One lesson from the Zotero project has been the wild popularity and usefulness of video introductions or screencasts to help people understand and get started with a new piece of software. Text explanations and manuals just do don’t as good a job as showing software in action.

This month’s THAT Podcast from Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester walks the viewer through the installation and customization of Omeka, which Jeremy and Dave work on, and which just launched recently. (And it’s off to a fantastic start, with active forums and nearly 300 downloads in under a week, a very large number for an institutional web app.) It also includes interviews with Tom Scheinfeldt and Sharon Leon, the directors of the project.

The podcast is filmed in part in the Center for History and New Media‘s “Owl Lounge,” a favorite brainstorming site at the Center. And yes, Dave and Jeremy are already showing off some of the Omeka swag, including t-shirts and laptop stickers.

The Omeka and Zotero teams are currently out in force at the packed Code4Lib 2008 conference in Portland, Oregon, where they will each be presenting and hacking.

We’re excited to have two terrific guests on the podcast this week, Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts and Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland. Sunil and Matt debate the NEA’s recent report, To Read or Not To Read, which generated a lot of headlines and hand-wringing when it was released last month. (Blog subscribers may remember my critique of the report.) We also cover Microsoft’s courtship of Yahoo and what it means (if anything) for campuses, provide an update on a problematic U.S. House of Representatives bill, and dissect the new Horizon Report on digital technologies that will affect universities in the coming five years.

Coming up next time on Digital Campus: a discussion with Yakov Shafranovich, the creator of PublicDomainReprints.org, which was covered on Digital Campus #19 and 20.

Are open educational resources such as iTunes U and thought-provoking dot-coms such as BigThink.com a distraction from the mission of professors and universities, or the wave of the future? We debate the merits of “open access” intellectual content in the feature story on our twentieth Digital Campus podcast. Also, I report on the mostly good (if a little odd) experience of buying a book from PublicDomainReprints.org, and we discuss the MacBook Air, Flickr Commons, and a variety of tools for manipulating RSS feeds.

Joining the growing network of CHNM podcasts (which includes Digital Campus, Tom Scheinfeldt‘s History Conversations, and occasional podcasts from our many online projects) is THAT Podcast: The Humanities and Technology Podcast. The podcast, available in both video and audio, is the brainchild of CHNM’s Creative Lead, Jeremy Boggs, and one of CHNM’s crack web developers, Dave Lester.

And what an incredible way to start the podcast: Jeremy and Dave interview Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. Matt has a number of interesting observations about the role of blogs in academia and how to run a successful open source software project. Jeremy and Dave also demonstrate how to install their ScholarPress Courseware course management plugin, which can be used to set up a course website and blog.

A day before Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, we recorded this Digital Campus podcast on the One Laptop Per Child project and the rise of small, cheap laptops (including the wildly popular Asus Eee PC) and their significance for education and cultural sites. In the news roundup we cover the end of the line for Netscape and heap more scorn upon social networks and Second Life. Plus we note a great new word processor for the Mac, a service to print out-of-print books, and the digitization of a gigantic medieval bible.

The final Digital Campus podcast of 2007 covers the top digital humanities stories of the year. For those who haven’t had the time to listen to the first 17 episodes, here’s a great way to catch up. And for longtime listeners (as well as new ones) we anticipate the important technology trends that will affect universities, libraries, and museums in 2008. Why not make your New Year’s resolution to subscribe to the podcast?

Can cell phones become a useful platform for education? That’s the feature story on our holiday Digital Campus podcast, as we discuss several possibilities for the device that is now in every student’s and museum-goer’s pocket. We conclude our discussion of Facebook‘s controversial advertising system, wonder if privacy will be a draw for Ask.com, and revisit the rise of the podcasting of lectures now that commercial companies are entering the market. Our links for the week include exhibition software for museums, a great new academic blog from Stan Katz, and a simple way for libraries and museums to turn cell phones into audio tour handsets.

As noted in this space recently, Amazon.com’s release of its new e-book reader the Kindle has set off a frenzy of speculation about the future of books, reading, and publishing. On the new episode of Digital Campus, we debate the promise and problems of the Kindle and e-book readers in general. In the news roundup we express outrage at a possible new U.S. bill that would remove funds from universities that fail to stop online piracy and at Facebook’s new feature that allows everyone to see what you’re buying. Listeners beware: it’s a cranky week on the podcast.

Think Google is scary with all of the information it gathers about you through your web searches? Wait until Facebook starts its advertising platform based on all of the likes and dislikes you’ve given it, and combines that with the power of Microsoft, which just bought a stake in the biggest social network on campus. We tackle privacy, anonymity, and giving away personal information in this week’s podcast. In the news roundup we celebrate the release of Apple’s new operating system upgrade, Leopard, and debate whether it and Ubuntu can begin to steal market share from a faltering Windows Vista.

On this episode of the podcast, we debate the proper relationship between a museum’s virtual and physical manifestations. Our news roundup covers the opening up of Harvard’s scholarship, Berkeley’s YouTube channel, iTunesU, and two software projects that aim to improve the library catalog and the museum exhibit. We also highlight Errol Morris’s blog posts on truth in photography, a great museum blog, and a tool for converting one type of digital file to another.