http://odeo.com/channels/2121136-CBC-Spark-Plus no This is a podcast feed of all the audio (episodes + bonus interviews) from the Spark blog. This is a podcast feed of all the audio (episodes + bonus interviews) from the Spark blog. Tech, Trends, and Fresh Ideas en 40 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:15:05 -0800 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:15:05 -0800 Technology http://odeo.com/episodes/25492930-Spark-94-%E2%80%93-December-6-8-2009 On this episode of Spark: Magic technology, glove hackers, and the age of metrics. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091206_24063.mp3) Gus Savoie remembers the first email he sent Gus’s letter appears in the second issue of Wired Magazine, attributed to “Kesh” Dan Misener hacks his gloves with conductive thread so they work with his iPhone Steve Hoefer’s step-by-step guide at Instructables.com: Making A Glove Work With A Touch Screen Video of Leigh Honeywell at hacklab.to Spark’s mailing address Letter: Jim Martin lost 20 pounds listening to podcasts Julie Ireton looks at Canadian copyright Nora mentions that you can now lock Google’s SafeSearch (video) Same as it never was: Hannah Classen heads to the roof to look at space colonies Nora mentions that Google Street View added 9 Canadian cities Craig Fahner waters his garden remotely with #garden Interact with #garden through twtrgrdn on Twitter Anand Giridharadas on the ag... On this episode of Spark: Magic technology, glove hackers, and the age of metrics. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091206_24063.mp3) Gus Savoie remembers the first email he sent Gus’s letter appears in the second issue of Wired Magazine, attributed to “Kesh” Dan Misener hacks his gloves with conductive thread so they work with his iPhone Steve Hoefer’s step-by-step guide at Instructables.com: Making A Glove Work With A Touch Screen Video of Leigh Honeywell at hacklab.to Spark’s mailing address Letter: Jim Martin lost 20 pounds listening to podcasts Julie Ireton looks at Canadian copyright Nora mentions that you can now lock Google’s SafeSearch (video) Same as it never was: Hannah Classen heads to the roof to look at space colonies Nora mentions that Google Street View added 9 Canadian cities Craig Fahner waters his garden remotely with #garden Interact with #garden through twtrgrdn on Twitter Anand Giridharadas on the age of metrics NYT Currents: Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “acclimate” by General Fuzz “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Good Morning” by Pitx “koto” by airtone “Star Trek Theme” by RAC “Electron Map” by Chad Crouch You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by hypatiadotca] On this episode of Spark: Magic technology, glove hackers, and the age of metrics. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091206_24063.mp3) Gus Savoie remembers the first email he sent Gus’s letter appears in the second issue of Wired Magazine, attributed to “Kesh” Dan Misener hacks his gloves with conductive thread so they work with his iPhone Steve Hoefer’s step-by-step guide at Instructables.com: Making A Glove Work With A Touch Screen Video of Leigh Honeywell at hacklab.to Spark’s mailing address Letter: Jim Martin lost 20 pounds listening to podcasts Julie Ireton looks at Canadian copyright Nora mentions that you can now lock Google’s SafeSearch (video) Same as it never was: Hannah Classen heads to the roof to look at space colonies Nora mentions that Google Street View added 9 Canadian cities Craig Fahner waters his garden remotely with #garden Interact with #garden through twtrgrdn on Twitter Anand Giridharadas on the age of metrics NYT Currents: Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “acclimate” by General Fuzz “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Good Morning” by Pitx “koto” by airtone “Star Trek Theme” by RAC “Electron Map” by Chad Crouch You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by hypatiadotca] tag:odeo.com,2009-12-04,25492930 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:15:05 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus iphone, twitter, Episodes, gloves, touchscreen, hannah classen, hacklab.to, anand giridharadas, hacklab, ireton, steve hoefer, jim martin, leigh honeywell, craig rahner, gus savoie http://odeo.com/episodes/25471416-Spark-93-%E2%80%93-November-29-December-1-2009 On this episode of Spark: Too much information, digital pack rats, and Wikipedia’s digital blind spots. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091129_23715.mp3) Gabriella Coleman explains why ebook piracy may be poised to shake up the publishing business (full interview) Tim Pridie and Rob Hyndman on digital pack rats Daemon Fairless’s iPod changed his relationship with music Nora and Sue Foley rock out with ThinkGeek’s Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt (video) Nora mentions Ontario’s new green license plates Cyrus Farivar surfs the Halal web IMHalal.com Mark Graham maps Wikipedia’s digital blind spots (full interview) Clay Shirky on how we shape tools and tools shape us (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s holiday remote access toolkit This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Music from “Music for Air Travel / Long Distance Love” by Podington Bear “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Music from... On this episode of Spark: Too much information, digital pack rats, and Wikipedia’s digital blind spots. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091129_23715.mp3) Gabriella Coleman explains why ebook piracy may be poised to shake up the publishing business (full interview) Tim Pridie and Rob Hyndman on digital pack rats Daemon Fairless’s iPod changed his relationship with music Nora and Sue Foley rock out with ThinkGeek’s Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt (video) Nora mentions Ontario’s new green license plates Cyrus Farivar surfs the Halal web IMHalal.com Mark Graham maps Wikipedia’s digital blind spots (full interview) Clay Shirky on how we shape tools and tools shape us (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s holiday remote access toolkit This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Music from “Music for Air Travel / Long Distance Love” by Podington Bear “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Music from “Music for a Rainy Day” by Podington Bear “The Two Little Squirrels” (1941) by Louis Jordan & His Tympani 5 “Proliferate,” “Curious Process,” and “Pink Blossoms” by Chad Crouch “Eye Heart Knot” by General Fuzz “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 “I Want To Learn To Speak Hawaiian” by Andy Iona’s Novelty Four You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by jblyberg] On this episode of Spark: Too much information, digital pack rats, and Wikipedia’s digital blind spots. