These days my car stereo functionally has three modes: WAMC (our local NPR station), XM 84 (Electronica), AUX in for Drunk & Retired podcast (I’ve gotten into the 40s on the backlog of episodes). Usually when I have other people in the car, I have it on WAMC or XM 84, but turned down, so it’s not that audible.

Yesterday, I drove for lunch. One the way back, while sitting at a light, I heard the following very quietly through the radio.

I love Linux!
I love Open Source!

Well that’s an odd thing to hear on NPR, so I turned it up. The speaker then started talking about virtual worlds, which is also not the kind of thing you tend to hear randomly on NPR. We had to make a quick stop, so once I was back in the office I looked up the program.

What I was listening to was Word for Word’s broadcast of the Big Ideas Conference from Aspen. If you pull these week’s podcast, and jump to 03:00 in, you’ll hear the same bit. It’s only 5 minutes long, as they had 10 speakers in an hour, but it is an interesting perspective on the power of virtual worlds for a less tech savy audience.