I love this little app! It has [almost] all the ingredients everyone likes: [They need to add chocolate.]

• It's free!
  
• It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
  
• It's among the simplest applications on earth to use.
  
• It works.

Here is a screen shot of the application window:

Ah, but what does it do, you ask? Simple. Take your WAV or AIFF file and drop it onto the window. It thinks for a while, and poof! Out pops the same file, in the same location as the original, with .output.aiff or .output.wav appended to the name.

The new file has been leveled. No more extreme louds and extreme softs. The volume remains rather constant throughout. So if one child in a podcast speaks too loudly while another speaks too softly, the new file has them both speaking at the same level. And if your overall audio needs a nice boost, it gets it.

If you make podcasts or have your students making them, you know the issue I'm talking about. Add the Levelator to your workflow. It's a quick, easy step that will make a giant improvement in your audio podcasts!

From their website:

So what is The Levelator®? It's software that runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It's not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It's much more than those tools, and it's much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler's application window, and a few moments later you'll find a new version which just sounds better.

Have you ever recorded an interview in which you and your guest ended up at different volumes? How about a panel discussion where some people were close to microphones and others were not? These are the problems the post-production engineers of Team ITC here at The Conversations Network solve every day, and it used to take them hours of painstaking work with expensive and complex tools like SoundTrack Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge or Audition to solve them. Now it takes mere seconds. Seriously. The Levelator® is unlike any other audio tool you've ever seen, heard or used. It's magic. And it's free.

link: The Levelator® from The Conversations Network

I just discovered Feverº, a self-hosted RSS feed aggregator with a twist.

People are becoming aware of the power of reading RSS feeds through online feed (or news) aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines, or applications like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon that run on the computer desktop and do the same thing: bring lots and lots of current information from your favorite blogs and other websites to you almost in real time.

The problem: most of us subscribe to so many RSS feeds, reading them becomes a time consuming challenge. Wouldn't it be helpful at times if your RSS aggregator could sift through all of your feeds and indicate trends and top discussions from among all of your RSS sources? Tah dah: Feverº!

Feverº looks for hot "discussions" across your many feeds. It actually encourages you to add more feeds, even ones you're less interested in following on a regular basis, but consider trusted sources. You add these feeds to a group called "Sparks." Fever looks through your "Sparks" and your "Kindling" (which are the feeds you read regularly) for the topics or discussions that are "Hot." Sort of an aggregator of aggregation...

These hot topics are ranked in order with the hottest ones on top. You can check out the hot topics for now, today, this week, etc.

Fever will not be for everyone because it is web-based and must be self-hosted on your own server account. This means you must install it yourself on a hosting service. However, that said, I found the installation easy and straight forward. Your hosting service requirements include your typical: Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Because you are hosting it yourself, Google isn't monitoring and making money off of what you read, and you can read from any browser, your iPhone or iPod Touch, and Mac users even have a desktop application, Chill Pill, that interfaces with Feverº to add additional functionality.

Feverº is a novel approach to RSS feed aggregation and reading and offers many things I haven't mentioned. You might want to check it out! While its current feature set is already rich enough to cause me to purchase it, I look forward to seeing it even mature further. In light of the recent changes to NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, Feverº may well become my new aggregator of choice!

I have the basic news apps on my iPhone: AP, the New York Times, NPR, even the Wall Street Journal. I've had the CNN site bookmarked on my phone until today. I deleted it after purchasing CNN's new mobile app for the iPhone. It's the best news site application I've seen to date--complete awesomeness!

The app only costs $1.99. As a friend of mine pointed out, however, you still have to suffer with advertisements on the paid application. Sad. But at least I don't find it nearly as intrusive as CNN.com's video ads before every video. [By the way, I've found a way around that!] On the iPhone app you only get a still image ad while the video loads. And I'm delighted you can watch live newscasts and video over WiFi, 3G, and Edge!

Turning the phone horizontally gives a very nice coverflow slideshow for news events and videos all based on category. Touch the picture to flip the image and reveal the barebones basics of the story with a link to watch or read if you desire.

My CNN provides immediate access to news, weather, and traffic based on your physical location and on any locations you setup to monitor. The news stories link to local media.

iReport, shown at the bottom of this post, is probably my favorite, not because of the content, but because of the concept. In this section you can view featured iReport articles or video. But what is really impressive: Submit. The user can submit photos or video right from the iPhone. So if you find yourself in the middle of a news-worthy event, you can shoot it and upload it to iReport on the spot. Very slick! CNN even offers some suggested assignments for iReporters.

Sharing and following news stories and topics is easy. When you choose to follow a topic, that topic is loaded into your "My CNN." Topics, naturally, are broader than individual stories. For example: I touched "Follow" on a story about Iran's nuclear program. Four stories, all related to Iran, appeared in "My CNN." You can also share news and iReports via Text Message, Email, Twitter, and Facebook. I'm not sure if selecting "Save for later" will allow you to read the story offline when you have no access--like on an airplane. Now, that would be very nice!

Other nifty little features remain undiscussed. I like the new CNN app, a lot. The designers did a great and thoughtful job.

Wouldn't it be great if each of us had a photographic memory? One of my dissertation advisors did. Everything he ever read in his life he could recall word for word. Often he would close his eyes, place his palm to his head, and begin reading, from memory, some research report he had read years back. I wished I could do that. But today, I'm not so sure.

Forgetting versus Perpetuity
The default setting for the vast majority of humanity is to forget. And I've come to realize that forgetting has its rewards. What's that new adage: "What happens in Vegas stays... on Google, on Facebook, on YouTube...".

Forgetting allows people the human space required to grow, mature, and change over time--all of which are fundamental aspects of the human experience we certainly don't want to lose in the digital age. As a middle school educator, I have often met former students who had such difficulty as adolescents. But they grew up to be wonderful adults, often embarrassed at running into me fearing I still remembered the trials and tribulations of their relatively recent past.

In this example, I allowed context and perspective to play a significant part in remembering, and I extended the hope that I had forgotten. I do believe that change is not just possible, but usually inevitable.

But the digital world in which we live changes these important default settings. The past never goes away. Change might never have happened or is not assimilated quickly enough to matter in the present. Context and perspective are often absent from the databased information.

Anonymity versus Publicity
But this isn't the only default setting that is being turned on its head in our digital age. Pervasive monitoring accompanies eternal memory and storage. Everywhere I go, I am watched by unseen eyes. This data can be stored so cheaply, it probably will never go away.

You see, I want to be able to run a red light at 1:00AM when there is not a single person or vehicle within miles of me. I actually think I'm doing a good thing when I run that light: I'm trying to conserve fossil fuels, reduce transportation costs, and use time efficiently.

Moral Wisdom versus Binary Choices
But now, I might be at a traffic light that will use its digital systems to issue me a citation. Included in that data will be no mention of the good judgements I was trying to make in breaking the rules of the road in a safe way. So the digital grid is now depriving me of the capacity to exercise moral wisdom and common sense--and not just me, but everyone in the society.

We are now being squeezed into rigid perceptions of what is right and wrong, good or bad, acceptable or not--those regrettable, reductive binary choices that neglect all of the possibilities that live between on and off, which is all the microchip can assess. The human condition is much richer than that.

Balancing the Future
As we move forward, we need to keep our human limitations and default settings in mind, not to hold us back, but to keep the defaults of the life experience moving forward more humane.