / lectures / reports ? Why not have an "elevator pitch" to advertise important work? There must be all sorts of opportunities for syndicating audio content, and mixing it up into academic playlists.