Tuesday December 3, 2019; 1:52 PM EST
I've created commercial products, and no one ever said they named my product ThinkTank, Ready, MORE, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, even if they thought of the name before I did. Because people respect commercial development. #- The process for podcasting was no different, except we did it in the open and no one claimed ownership of the resulting product. This is the way new web standards were developed in the late 90s and early 00s. #
- Hammersley could have helped, but didn't. He made a lucky guess, and for that he deserves credit, but not for naming the product. It's possible that Dannie Gregoire, the person who does deserve the credit, got the idea from Hammersley, but I've never heard him say that. And he put in time and effort to help make podcasting real. So many people who poured their hearts into this work got little or no credit.#
- It has become established that Hammersley named our product, even though this is not true. That's the only reason I object. I think the truth matters. #
- Hopefully this makes it into the Wikipedia piece on the history of podcasting, if not, know that our system of fact checking and truth vetting is about as bad as can be. When people naively say that Facebook should be able to vet everything for truth, here's something that's easily shown to be false, has been contested for years, however the record never gets altered, and reputable reporters still cite the lie as fact. Probably will continue to for a long time, maybe always. #