About

hugh mcguireI build webby things, usually with help from smart people. I write and speak often enough about media, publishing, the web, technology, mass collaboration, online community-building, open culture, copyright.

If you’d like to get in touch, find out how here, or:

* Send me an email: hughmcguire@gmail.com.
* Ping me on Twitter: @hughmcguire

Here are some of the things I’ve been involved with starting, one way or another:

LibriVox – I’m founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project that makes free, public domain audiobooks. LibriVox was once called “perhaps the most interesting collaborative cultural project this side of Wikipedia.” We are the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, putting out 70-100 books a month. We have a catalog of 3,318 books (as of April 2010) in 29 languages. All driven by the passion of thousands of volunteers around the world who love books. Here is even more info about LibriVox. Some nice things various people have said about LibriVox: Reason Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Montreal Gazette, New York Times, red hat magazine, The World – BBC Radio, wired.com, IT conversations (audio), creative commons, wikinews, Les Echos [fr]. And here is the site: LibriVox.org.

Bite-Size Edits – Bite-Size Edits – is a crazy thing we built, which the New Yorker called a “video game for editors.” We take a text, chop it up into sentences, and serve those sentences at random to editors. It’s a proofreading tool, a game, a way to connect writers and readers, all in the name of good sentences. Why not go edit, for fun? Bite-Size Edits.

Book Camp Toronto – BookCampTo is a yearly unconference about the future of books, publishing, writing and reading. It’s an intimate gathering of writers, publishers, technologists, librarians, readers and people passionate about the written words, and the technologies used to ship them around and consume them. Find out more.

Earideas – Earideas = ear + ideas … get it? A a collection of thought-provoking radio shows and podcasts from around the web, updated daily. This is the stuff I listen to on a regular basis – culled from a variety of sources, including public broadcasters in Australia, the UK, US, and some other countries, including a dwindling list of shows from the once-great CBC. In addition, there is stuff from the NY Times, the Economist, Times Online, Nature Magazine, among others. It’s built to make it easy to find good stuff to listen to. Start giving your ears some ideas: earideas.

Book Oven Blog – For the past year and a half, I’ve been writing about what’s affectionately known as “the future of publishing,” mostly on the Book Oven Blog. The blog came out of work we were doing on Book Oven, but while development of the Book Oven has slowed considerably, I keep posting to the blog. I should probably decide where to do my writing – here, there, Huffington Post, elsewhere? It’s a complicated world. One thing you might like to check out is the Book Oven Blog’s series of Monday Typewriters. They’re lovely.

Media Hacks Podcast – Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and I used to go to lunch all the time, and have heated discussions about media, technology, the Internet and other sundry topics. One day Mitch said: “we should record these.” He had the idea to bring in a few other smart people: Chris Penn, CC Chapman, and Chris Brogan. And so, Media Hacks was born. It’s a 40 minuteish free-flowing discussion about whatever is on our minds – much like those lunches of yore. Unfortunately it doesn’t really have its own URL that actually updates, so you’ll have to visit Mitch’s podcast to find the ones titled: Media Hacks. (Media Hacks secret trivia: when we were debating the name for the podcast, a leading candidate was “Zoltan’s Underwear”).

DataLibre – One of my neglected passions is citizen access to government data. I think datasets that are collected by the government with taxpayer money belong to the citizens, and should be available for free, in open formats. For instance: did you know that you have to pay thousands of dollars to the government to get the data set that links postal codes to electoral districts, and once you have done so, your usage of that dataset is restricted? DataLibre is a blog about issues surrounding citizen access to data. I am an absentee founding-editor. The present editor is Tracey Lauriault.

Book Oven – Book Oven is a digital book-publishing platform.

In addition to these things, I:

Before rediscovering the web, I worked in environmental finance, where I helped build and market structured financial products to address the risk of greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements for large global energy companies, while financing greenhouse gas emissions reduction projects. It was souped-up, complex carbon trading, and we were far too early.

I’ve got degrees in Mathematics & Engineering, as well as Philosophy, from Queen’s University.

[pic by Shawna]