Podcast is 'word of the year'

Well, you've gotta love those wordsmiths over at the New Oxford American Dictionary. We here at ClickCaster, being in the podcasting business, say: hat's off! We love the word too.

NEW YORK, Dec. 5/PRNewswire/ -- Only a year ago, podcasting was an arcane activity, the domain of a few techies and self-admited ‘geeks.’ Now you can hear everything from NASCAR coverage to NPR’s All Things Considered in downloadable audio files called “podcasts’. Thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more.

That’s why the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected “podcast” as the Word of the Year for 2005. Podcast, defined as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player,” will be added to the next online update of the New Oxford American Dictionary, due in early 2006.

Well... that didn't take long:

Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules

By DAN GOODIN, Associated Press WriterMon Dec 5, 6:10 PM ET

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations.

Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.

Full story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051205/ap_on_hi_te/wikipedia_rules&printer=1;_ylt=AujlxiWuF_KWrP7LDqbtFiJk24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

Graffiti and Wikipedia

Graffiti. I’ve been thinking about that last post on Wikipedia and the uproar over how anonymous posting there can be troublesome and, in some cases, potentially libelous. It brings me to some personal experiences, both recent and in the past that tells me: anonymous isn’t necessary goodness.

I’m CEO of a podcasting startup called ClickCaster (www.clickcaster.com). We had some debate among the development team on whether to allow anonymous podcasting or not and, after going back and forth, decided that there needed to be some degree of accountability for what you say in your podcast. At the very least, you needed to supply a verifiable email that someone would complain (or send praise) to. You can still browse and listen to podcasts, but if you want to post something, you’ve got to supply a working email.

And this reminded me of a program developed internally at Apple computer back in the late 80’s, early 90’s by a fellow (Harry C) that had a somewhat profound effect on the company. It was called Graffiti, and that was exactly what it was. It was a small program you installed on your Macintosh, and it had two fields, one for text that you’d enter, and one for text that others entered to appear in. Super simple. Super fun and it, for a while, brought the Apple Campus network to it’s knee’s (thousands of copies running on virtually every employee computer in Cupertino).

Harry wrote it while working for ATG (Advanced Technology Group) and then, worked for me in the AOS (Apple Online Systems group). The sheet hit the fan, unfortunately, when he went to work for me, so I got a front row seat (as his manager) to what unfolded.Since you didn’t have to name yourself when you put text in and blasted it all over the network, making it anonymous and very graffiti like (hence it’s name), you also could say anything you wanted. Some people did, and it was fun.
But some people posted rumors, and gossip. One in particular was started about an HR exec who was sleeping with his administrative assistant. No biggie, most people at Apple back then were single and it’s was pretty common, This guy was married though, and in a sensitive job that interacted with a lot of people. And, unfortunately, it might have been true. This exec found out, went to the engineering VP (I think it was Larry Tesler… can’t remember) who, eventually, got to me, the software authors manager.
Because the software assumed a small (Apple only) audience, and it was a closed system, Harry thought it wouldn’t be a problem that it was anonymous. He was wrong. He was forced to pull the software from the network (although, if you had it, you could keep running it) and he was almost fired over it (I intervened, of course). But the lesson was learned.

Anonymous posting is almost always bad. There are a few (rare) cases where it makes sense (political, personal or professional repercussions if you associate your name with something for instance) but, in general, it’s better to have accountability than not to.

Hopefully, the Wikipedia folks have learn this lesson as well.

The New York Times vs. Wikipedia

Following is a link sent to me by a friend about how a fake posting a person in Wikipedia got by the volunteer editors and slandered someone who's still around with alot of untrue info. This is my response to it. It's interesting in that I think this will become a sort of attack point by old media entities on new media and it's worth both keeping an eye on and making sure it doesn't spiral into something unreal:

"This is interesting in that it's creating alot of focus on the 'unreliability' of things like WIkipedia and blogs.

My initial reaction is 'how accurate are the newspapers?'. I've been quoted, over the years, many times in newspapers and magazines and, about 10 or so years ago, stopped talking to them because they NEVER got it right. Sometimes, they intentionally got it wrong (a quote by me was once used by a Washington Post reporter, totally out of context, about a story on the 'problems' at Apple computer... my quote, which had nothing to do with the problems, made it sound like an exec (me) from the company was confirming it was going down the tubes).

And the NYT's has some very real credibility problems in my mind right now when it comes to 'getting it right'. I don't even read these guys anymore due to 'award winning' reporters getting it wrong and, in some cases, just making it up. The NYT in particular is well known for having this happen to them.

