Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Now here's a Forest Gump moment, podcast was chosen word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. "Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon." 

New Flickr set: In December 2003, a few Berkman-Thursday people went up to New Hampshire to see Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman campaign.  

This morning I sent an email to John Palfrey, executive director at Berkman Center, asking if he was interested in looking at the history of podcasting in a formal way. I thought of Berkman first for a few reasons. 1. I was a research fellow there during two important years in the evolution of podcasting. A lot of the events happened there, and at the first two BloggerCons, that were hosted there. 2. Wikipedia's leading spokesperson, Jimmy Wales, is currently a fellow at Berkman, so their interest in the future of Wikipedia is also clear. 3. Harvard likes to partner with other universities, so if there is an interest in this among others elsewhere, it seems Berkman might be able to coordinate. I think this investigation, if it's going to be done right, must be done slowly and deliberatively, with all the participants included, without favoring any particular set of facts. And the work must be done with a larger goal of helping set a precedent for future work in Wikipedia. 

What Jeff Jarvis said. "Use SSE young man." Cooolyo! 

Four years ago today: "As an alpha male, in a society that thinks we're the problem, it's nice to see another alpha male gain total acceptance in his alpha-ness." 

Dan Farber reports from When 2.0. 

Dowbrigade predicts the Iraqi equivalent of the Vietnam Tet Offensive. The Wikipedia page on the Tet Offensive, which is the first hit in a Google search, is clearly partisan. "The Tet Offensive is widely, however incorrectly, seen as a turning point of the war in Vietnam," it says in the second paragraph. Now of course I want to know who said that. See the problem? Same set of facts, two different views. In the case of Dowbrigade, I know who's speaking. 

Andrew Hargadon: "From the glass house they live in, the NYT editorial staff should be much more careful about throwing stones at online reference material." 

News.com: "Can another Google still emerge? Never say never. But industry experts say the barrier to entry gets higher as the big companies become more." 

Dan Fost: Salon marks 10 years on Internet. 

The Chronicle piece from yesterday was corrected per my comment. Excellent. 

Some progress has been made on getting a nice icon for WordPress posts in the OPML Editor. Thanks to Steve Kirks for picking up the ball. So far (as far as I know) no one has asked anyone with Frontier expertise (specifically re nodetypes) for help, they're still coming to me for everything, which is totally not a scalable development model. I've been enjoying more naps lately, long walks and long lunches. I'm 50 years old, not 21, and the dotcom bust was almost six years back (so there's no eyeball monetization angle here) and to be totally honest I had heart surgery 3.5 years ago, so for all those reasons, I'm not a good guy to go to for all your features. As I said in the post, this is not a mission-critical feature, so if we don't have it, well, we'll survive. I deleted a couple of flames, and my responses to them. At first I thought the flames were a bad sign, but now I think they're a good sign (but not a good thing of course). No point getting personal here, I won't be guilted into doing all your work, and eventually I won't do any of it. This is a pass-off, I'm here to help, but I can't pass off if there's no one to pass off to. So if you don't like it, that's okay, there are lots of things I don't like too (like getting older, for example), but I can't make you miserable for it, and I won't let you get my goat, not in my space, not on my dime. Anyway, this is a long way of saying, if you can help out here, and you know about Frontier nodetypes and icons on Mac and/or Windows, you'll get some good karma points from the OPML community. Namaste. 

Technorati's posts that are tagged "lesblogs" which the mind keeps wanting to parse as "lesbians." Also just heard about a conference today at Stanford, hosted by Esther Dyson, called When 2.0. This is where Google's calendar is rumored to be rolled out. Random thought: Someone ought to do a feed of the international circuit of industry conferences. Or maybe a calendar of them. Heh. BTW, don't confuse When with Where 2.0, which was an O'Reilly conference in June in SF. Of course now we're all waiting for What 2.0, and then we can roll around to the 3.0's.  

Today's email to John Palfrey 

Hi John -- I'm writing to you today as the Executive Director at Berkman.

I wonder if you've been following the whole mess over Wikipedia and podcasting over the last few days.

I think basically it's going to turn out to be a good thing that it happened, because we can now perhaps involve some serious academics in the process, for touchy subjects like podcasting, where all the principals are alive and active, and some have commercial interests, and some of them start abusing the Wikipedia for those commercial interests.

There's an email being circulated among some of the people involved in podcasting that we all work with a historian to get the accurate story published and perhaps on Wikipedia. I think this is one level too involved, I shouldn't be part of the process of deciding even who the historian is, and I don't think there should be a single "official" historian that's approved of by anyone in particular. Then what's next, Adam's official historian, and my official historian? It could get out of hand quickly, and of course whoever we approve of could be attacked simply because he or she was approved of.

So, as far as I know you don't have anything to do with the development of podcasting.

What do you think is a good approach for this?

Is this something that perhaps Berkman would like to take a role in?

Do you have a conflict because I was a fellow there and Wales is one now?

Do you have any thoughts on other people I might send such an email to?

Dave