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091129_23715.mp3) Gabriella Coleman explains why ebook piracy may be poised to shake up the publishing business (full interview) Tim Pridie and Rob Hyndman on digital pack rats Daemon Fairless’s iPod changed his relationship with music Nora and Sue Foley rock out with ThinkGeek’s Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt (video) Nora mentions Ontario’s new green license plates Cyrus Farivar surfs the Halal web IMHalal.com Mark Graham maps Wikipedia’s digital blind spots (full interview) Clay Shirky on how we shape tools and tools shape us (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s holiday remote access toolkit This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Music from “Music for Air Travel / Long Distance Love” by Podington Bear “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Music from “Music for a Rainy Day” by Podington Bear “The Two Little Squirrels” (1941) by Louis Jordan & His Tympani 5 “Proliferate,” “Curious Process,” and “Pink Blossoms” by Chad Crouch “Eye Heart Knot” by General Fuzz “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 “I Want To Learn To Speak Hawaiian” by Andy Iona’s Novelty Four You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by jblyberg] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-27,25471416 Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:31:44 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes, Piracy, wikipedia, ebooks, cyrus farivar, sue foley, clay shirky, daemon fairless, Tim Pridie, pack rats, mark graham, gabriella coleman, rob hyndman, halal http://odeo.com/episodes/25471420-Full-Interview-Clay-Shirky Have you ever played around with a gadget or application, only to discover it’s absolutely perfect for something different from its original design? This kind of inventiveness, or playfulness, happens all the time in our digital environment, but it signals a major shift in the relationship between the inventor or designer and the user. Nora interviewed Clay Shirky about just that earlier this week. Clay is a big thinker on internet and culture, and he has a lot to say about how users shape the tools they use and how designers should respond to this new “interaction loop.” A shorter version of that interview will air on Spark 93, but you can listen to the whole thing now, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20091009_clayshirky.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Ori... Have you ever played around with a gadget or application, only to discover it’s absolutely perfect for something different from its original design? This kind of inventiveness, or playfulness, happens all the time in our digital environment, but it signals a major shift in the relationship between the inventor or designer and the user. Nora interviewed Clay Shirky about just that earlier this week. Clay is a big thinker on internet and culture, and he has a lot to say about how users shape the tools they use and how designers should respond to this new “interaction loop.” A shorter version of that interview will air on Spark 93, but you can listen to the whole thing now, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20091009_clayshirky.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by Joi Ito] Full transcript after the jump Full Transcript Nora Young: Hi, I’m Nora Young, host of Spark on CBC Radio. This is my full, uncut interview with Clay Shirky. Clay is the author of “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about mass collaboration, and he’s also a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program. An edited version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but for now I hope you enjoy this full conversation. Hi, Clay. Clay Shirky: Hi, Nora! Nora: So, your talk at the TED conference earlier this year, you started with this example of how people use cell phone technology in the US and Nigerian elections. And in the US, people used phones to video polling stations, making sure there was no voter suppression going on; and in Nigeria, people used cell phones to send text messages during the election and sent that online. So, what does that example show us about how innovation happens now? Clay: I think the important thing about that example is that the social pattern of involving people in monitoring elections is somewhat independent of the tools. It’s not completely independent, you have to have some tool to do this kind of shared monitoring, but it’s also not completely dependent, you don’t need the fanciest cell phone. And a lot of what we’re learning about design of these social tools is, once you understand a particular pattern you can start to replicate it in all sorts of places. Even though the original conditions where, again with election monitoring, even though the original conditions of election monitoring aren’t the same everywhere in the world you can recreate some form of election monitoring once you understand the social tools you need to do it.. Nora: OK, so when it comes to this kind of spirit of innovation spreading, what are some of the conditions that you need to foster that kind of spreading of this social innovation? Clay: You need a very low cost of experimentation, right? If things are expensive to try people will hold back from trying them and they’ll spend all their time trying not to fail. If the cost of experimentation falls though, and I mean falls precipitously, then people will spend a lot of time experimenting, and instead of not failing, the goal becomes to fail informatively to learn something from the things you tried. So, Ward Cunningham, who created the Wiki form, launches it in 1996, and it’s mainly sort of groups of programmers using it, but anybody who looked at the Wiki pattern could essentially write their own Wiki because it was the conceptual shift that Ward had done. The software wasn’t terribly complicated, it was really the conceptual model of how could people trust each other in a collaborative group. And so, after five years of that, of famously, you know, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger adopt it for what became Wikipedia. But, by that point, both the way the tool worked and the social pattern around it were well enough understood. You couldn’t I think have gone straight from Ward’s original Wiki to Wikipedia. There was that long period of low?cost experimentation. So, I think it’s at the technical level, low?cost of experimentation, at the social level, a high willingness to share results. And those two things create a kind of feedback loop that’s created a lot of this surprising pricing progress we’ve seen. Nora: And so is that why the Web in particular is a good format for that kind of innovation, because the barriers to experimentation are so low? Clay: So, there is a real chicken and egg question. I mean there is a doctoral thesis in that question, and it’s not the one I’m going to write. There were two different things about the Web. One, the barrier to entry is very low, exactly as you say. But, two, the culture of the Web is absolutely predicated from the earliest days on a kind of openness and a kind of sharing, and it shows up up and down the stack. So, at the very highest level, you’ve got Berners-Lee’s original vision of all the world’s knowledge linked. And then you have these tiny, seemingly minor details that ramify in enormous ways. So, Marc Andreessen, who writes the first graphic user interface browser called Mosaic back in the early 90s, there’s a button in Mosaic that says view source, right, show me how the HTML code makes this page look the way it does. And it’s just a debugging function, right? It’s for techies, nobody wants to look at that junk. But, Andreessen didn’t turn it off. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, OK, now we’re shipping this to Ma and Pa Kettle. They’re not going to view source so we’re just going to turn view source off in everybody’s browser and then if you want the specific techie version, you can request it, or something like that. They didn’t do that. So, everyone’s browser to this day has view source enabled. Almost no one uses is, but if a kid wants to see how a web page is made, they can view source and get some sense of the structure. And that reflexive notion of openness isn’t just about the technology, it’s also about the culture. Brian Behlendorf for the Apache Web Server, exactly the same thing. And so you have these people who are working on tools but also embedding cultural beliefs about sharing into the design of those tools. And you can’t really, I think, tease apart those two things. The Web started with this feedback loop of technological and cultural openness and that continues to this day. Nora: I mean I was thinking about that, you know the phrase of Marshall McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterward our tools shape us,” which does make you wonder how once we’re swimming in this sea which is… Clay: He missed step three, though. Nora: What’s step three? Clay: After that we shape our tools the way they’ve shaped us, which is to say, at least the simple reading of that phrase is there’s a kind of deterministic, the medium is the message, we occupy the tools we create. But, in fact, we’ve seen over and over again that user innovation happens within a given set of tools, and that the designers of those tools will watch what the user is doing and alter the tools accordingly. And that becomes yet a new environment for the users to play around in. And it’s that feedback loop, I mean McLuhan’s phrase encompasses both the sense of the feedback loop, but it conveys, I think, a more static sensibility about the relationship between user and media than the one we’re witnessing today. Nora: I mean, I am really interested in this idea of how the users shape the tools because it seems self?evident that that’s happening, and yet we have this whole ideology about the inventor in the lab by themselves who hands them down like God giving Moses the tablets, or whatever. Do you think there’s something about the environment that we’re living in now though that makes it easier or, yeah, easier for people to shape the tools that they use? Clay: Yes, absolutely. There are several things all going on at the same time. The first is the one we talked about, which is just it’s much cheaper to do any kind of playing around. The second is that we’re living through, in the media environment, an enormous shock of inclusion where the public, previously locked out of participating in the media except as consumers, now anybody can say anything, anytime they want, and frequently does as you can tell if you wander around LiveJournal on any given afternoon. And that shock of inclusion isn’t just about individual freedom, it’s also that social visibility. It’s very easy to see what people are doing and to start riffing on it. So, the bestselling T-shirt on Amazon, the Three WolfMoon T-shirt, got to be the bestselling T-shirt on the Amazon, not because it’s such a great shirt – it’s the kind of shirt of a 15-year-old boy would wear if he wanted to look tough – but because there’s a hilarious user review that then kicked off this whole drama of fake user reviews; 200 people pile in. So, the fact that people can see other playing that kind of game over there, and I’m going to join it, and that whole group can create something that’s even more visible, that means that… When you get things like Friendster, the original large scale social network service, people just started playing around, like they started setting up Friendster profiles for evil himself or the city of San Francisco, or whatever; so you and I would be connected through our mutual friend evil himself. And Friendster saw this kind of user-generated playfulness, and they said, ‘This is wrong; these people must be stopped,’ and they, by preventing the users from engaging in the kind of playfulness that helps tools adapt, they drew Friendster, first into a kind of dead end and finally into the brickwall at the end of that dead end. Facebook, I think, and MySpace learned that lesson by having a much higher degree of user freedom to kind of configure and play in that environment. That’s probably the biggest scale example we have right now ? the difference between discouraging and encouraging the users from experimenting with the tools in a way that changed the tools in a way that changed the users. Nora: I mean, this is a huge cultural change for anybody who runs the business to get their heads around having that attitude towards their users. So, what would you say to encourage somebody to say, OK, yeah, that’s actually a good thing if your users are mucking around the stuff and doing things that you didn’t imagine them to be doing? Clay: Yeah. Well, so it’s easy to make that case to owners of platforms. For instance Flickr, founded in Vancouver – which I was on the advisory board of back in the day – set themselves up to share photos, but then quickly you started getting groups of people coming around. And so there was one early group, square in circle, rather circle in square. They’d try and take a square photo, camera phone style, with a perfect circle right in the middle it, touching all four sides. This was the game, and you get thousands of these photos. And Stewart and Caterina, the founders, were smart enough to realize “This is useful,” because it drives adoption, it drives use, it make it more interesting. So, if you’re running a platform, if you are running Flickr, or Delicious, or YouTube, or whatever, user playfulness is great. The harder cases for businesses that are just participating in the media environment, and there it really is more of a mixed bag. Because a lot of what the users are going to say about a business is to complain about the service, or to wish they had something different, or better, or whatever. And the trick, I think, is to view what the users are saying about the service, to take that away from the marketing and PR departments, and send it instead to the product department. Which is to say, you start viewing user feedback not as some negative in a media landscape you used to control, but rather as information about how to do it better next time. Dell famously has opened itself up to input by users. I recently bought a netbook, and I bought one from Hewlett Packard because on their site, they have user reviews. And the users are saying “This one is good, and that one is not good.” And that degree of transparency made me think “OK, I’m going to buy the one that these users are recommending that I buy.” Because if HP is willing to expose itself in my sight to this kind of feedback, that suggests to me a long term commitment to quality. For businesses that thrived on being able to control the media landscape down to the last sort of jot and tittle, principally service agencies, advertising agencies, PR agencies, a lot of this stuff is nothing but bad news, because it’s uncontrollable, it’s unfilterable, it’s unpredictable, and so you move from a predictive and prescriptive model to a reactive one. And I think every communications media marketing agency in the world is dealing with that, in one way or another. And the good ones are figuring out interesting new things to do. But there, the more a business relied on the consumer not being able to talk back, the worse news the Internet is. Nora: I’d like to pull in some of the ideas form your book “Here Comes Everybody.” It seems like when we are talking about the change in how innovation is happening, it’s this example of a larger shift from the old idea of a company hiring an R&D department, and sort of assuming the cost of innovation and so on, and putting it out in the world. To something that’s a lot more loose and collaborative. Can you sketch out that shift a little bit? Clay: Sure. Well, actually the interesting thing about the collaborative piece is that the business model, the sort of classic enterprise model of collaboration, I put together a design or an engineer and a project manager, and so forth, and they go off in a room and work together. The surprising thing about web scale collaboration, about the design or creation of large artifacts, e.g. Wikipedia, or