That said, yea.. it's an issue. I think, however, it's a self correcting one. The Wisdom of Crowds is real, and overall, it's better than the editor/writer/fact-checker model used by commercial entities that broadcast out to the masses. Will things like this happen? Always. Will the Wikipedia's (and blogs and podcasts) of the world continue to have this problem? Yes. But I would bet, over time, if you compare the accuracy of a Wikipedia to a NYT's, you'll find overall better information with the user generated (and policed) source over the commercial source.

Just my two cents. ;-)S

WEEK IN REVIEW December 4, 2005 Rewriting History: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE The question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

Denver's Police State

http://www.papersplease.org/davis/facts.html

Read this link. Really, read it.

Next Stop: Big Brother

Meet Deborah Davis. She's a 50 year-old mother of four who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her kids are all grown-up: her middle son is a soldier fighting in Iraq. She leads an ordinary, middle class life. You probably never would have heard of Deb Davis if it weren't for her belief in the U.S. Constitution.

This is not America. When honest, law-abiding citizens can't commute to work on a city bus without a demand for their 'papers', something is very, very wrong.

One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.

On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "papers" whenever a cop demands them.

Now, I'm no alarmist. I think the militia folks out in the AZ dessert are a little batty, but this smacks of state control like nothing I've heard for some time.

Seems this women was asked for her ID on a bus that happened to go through a federal facility area (just the area, mind you, and this is a public transportation open to the world bus).

Read the story. The summation is she refused to show her ID because she'd learned long ago there is no law requiring it and it bugged her doing it. It was a principle thing (do we live in a gulag pro-1990 soviet state? not last time we checked, or, so I thought until reading this). She was arrested, dragged to the police station and is being charged with a multitude of ‘crimes’. All for being, as the story notes ‘uppity’.

We need a degree of authority. We need laws. But we also need our constitution and our freedoms.

Anyone who says 'someone who has nothing to hide shouldn't have a problem with it' wasn't around in 1770 when search (and seizure) without warrants where common. That's why we have a constitution: to protect against this kind of behavior in the face of randomly applied authority.

Is Google becoming the old Microsoft?

I'm seeing some really weird things happening lately. Microsoft releases SSE, a two way RSS like spec, under an open Creative Commons license (!). Google refuses to allow true RSS feeds that would open Google's engines to the world.

What's happening here?

Google is at the center of a centralized view of the worlds data. It controls everything, and everyone, coming in and out. It then monetizes that with advertising, allowing it to create lots of cool free services (that area also tracked and often, but not always, monetized with advertising). The problem for those of us that like to pick bits and pieces of things out there and subscribe to them via RSS is Google doesn't want to lose it's place at the center, so won't let you subscribe to things through their engine. If you did, they wouldn't be able to sell you advertising along the sides and tops of your page.

Microsoft, having no real advertising business, and not really understanding this space (as a company, although some of the folks working for them certainly do) is going the opposite route. Maybe just to do what it can to slow down Google, maybe because it's the right thing to do, I can't really tell. The SSE spec they put out, defining how to make RSS two way (simplified view, but reasonably accurate) is, by all outward appearances, legit. It's open. It's licensed right. It adds to RSS in a positive community way that doesn't (necessary) benefit only Microsoft.

Like I said, what's going on here?

Is Google's success creating the walled fortress mentality that made Microsoft into the evil empire of the north (and makes Apple, with it's much smaller walled fortress build around the iPod and iTunes the same)?

Is Google moving into the old space owned by Microsoft and, in it's fear of having someone do to it what it did to IBM driving them to actually do the right thing (albiet for the wrong reasons)?

2006 is going to be a very interesting year in the technology world indeed.

Firefox and Useless Extensions

I just spent 10 minutes trying to install 'cool' extensions to my Firefox browser and not one of the damn things works with the 1.5 RC3 version of the browser!

What's interesting to me is most of them didn't work with the latest version of the released browser, either (1.0.7).

This, I think, is one of the big weakenesses of Firefox. If, whenever a new release comes out, it breaks everyone's extensions (one of the things that allow you to get the same functionality as IE, plus some), well, it's a bitch.

I like componentized software as much as the next guy, more maybe, but the framework's just gotta work better if you want people to switch to Firefox. I'll keep using Firefox (if for nothing else the tabs) but if you break all the things that make it stand out from IE, you give Microsoft the chance to catch up.

Let's hope the Firefox browser folks keep that in mind while developing. In the end, users will use what has the most stability and the most (useful) features.