the life and times of endenizen » 2005 » December

According to a BBC news story,

The term ‘podcast’ has been declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

When I first heard about podcasting, it was definitely in its infancy. One or two people would record themselves talking and they’d share it on the internet and suddenly… others were supposed to download that? What use could it possibly be? How could I gain anything in life by listening to two people ramble on about various topics when I could instead be listening to some kickin’ beats?

One day, after podcasting had gained a significant boost in popularity and I was too bored to do anything productive, I thought I’d check it out. I Googled “podcasts” and came up with a few sites that listed podcasts for downloads so I started grabbing a few and seeing what they had to offer. I was instantly hooked.

One such podcast, TWiT (or This Week in Tech), impressed me. This wasn’t just two people rambling on about stupid stuff, these people knew what they were talking about. They also sounded like actual radio broadcasters (because most of them have a lot of broadcasting experience) and the audio quality was amazing.

Some podcasts were a little disappointing and weren’t much more than one or two people sitting and talking about something that wasn’t very interesting.

Nowadays, though, podcasting is huge and the most popular ones are done professionally and regularly and are frequently from actual news sources (like the BBC or NPR). If you want to check out podcasting for yourself, I’d get iTunes. Apple has been very helpful in their adoption of podcasting (mostly because the “pod” in podcasting comes from iPod) and they have an easy (and free) interface to subscribe to the latest and greatest podcasts and have them automatically downloaded when they are updated. If you have an iPod, a new software update lets you customize how you listen to podcasts. You can sync all the episodes if you’re a fan of one particular podcast or you can sync only the newest episodes of several podcasts if you want to keep on top of what’s going on in the world. I usually listen to TWiT, the BBC dailies, and the NPR dailies but look through the directory and see if you can find some other interesting ones.

The bottom line: Podcasting is awesome.

Link - Google Transit

Before I had my car, I would find myself wishing I had a handy reference on public transportation to get around. You know, just something that would list every bus, train, and even walking distance that would take me from one place to another. Sometimes in Chicago I caught myself wondering what mystical powers lie beneath the streets and where they could take me. I never went down there cause it was pretty scary and I was afraid of getting lost and ending up in the part of the city that trains only travel to once a month. With a solid destination and a way to get to each of the points in between, I’d feel much more confident.

Apparantely some Google employees have been thinking the same thing because a few of them collaborated on a new Google program called Google Transit which amazingly, solves all of these problems. The system currently supports only Portland but they’re rolling out new cities as they collaborate with city transit officials for schedules and stops. I’ll be excited when they have Chicago and New York.

The bottom line: Have Google, will travel.

We’ve all seen poorly-written, somewhat-incorrect, or just downright wrong Wikipedia articles but few have done anything this drastic about it. Regardless, if I was John Seigenthaler Sr., I’d be pissed if I saw this:

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

Seigenthaler’s response began:

This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.

Read the rest…

Some Wikipedia fans were mildly amused and argued “If he doesn’t like it, just change it!” What if it was an article about you? With the internet coming up in court many times and even providing evidence to sway the trial one way or another, who’s to say that something written on Wikipedia wouldn’t be further investigated, even if it was just a rumour. Imagine someone calling in an anonymous bomb warning to a school. Like the Anonymous Editor of Wikipedia, they cannot be prosecuted but imagine how the school would react. Would they take it seriously? If someone wrote allegations in a Wikipedia article and the police happened to find them, don’t you think they’d investigate, just on the off-chance that they might turn out to be true?

The “truth” of an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is commonly called into question. One could argue that no encyclopedia anywhere in the history of history has been completely accurate and they might be right. Using such an argument to claim that Wikipedia would naturally be “more correct” than these encyclopedias, however, is somewhat ridiculous. This claim would most likely be attributed to Wikipedia’s large number of daily visitors and that these visitors will fix something if it’s wrong. Wikipedia used to be a tool of the “internet elite” and with it’s proliferation in online dictionaries, reference materials, and even mainstream news articles, it will attract more and more visitors who don’t really care about its success. I believe that the additional visitors will do more harm than good. Maybe not even on purpose because, as you should always keep in mind, people are dumb.