the Linux operating system, the Apache Web Sever, these kinds of things, is how successful they are at reducing the amount of collaboration. One of the really big changes from enterprise models, to very large models of work is that you can take in proposed changes or improvements to a product, like Wikipedia, in tiny, tiny, increments. I can go onto Wikipedia, and I can fix a typo. A single typo on a single page, and never touch the thing again. And nobody has to cut me a check, and nobody has to check my credentials, or any of the rest of it. And that small granule of work at very, very low cost of integration is absolutely essential. Because if I actually had to collaborate in any serious way, people know who I am, we get to know each other, I would never go around fixing typos. And so for very large scale creation, what you get is this funny model of co-creation without collaboration. There are tight collaborate groups, highly, highly active, sort of at the center of things, managing the process, right? The people who are managing what finally goes into the Linux kernel are very, very careful about what they do and don’t accept. But, the people at the edges just messing around with the code to see they’re doing, no one is keeping track of those people. They don’t have to. And interestingly, the design of what’s called the Source Code Control System, the way the Linux project keeps track of all of the proposed changes, is specifically designed to maximize the freedom and minimize the oversight of the lowest level participant – which is the inverse of the business model. When you come in and you just got there, they minimize your freedom. All you can do is fill out this one form this way. And then after six mouths we will see how you are, and we’ll give you a little more freedom. Here, it’s like “Look, check out the whole kernel, do whatever you like. We don’t care.” The chances that you’re going to do anything important or interesting with it are effectively nil. But, they’re not absolutely nil. And so we’ll hold open the possibility that somebody we never heard of puts in a security patch that actually turns out to be really important. And if we never hear from that person again, that’s great. And that’s a model that’s so different from the enterprise, that there are still people writing today as if Linux or Wikipedia should either not exist, or will go away tomorrow because they can’t understand how it’s happening, even though these things have happened for a decade, two decades now. Nora: This may answer this question I’m going to ask, but I twittered earlier today that I was going to be interviewing you. And Elizabeth Wellburn talked about research that pointed out problems with group decision making – the thought that people tend to engage in groupthink, and so on. And she wanted to know, not because she’s critical of Web 2.0 or anything like that… Clay: She should be. Nora: … but she wonders what it is about the character of the web now, that makes things different? Clay: Well, I think it’s the thing we were just talking about, which is that very often, the groups that we’d be afraid of groupthink in, are actually not collaborating. Groupthink comes about when people commit themselves to the identity of the group as a whole, and become participating members. Now, culture is a really, really important human characteristic. Given how flexible we are as creatures, we need some way of reducing all the possible ways we can relate to one another, in order that we can have any kind of sensible interactions. And so different cultures arise, all the way from macro scale cultures, you know “The West,” all the way down to “Right here’s the culture of these kids at this high school, and they have their in jokes, and their selected gathering spots, and so forth.” For all the good that culture does in terms of synchronizing people however, it is also the producer of this kind of groupthink. And Cass Sunstein – who wrote a book called “Infotopia,” which covers a lot, does an amazing literature view on the groupthink stuff – says that even worse than groupthink, is that when groups get it wrong, they are likelier to persist in wrong beliefs and to believe them more strongly at any given moment, than individuals with the same wrong beliefs. So, what’s different is that you’ve actually got systems where if I disagree with the entirety of the Linux developing team, or the Apache developing on say one of these open source projects, I can take the entire code base and go off and do my own thing. No one can prevent me from doing what’s called forking, which is to say to create a completely alternate project. And as a result of forking, it’s as if I didn’t agree with the polices of my country, I could form my own country of one. And that inability to force individuals, in at least some of these situations, to force individuals to go along with the will of the majority makes the arguments much more contentious, but it also preserves them as technical meritocracies. And that’s a big change. It used to be that groups had to coordinate themselves and assume a group identity and culture before they could get any work done. But now, if you can get work done with thousands or millions of people who you don’t even know, the risks of groupthink are smaller than they were. Nora: So, how big a change do you think this is culturally? Clay: Wow, that is a huge question. I used to be for, you know, space of 18 months, two years, I used to be utopian, which is, you know, I got hold of the net in the early 90s, and I thought oh, this is unbelievable, you know, this is the dawn of a kind of digital Age of Aquarius. Then I turned into a mere optimist, which is to say I started to see that there were downsides, and I thought that on balance, the upsides would outweigh the downsides. But recently, I’ve really had to sit down and say, I am a revolutionary, which is to say, I think that this change is so large that its ultimate effects cannot be predicted from the middle of the maelstrom. So, I can sketch out a scenario in which every hierarchically managed organization, whether for?profit, not?for?profit, government, private sector, whatever, is transformed because the thing that holds large organizations together is communications, and when there’s enough of a shock of inclusion in the communications environment, everything changes. I can also sketch out a scenario in which there are kind of two worlds that exist in parallel. One is the world of assumed openness, and that world grows and is creative in all the ways we’ve seen, but that it ultimately reaches some accommodation with the hierarchically managed world and the for?profit world and so forth. And we then know the outlines of those two countries. And I don’t feel confident at this juncture, or rather, when I catch myself extrapolating after that first world, everything changes, I realize that what I’m doing is extrapolating present trends infinitely into the future, which is a classic mistake of prediction. So, I will say this: In the places where this is a change, this is a huge change. The media environment plainly is getting it first, as it would, being based most directly on the communications capabilities of a society, but I see the changes showing up lots of other places. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of institutions that continue to exist and find new roles for themselves even in the face of enormous technological change. So, it’s going to be a very big deal in at least some places. It will change things in a lot of places. And I can’t, I just, I can’t extrapolate either of those thoughts, both of which I believe completely, to a stable end state that I feel like we can predict from 2009. If you had gone to Germany in the mid-1470s and said, let’s see what this printing press is doing, right, you would miss novels, you would miss newspapers, you would miss the rise of scientific publication, you would miss Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” you would miss the Venetian publishing industry. So many of the changes brought by the kind of abundance created by the printing press were in the second 50 years of its existence, if not the second century of its existence, that I think that over-extrapolating from current trends would leave us in the same position as if we tried to do the printing press in 1473. Nora: Are there things about this sort of loose way of innovating and developing that concern you, that you think we should be cautious about or that we need to be aware of addressing? Clay: You know, in a way, those break down to two different questions. I don’t think, I mean, the people who are concerned about the Internet upending culture as we’ve known it are in general, as people who make those kinds of predictions always are, they are in general basically correct, right? When the people said, oh my goodness, you’re printing Bibles in French and Italian? This is going to be terrible! This is going to wreck Western civilization as we know it. And that’s, indeed, exactly what happened. It wrecked Western civilization as we know it. There’s a permanent tension between freedom and quality in the media landscape, and that’s just the great, you know, the two poles of the media debate. And any time, any time there’s a shock of inclusion, the dial tips towards freedom, average quality falls, and then you get all this experimentation. So, I don’t think that there’s anything, I mean, you know, I grew up in the 70s, right? I remember what culture was like before there was any digital expression in the hands of the public, and it’s not a culture that I would particularly say, that was the apotheosis of the human race, we definitely ought to be preserving that. Nora: There was “Fantasy Island.” Come on, you know? Clay: There was “Fantasy Island,” exactly, but this is the thing. In a way, mass media achieved its high water mark in the period just before the Internet, in part because the audience was at the scale it was at, but there was no alternative, right? There was nothing we could do except, you know, if we wanted media, we had to consume it as it was being produced, and that’s broken. So, there’s nothing I’d say, oh, we must form a cordon around, as some people are saying, oh, we must form a cordon around newspapers, or you have to say, newspapers in their traditional form, or we have to preserve the university in its traditional form, or whatever. I don’t. I’m much more worried about the problems that are native to group collaboration. Nora: Right. Clay: Not the part of the old society that breaks, which, you know, that happens. Here’s the thing that worries me. Openness creates experimentation, again, with cheap enough technology, openness creates experimentation. Experiments create value. Value creates an incentive. But, the incentive, if all the incentive tied back to was more openness, right? We have this lovely, virtuous feedback loop. And in the early days of any medium, it looks like that’s what we get. But, incentive is actually completely value-neutral. The spammers are responding to the incentives of email just as surely as you and I are. People trying to spam Twitter, people trying to game voting systems online, certainly the people, you know, identity fraud, credit card theft, all of these things are responses to openness just as surely as people blogging about their life’s experiences or Twittering to their friends or updating their Facebook status is. And one of the things we’ve seen, particularly with Wikipedia, is that past a certain point, openness becomes indefensible. The only response is to partially close down. And so, the history of the last three or four years of Wikipedia’s governance structure has been a very targeted attempt to find those places where the incentives are the most deleterious to the enterprise as a whole, they tend to be around biographies of living persons, and to do things like having semi-protected status, locking articles, flagging revisions, a whole variety of techniques for saying, it’s the encyclopedia anybody can edit but either, and not you, or, and not now. What we don’t know is, is this an arms race where it’s just fought to a kind of stalemate that, you know, each side kind of ups the ante but basically some new steady state is reached; or are we in the middle of a process of progressive decay, where at a certain point, the number of people who want something like Wikipedia to fail essentially lock out its initial promise from most of its current participants – I hope, because it’s something I want to believe is true about the universe, frankly, this is now just deep desire, it has nothing to do with analytics – I hope that the kind of bargains we’ve seen in the design of constitutional democracies can start to enter this sphere, which is to say, look, it’s a group of people who’ve got conflicting needs, and here’s how we’re going to balance it out. But, I also recognize that there are systems, and we have examples in the past, like CommuniTree, this bulletin board that was overrun by high school kids and eventually just pulled the plug, they just shut themselves down because they couldn’t withstand the onslaught, that there are models where it’s not like the design of the Constitution, it’s like the sack of Rome… [laughter] Nora: Right. Clay: … Where the people coming in intent on destroying can simply have the upper hand, have or gain the upper hand. And we’ve seen more models that are like constitutional design than like the sack of Rome, but you can’t write off the desire of people to destroy things they don’t like or don’t trust, and that’s still an open possibility. Nora: Clay Shirky, thanks so much. Clay: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Nora. Nora: That was my full, unedited interview with author Clay Shirky. An edited version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark. If you like hearing these kinds of full, uncut interviews, you can subscribe to the Spark Plus podcast. You’ll get all the regular weekly episodes of Spark plus bonus blog?only audio. It’s totally free, really easy, so check it out at our website, cbc.ca/spark. And thanks for listening. Have you ever played around with a gadget or application, only to discover it’s absolutely perfect for something different from its original design? This kind of inventiveness, or playfulness, happens all the time in our digital environment, but it signals a major shift in the relationship between the inventor or designer and the user. Nora interviewed Clay Shirky about just that earlier this week. Clay is a big thinker on internet and culture, and he has a lot to say about how users shape the tools they use and how designers should respond to this new “interaction loop.” A shorter version of that interview will air on Spark 93, but you can listen to the whole thing now, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20091009_clayshirky.