The brilliant POTS hackers at Digium have hooked up with voice Allison Smith and launched a web-based voice prompt service called thevoice.digium.com. The service lets you purchase high-quality digital recordings of Allison reading text of your choice to use in interactive voice response systems. Here’s a screen, er, voice shot from Digium. And here’s Allison’s voice-reel.

Hermann Kleefisch, from Alaska, Prince Edward Island, set off around the world in his VW microbus in July.

I spoke with Bob Likely at Sherwood Volkswagen this afternoon, and Bob didn’t know where Hermann was on his trip right now (he promised to let me know if he heard anything).

I’d like to hook Hermann up with my friend Steve when he drives through Thailand, as Steve did the round the world drive in the late 1960s.

Anybody know where Hermann’s at?

There were two practical secret ingredients that went into making Zap Your PRAM a success.

First was Kindred Spirits Country Inn in Cavendish. Owners Al and Sharon James warmly accepted the conference into their home, and bent over backwards to make everyone feel welcome. Usually conferences are held in faceless motels that feel more like prison than anything; being at Kindred Spirits felt more like being at a good friend’s house for the weekend. The facility was universally lauded by everyone I talked to: Steven raved about the fire, Ian said his bed was so big he couldn’t find Tessa on the other side, and so on and so on. We couldn’t have held the conference anywhere else. Al and Sharon: thank-you!

Second was the catering magic of Karin LaRonde. I’ve sung Karin’s praises before, but it bears repeating. In a couple of email exchanges, we worked out the details for providing three meals for 35 people over three days. Some vegetarian, some not. And then it just happened. The food was excellent: hot, tasty, healthy, interesting. And Karin did exactly what she said she was going to do. Which meant that we didn’t have to worry about the food. Karin, thanks!

If you are organizing a conference on Prince Edward Island (and shouldn’t you be?), you will not go wrong with hosting it at Kindred Spirits and having Karin provide the food. Tell them Zap sent you.

Here’s the other secret about Zap Your PRAM: it wasn’t difficult to organize and didn’t cost a lot of money.

I suspect that when we total the bills for beer and food and T-shirts and airfares and hotel rooms, silverorange and I will each end up kicking in about $1500. That’s $3000 in expenses to house, entertain and feed 35 people for 3 days. I think a class of grade 4 students could handle that funding burden.

So, note to bureaucrats: next time an eager group comes to you with a $300,000 funding request to host a conference, point them back at this post and ask them to explain themselves.

Now, to be honest, Zap Your PRAM wasn’t a lavish conference. Speakers picked up other speakers at the airport. We carpooled to the Saturday night dinner down the road. We didn’t have organza bags embroidered with images of Anne to give to attendees. We asked our speakers to speak for free. We asked a lot of our speakers to fly themselves here on their own dime. But nobody complained.

If we had gone a more traditional route, and sought funding from government and corporate sponsors, the degree of soul destruction we would have had to endure while prostrating ourselves would have eliminated the benefits of any largese such funds would have allowed.

As to the organizational work: the conference was conceived in a series of hour-long meetings in places like the Formosa Tea House. It gestated inside the silverorange intranet. And then it just appeared.

If you leave out tasks like “picking up the keg” and “stringing ethernet cable through the trees” and “rearranging the chairs,” I would hazard a guess that there were less than 2 or 3 hours of “work” that went into arranging the conference, along with an additional couple of dozen hours of “hanging out” and perhaps a dozen more spent on things like answering email and lining up speakers.

The conference had no employees, no volunteers, no organizing committee, no bank account, no formal meetings (i.e. with uncomfortable chairs, white boards, and agendas that nobody really wanted to go to in the first place). We had a website, a weblog, four organizers, and a collection of eager, helpful and enthusiastic friends, family, and colleagues.

Already others have started to think about doing Zap-like things themselves. Please, do it! It’s easy, it’s fun, and you’ll be glad you did.

And now it can be told.

Uncharacteristically, being that I am naturally a shy person, I loved summer camp. And I have loved the summer camp-like events that I’ve participated in since. There’s something about taking a diverse melange of people who don’t know each other and throwing them in an isolated oasis for a time, doing stuff together: no matter who they are, and where they’re from, interesting stuff results. Soul-building stuff.