As an impromptu experiment performed by me right now, I looked for an error, just one, to weakly demonstrate my claim. I’ll take an innocuous, but not random, article like the one about Western Michigan University. As I set off on my search, I first looked through the history to see if there had been any obvious vandalism (not as an end to my search, mind you, just for fun). I didn’t see anything right away but about midway through last month, I noticed that there had been a spelling edit. Something was strange about the spelling edit, though. The editor seemed to know what they were doing but they had neglected to correct a word mere letters away from the bulk of the edits. Surely, I thought, they must have later gone back to correct this. But when I checked the current article, it was still there! Success! The error had been active for about 1 month and a total of 12 edits. So 12 people who took the time to edit the article didn’t notice that “Engineering” was spelled “Enginnering” and I, taking a few seconds out of my Wednesday, suddenly become a hero.

What can be done about openly-editable content on the internet? Would more restrictions help such content or condemn it to be full of even more innacuracies? Wikipedia responded to the Seigenthaler incident with a new rule that you must be a registered user to create a new article. This is a far cry from making a difference, though, and it wouldn’t even have stopped what happened. More realistically, I think all anonymous edits should go into a “pending” queue where they await the approval of a Wikipedian who then takes responsibility for the added content. If they feel it’s appropriate, they add it. If they know it’s vandalism, they delete it, and if they’re not sure, they let it sit for someone else to look at. Old anonymous edits (whatever their status) would then be added to the history of the page to make sure valid information was not disappearing into the internet abyss.

Seigenthaler was justified in his posting to the world and I support him for taking a stand and pointing out that we shouldn’t trust this kind of technology as much as we do.

The bottom line: Will things change? Probably not.

Link - Pandora

I guess you could call Pandora a “music-recommending” program. However, instead of the typical “you like this band and other people that like this band also like these bands so you’ll probably like these bands” approach of websites like Last.fm or even Amazon, Pandora uses “so-phisticated techniques” (in the voice of the DNA-strand from Jurassic Park) to determine what elements (such as “fast rhythms” “solid bass-line” or “acoustic piano”) of music are in each song. By combining these elements across an artist’s entire catalog, some idea of “what kind of music they play” can be established much more accurately than any genre label that might be slapped on them.

I was impressed at first. I have a few gripes about it though. They don’t have much in the way of independent or otherwise non-mainstream music so if you’re looking to discover new artists that you haven’t heard of before, you might come up empty-handed. Also, some of the categorizing of the music was a bit… off. A few songs that played were radically different from the style of the artist I started with and weren’t very appealing at all. That’s not to say I have a closed mind when it comes to music. On the contrary, I listen to many different kinds of music as long as they’re not whiny or country (the latter is really a subcategory of the former but I thought I’d mention both of them specifically for the benefit of those that might be confused). Actually maybe I’m not the best person to review this website because I’m not a fan of most mainstream music and that seems to be all that it’s pulling up.

The bottom line: give it a try. It loads on the homepage and you only need to type in one artist to get started. Let me know what you think.

After bringing the unsettling Requiem for a Dream to the big screen, how could Darren Aronofsky possibly disappoint? As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan. His storytelling and imagery brings to mind a fusion of Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher, though how I came up with that even I couldn’t say. I hope Aronofsky will make more films as he continues to develop his unique style. Anyway, on to the latest film…

Watch the trailer.

The Fountain is about plenty of things like life, death and time-travel. Aronofsky.net has a quote from the man himself:

When asked about the film Darren said, “It’s a post-Matrix, metaphysical Sci-Fi movie, and it’s very different to anything you’ve seen. I call it post-Matrix because Matrix reinvented sci-fi in the same way Star Wars did, or 2001. I’m in a new environment, I’m trying to figure out what type of film would play to an audience now, and I think we came up with something really cool.”

The film has fallen on plenty of hard times. Between Brad Pitt ditching the project for Troy and plenty of difficulties actually writing the story, it’s a wonder this film is still being made. Of course, many of the changes along the road have indeed been positive. Hugh Jackman signed on for the lead role, with Rachel Weisz and Ellyn Burstyn in supporting roles. I believe Jackman will be much better for this movie because even though I looooooove Brad Pitt, I notice that his roles are VERY similar between movies (he also said he had “issues with the script” … not very reassuring for your lead actor). Besides, when you’re a young filmmaker with a bit of experience, do you really want the life or death of your first foray into multi-million dollar blockbuster filmmaking riding on the shoulders of Tyler Durden? Rachel Weisz is, of course, amazing and Ellyn Burstyn returns from her beautifully twisted performance in Requiem for a Dream. Maybe this time she’ll get an award like she deserves.

All in all, I can’t wait to see what this movie is like. It goes beyond being interested in the subject (which, from what I’ve heard so far, is fascinating) because frankly, the movie could be about a can of beans and Aronofsky would find a way to make it grow a magical beanstalk, enabling a small powerless man to confront a giant.