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by Joi Ito] Full transcript after the jump Full Transcript Nora Young: Hi, I’m Nora Young, host of Spark on CBC Radio. This is my full, uncut interview with Clay Shirky. Clay is the author of “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about mass collaboration, and he’s also a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program. An edited version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but for now I hope you enjoy this full conversation. Hi, Clay. Clay Shirky: Hi, Nora! Nora: So, your talk at the TED conference earlier this year, you started with this example of how people use cell phone technology in the US and Nigerian elections. And in the US, people used phones to video polling stations, making sure there was no voter suppression going on; and in Nigeria, people used cell phones to send text messages during the election and sent that online. So, what does that example show us about how innovation happens now? Clay: I think the important thing about that example is that the social pattern of involving people in monitoring elections is somewhat independent of the tools. It’s not completely independent, you have to have some tool to do this kind of shared monitoring, but it’s also not completely dependent, you don’t need the fanciest cell phone. And a lot of what we’re learning about design of these social tools is, once you understand a particular pattern you can start to replicate it in all sorts of places. Even though the original conditions where, again with election monitoring, even though the original conditions of election monitoring aren’t the same everywhere in the world you can recreate some form of election monitoring once you understand the social tools you need to do it.. Nora: OK, so when it comes to this kind of spirit of innovation spreading, what are some of the conditions that you need to foster that kind of spreading of this social innovation? Clay: You need a very low cost of experimentation, right? If things are expensive to try people will hold back from trying them and they’ll spend all their time trying not to fail. If the cost of experimentation falls though, and I mean falls precipitously, then people will spend a lot of time experimenting, and instead of not failing, the goal becomes to fail informatively to learn something from the things you tried. So, Ward Cunningham, who created the Wiki form, launches it in 1996, and it’s mainly sort of groups of programmers using it, but anybody who looked at the Wiki pattern could essentially write their own Wiki because it was the conceptual shift that Ward had done. The software wasn’t terribly complicated, it was really the conceptual model of how could people trust each other in a collaborative group. And so, after five years of that, of famously, you know, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger adopt it for what became Wikipedia. But, by that point, both the way the tool worked and the social pattern around it were well enough understood. You couldn’t I think have gone straight from Ward’s original Wiki to Wikipedia. There was that long period of low?cost experimentation. So, I think it’s at the technical level, low?cost of experimentation, at the social level, a high willingness to share results. And those two things create a kind of feedback loop that’s created a lot of this surprising pricing progress we’ve seen. Nora: And so is that why the Web in particular is a good format for that kind of innovation, because the barriers to experimentation are so low? Clay: So, there is a real chicken and egg question. I mean there is a doctoral thesis in that question, and it’s not the one I’m going to write. There were two different things about the Web. One, the barrier to entry is very low, exactly as you say. But, two, the culture of the Web is absolutely predicated from the earliest days on a kind of openness and a kind of sharing, and it shows up up and down the stack. So, at the very highest level, you’ve got Berners-Lee’s original vision of all the world’s knowledge linked. And then you have these tiny, seemingly minor details that ramify in enormous ways. So, Marc Andreessen, who writes the first graphic user interface browser called Mosaic back in the early 90s, there’s a button in Mosaic that says view source, right, show me how the HTML code makes this page look the way it does. And it’s just a debugging function, right? It’s for techies, nobody wants to look at that junk. But, Andreessen didn’t turn it off. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, OK, now we’re shipping this to Ma and Pa Kettle. They’re not going to view source so we’re just going to turn view source off in everybody’s browser and then if you want the specific techie version, you can request it, or something like that. They didn’t do that. So, everyone’s browser to this day has view source enabled. Almost no one uses is, but if a kid wants to see how a web page is made, they can view source and get some sense of the structure. And that reflexive notion of openness isn’t just about the technology, it’s also about the culture. Brian Behlendorf for the Apache Web Server, exactly the same thing. And so you have these people who are working on tools but also embedding cultural beliefs about sharing into the design of those tools. And you can’t really, I think, tease apart those two things. The Web started with this feedback loop of technological and cultural openness and that continues to this day. Nora: I mean I was thinking about that, you know the phrase of Marshall McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterward our tools shape us,” which does make you wonder how once we’re swimming in this sea which is… Clay: He missed step three, though. Nora: What’s step three? Clay: After that we shape our tools the way they’ve shaped us, which is to say, at least the simple reading of that phrase is there’s a kind of deterministic, the medium is the message, we occupy the tools we create. But, in fact, we’ve seen over and over again that user innovation happens within a given set of tools, and that the designers of those tools will watch what the user is doing and alter the tools accordingly. And that becomes yet a new environment for the users to play around in. And it’s that feedback loop, I mean McLuhan’s phrase encompasses both the sense of the feedback loop, but it conveys, I think, a more static sensibility about the relationship between user and media than the one we’re witnessing today. Nora: I mean, I am really interested in this idea of how the users shape the tools because it seems self?evident that that’s happening, and yet we have this whole ideology about the inventor in the lab by themselves who hands them down like God giving Moses the tablets, or whatever. Do you think there’s something about the environment that we’re living in now though that makes it easier or, yeah, easier for people to shape the tools that they use? Clay: Yes, absolutely. There are several things all going on at the same time. The first is the one we talked about, which is just it’s much cheaper to do any kind of playing around. The second is that we’re living through, in the media environment, an enormous shock of inclusion where the public, previously locked out of participating in the media except as consumers, now anybody can say anything, anytime they want, and frequently does as you can tell if you wander around LiveJournal on any given afternoon. And that shock of inclusion isn’t just about individual freedom, it’s also that social visibility. It’s very easy to see what people are doing and to start riffing on it. So, the bestselling T-shirt on Amazon, the Three WolfMoon T-shirt, got to be the bestselling T-shirt on the Amazon, not because it’s such a great shirt – it’s the kind of shirt of a 15-year-old boy would wear if he wanted to look tough – but because there’s a hilarious user review that then kicked off this whole drama of fake user reviews; 200 people pile in. So, the fact that people can see other playing that kind of game over there, and I’m going to join it, and that whole group