At Zap Your PRAM we had young techs and reborn veteran capitalists, radical librarians and radical academics, filmmakers and film enablers. And Buzz.

Many of these people never would have met without Zap as a forum. Some, like John Muir and Stephen Regoczei, have lived 4 blocks from each other for 10 years and worked for the same institution and didn’t meet until the conference brought them together.

Others, like Software User Robert and Software Developer Dave met in the real world for the first time after several years of sitting at opposite sides of a piece code.

So now John from Ontario is going to do radio with Dave from Harvard. And Ian and Tessa are turned on to PEI as film location. And Buzz and Stephen are going to work on ActiveWords together. And people from New York and Florida and Germany and Newfoundland and Windsor and Toronto. And Prince Edward Island. All know each other.

When I wrote the what is Zap your PRAM document back in August, I claimed that we didn’t really know what the conference was about. That was a lie. Zap Your PRAM wasn’t about blogs, or web browsers or provincial elections or image search solutions or death or libraries. It was a summer camp for people who, because of blogs and web browsers and provincial elections and image search solutions and death and libraries are part of what Stephen would call “the same tribe.”

When I wrote that we wanted Zap to be a conference for interesting, interested people, this is what I was really getting at. I didn’t mean “interesting” in any sort of universal way (although it appeared I did, for which I received from you’re-an-elitist flames); I meant interesting to each other.

I think it worked.

Jeff Pulver flys on jetBlue for the first time.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for David Neeleman (their CEO) to get back to me about having lunch.

From Tim Bray comes a pointer to How to read a modern Passenger Car Tire Sidewall.

I’ve always wondered two things about blogs and conferences: first, whether all those people with open laptop lids in the audience are actually listening or not, and, second, why official conference blogs always seem to dry right up as soon as the conference starts.

I’m still not sure on the first point. I wonder if there’s been a conference where the speaker has requested laptop lids shut? I mean, if two or three people in the audience were playing banjos, I would probably ask them to stop. Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t, because that would be pretty cool. But if they were frying eggs, or soldering copper pipe, or making a papier mache doll house, I would probably be distracted and annoyed enough to ask them to wait until I was done speaking.

Somehow, at least so far, the pitter patter of typing has been deemed enough like banjo playing and not enough like frying eggs so that it’s been allowed to fly under the annoyance radar.

Personally, I want to try to engage my audience, and that requires a sort of presence that isn’t possible if they’re all acting like court reporters on Law and Order. My personal spirit-guide on this is Lillian Ross, writer for The New Yorker, who writes, in her book Reporting Back:

I don’t use a tape recorder when I report. To me, the machine distorts the truth. It’s fast and easy, and a lazy way of eliciting talk, but a conversationalist is not necessarily a writer. Tape recorded interviews are not only misleading: they are unrealistic: they are lifeless. I don’t want a machine to do my listening for me. Literal reality rarely rings true. It is not interesting.

To me eye, transcribo-o-blogs are more tape recordorial than thoughtful, mostly because the art in a talk happens once my head explodes into the listener’s, and I don’t think the listener can properly process that explosion and report on it at the same time.

As to the “official blog dries up” situation, I’ve come to understand that: the conversational energy that lives inside a conference blog suddenly finds traction in the reality of the conference. In a sense, it’s like the [warning: Star Trek metaphor] conference has been “beaming in” for several months, and finally all the pattern buffers are aligned, and the physical form of the conference has appeared on the transporter platform, and you want to take it out to dinner, and give it a hug, and sing about it, rather than sitting back behind the machine and hiding behind it.

As Dan blogged yesterday, the Zap conference has been going very, very well. I feel like it’s a good party, with the right mix of people to create enough turbulent conversational energy to sail on through the weekend. When things wind down this afternoon, I think we’ll have reached the top of our game, which, said my old basketball coach Bill Difranceso, is the right time to pack up the ball for the time being, and start thinking about next week’s game.

Who would have thought that a bunch of my old friends, a bunch of librarians, a bunch of 20something technology gurus, and a straggle of people who accidentally wandered in could have so much in common?

Now you can get Matt Rainnie in stereo: listen and read.

This is the audio of a talk I gave at the 2003 Zap Your PRAM conference, in Cavendish, PEI. I spoke about my role in the 2003 Provincial General Election.