can create something that’s even more visible, that means that… When you get things like Friendster, the original large scale social network service, people just started playing around, like they started setting up Friendster profiles for evil himself or the city of San Francisco, or whatever; so you and I would be connected through our mutual friend evil himself. And Friendster saw this kind of user-generated playfulness, and they said, ‘This is wrong; these people must be stopped,’ and they, by preventing the users from engaging in the kind of playfulness that helps tools adapt, they drew Friendster, first into a kind of dead end and finally into the brickwall at the end of that dead end. Facebook, I think, and MySpace learned that lesson by having a much higher degree of user freedom to kind of configure and play in that environment. That’s probably the biggest scale example we have right now ? the difference between discouraging and encouraging the users from experimenting with the tools in a way that changed the tools in a way that changed the users. Nora: I mean, this is a huge cultural change for anybody who runs the business to get their heads around having that attitude towards their users. So, what would you say to encourage somebody to say, OK, yeah, that’s actually a good thing if your users are mucking around the stuff and doing things that you didn’t imagine them to be doing? Clay: Yeah. Well, so it’s easy to make that case to owners of platforms. For instance Flickr, founded in Vancouver – which I was on the advisory board of back in the day – set themselves up to share photos, but then quickly you started getting groups of people coming around. And so there was one early group, square in circle, rather circle in square. They’d try and take a square photo, camera phone style, with a perfect circle right in the middle it, touching all four sides. This was the game, and you get thousands of these photos. And Stewart and Caterina, the founders, were smart enough to realize “This is useful,” because it drives adoption, it drives use, it make it more interesting. So, if you’re running a platform, if you are running Flickr, or Delicious, or YouTube, or whatever, user playfulness is great. The harder cases for businesses that are just participating in the media environment, and there it really is more of a mixed bag. Because a lot of what the users are going to say about a business is to complain about the service, or to wish they had something different, or better, or whatever. And the trick, I think, is to view what the users are saying about the service, to take that away from the marketing and PR departments, and send it instead to the product department. Which is to say, you start viewing user feedback not as some negative in a media landscape you used to control, but rather as information about how to do it better next time. Dell famously has opened itself up to input by users. I recently bought a netbook, and I bought one from Hewlett Packard because on their site, they have user reviews. And the users are saying “This one is good, and that one is not good.” And that degree of transparency made me think “OK, I’m going to buy the one that these users are recommending that I buy.” Because if HP is willing to expose itself in my sight to this kind of feedback, that suggests to me a long term commitment to quality. For businesses that thrived on being able to control the media landscape down to the last sort of jot and tittle, principally service agencies, advertising agencies, PR agencies, a lot of this stuff is nothing but bad news, because it’s uncontrollable, it’s unfilterable, it’s unpredictable, and so you move from a predictive and prescriptive model to a reactive one. And I think every communications media marketing agency in the world is dealing with that, in one way or another. And the good ones are figuring out interesting new things to do. But there, the more a business relied on the consumer not being able to talk back, the worse news the Internet is. Nora: I’d like to pull in some of the ideas form your book “Here Comes Everybody.” It seems like when we are talking about the change in how innovation is happening, it’s this example of a larger shift from the old idea of a company hiring an R&D department, and sort of assuming the cost of innovation and so on, and putting it out in the world. To something that’s a lot more loose and collaborative. Can you sketch out that shift a little bit? Clay: Sure. Well, actually the interesting thing about the collaborative piece is that the business model, the sort of classic enterprise model of collaboration, I put together a design or an engineer and a project manager, and so forth, and they go off in a room and work together. The surprising thing about web scale collaboration, about the design or creation of large artifacts, e.g. Wikipedia, or the Linux operating system, the Apache Web Sever, these kinds of things, is how successful they are at reducing the amount of collaboration. One of the really big changes from enterprise models, to very large models of work is that you can take in proposed changes or improvements to a product, like Wikipedia, in tiny, tiny, increments. I can go onto Wikipedia, and I can fix a typo. A single typo on a single page, and never touch the thing again. And nobody has to cut me a check, and nobody has to check my credentials, or any of the rest of it. And that small granule of work at very, very low cost of integration is absolutely essential. Because if I actually had to collaborate in any serious way, people know who I am, we get to know each other, I would never go around fixing typos. And so for very large scale creation, what you get is this funny model of co-creation without collaboration. There are tight collaborate groups, highly, highly active, sort of at the center of things, managing the process, right? The people who are managing what finally goes into the Linux kernel are very, very careful about what they do and don’t accept. But, the people at the edges just messing around with the code to see they’re doing, no one is keeping track of those people. They don’t have to. And interestingly, the design of what’s called the Source Code Control System, the way the Linux project keeps track of all of the proposed changes, is specifically designed to maximize the freedom and minimize the oversight of the lowest level participant – which is the inverse of the business model. When you come in and you just got there, they minimize your freedom. All you can do is fill out this one form this way. And then after six mouths we will see how you are, and we’ll give you a little more freedom. Here, it’s like “Look, check out the whole kernel, do whatever you like. We don’t care.” The chances that you’re going to do anything important or interesting with it are effectively nil. But, they’re not absolutely nil. And so we’ll hold open the possibility that somebody we never heard of puts in a security patch that actually turns out to be really important. And if we never hear from that person again, that’s great. And that’s a model that’s so different from the enterprise, that there are still people writing today as if Linux or Wikipedia should either not exist, or will go away tomorrow because they can’t understand how it’s happening, even though these things have happened for a decade, two decades now. Nora: This may answer this question I’m going to ask, but I twittered earlier today that I was going to be interviewing you. And Elizabeth Wellburn talked about research that pointed out problems with group decision making – the thought that people tend to engage in groupthink, and so on. And she wanted to know, not because she’s critical of Web 2.0 or anything like that… Clay: She should be. Nora: … but she wonders what it is about the character of the web now, that makes things different? Clay: Well, I think it’s the thing we were just talking about, which is that very often, the groups that we’d be afraid of groupthink in, are actually not collaborating. Groupthink comes about when people commit themselves to the identity of the group as a whole, and become participating members. Now, culture is a really, really important human characteristic. Given how flexible we are as creatures, we need some way of reducing all the possible ways we can relate to one another, in order that we can have any kind of sensible interactions. And so different cultures arise, all the way from macro scale cultures, you know “The West,” all the way down to “Right here’s the culture of these kids at this high school, and they have their in jokes, and their selected gathering spots, and so forth.” For all the good that culture does in terms of synchronizing people however, it is also the producer of this kind of groupthink. And Cass Sunstein – who wrote a book called “Infotopia,” which covers a lot, does an amazing literature view on the groupthink stuff – says that even worse than groupthink, is that when groups get it wrong, they are likelier to persist in wrong beliefs and to believe them more strongly at any given moment, than individuals with the same wrong beliefs. So, what’s different is that you’ve actually got systems where if I disagree with the entirety of the Linux developing team, or the Apache developing on say one of these open source projects, I can take the entire code base and go off and do my own thing. No one can prevent me from doing what’s called forking, which is to say to create a completely alternate project. And as a result of forking, it’s as if I didn’t agree with the polices of my country, I could form my own country of one. And that inability to force individuals, in at least some of these situations, to force individuals to go along with the will of the majority makes the arguments much more contentious, but it also preserves them as technical meritocracies. And that’s a big change. It used to be that groups had to coordinate themselves and assume a group identity and culture before they could get any work done. But now, if you can get work done with thousands or millions of people who you don’t even know, the risks of groupthink are smaller than they were. Nora: So, how big a change do you think this is culturally? Clay: Wow, that is a huge question. I used to be for, you know, space of 18 months, two years, I used to be utopian, which is, you know, I got hold of the net in the early 90s, and I thought oh, this is unbelievable, you know, this is the dawn of a kind of digital Age of Aquarius. Then I turned into a mere optimist, which is to say I started to see that there were downsides, and I thought that on balance, the upsides would outweigh the downsides. But recently, I’ve really had to sit down and say, I am a revolutionary, which is to say, I think that this change is so large that its ultimate effects cannot be predicted from the middle of the maelstrom. So, I can sketch out a scenario in which every hierarchically managed organization, whether for?profit, not?for?profit, government, private sector, whatever, is transformed because the thing that holds large organizations together is communications, and when there’s enough of a shock of inclusion in the communications environment, everything changes. I can also sketch out a scenario in which there are kind of two worlds that exist in parallel. One is the world of assumed openness, and that world grows and is creative in all the ways we’ve seen, but that it ultimately reaches some accommodation with the hierarchically managed world and the for?profit world and so forth. And we then know the outlines of those two countries. And I don’t feel confident at this juncture, or rather, when I catch myself extrapolating after that first world, everything changes, I realize that what I’m doing is extrapolating present trends infinitely into the future, which is a classic mistake of prediction. So, I will say this: In the places where this is a change, this is a huge change. The media environment plainly is getting it first, as it would, being based most directly on the communications capabilities of a society, but I see the changes showing up lots of other places. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of institutions that continue to exist and find new roles for themselves even in the face of enormous technological change. So, it’s going to be a very big deal in at least some places. It will change things in a lot of places. And I can’t, I just, I can’t extrapolate either of those thoughts, both of which I believe completely, to a stable end state that I feel like we can predict from 2009. If you had gone to Germany in the mid-1470s and said, let’s see what this printing press is doing, right, you would miss novels, you would miss newspapers, you would miss the rise of scientific publication, you would miss Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” you would miss the Venetian publishing industry. So many of the changes brought by the kind of abundance created by the printing press were in the second 50 years of its existence, if not the second century of its existence, that I think that over-extrapolating from current trends would leave us in the same position as if we tried to do the printing press in 1473. Nora: Are there things about this sort of loose way of innovating and developing that concern you, that you think we should be cautious about or that we need to be aware of addressing? Clay: You know, in a way, those break down to two different questions. I don’t think, I mean, the people who are concerned about the Internet upending culture as we’ve known it are in general, as people who make those kinds of predictions always are, they are in general basically correct, right? When the people said, oh my goodness, you’re printing Bibles in French and Italian? This is going to be terrible! This is going to wreck Western civilization as we know it. And that’s, indeed, exactly what happened. It wrecked Western civilization as we know it. There’s a permanent tension between freedom and quality in the media landscape, and that’s just the great, you know, the two poles of the media debate. And any time, any time there’s a shock of inclusion, the dial tips towards freedom, average quality falls, and then you get all this experimentation. So, I don’t think that there’s anything, I mean, you know, I grew up in the 70s, right? I remember what culture was like before there was any digital expression in the hands of the public, and it’s not a culture that I would particularly say, that was the apotheosis of the human race, we definitely ought to be preserving that. Nora: There was “Fantasy Island.” Come on, you know? Clay: There was “Fantasy Island,” exactly, but this is the thing. In a way, mass media achieved its high water mark in the period just before the Internet, in part because the audience was at the scale it was at, but there was no alternative, right? There was nothing we could do except, you know, if we wanted media, we had to consume it as it was being produced, and that’s broken. So, there’s nothing I’d say, oh, we must form a cordon around, as some people are saying, oh, we must form a cordon around newspapers, or you have to say, newspapers in their traditional form, or we have to preserve the university in its traditional form, or whatever. I don’t. I’m much more worried about the problems that are native to group collaboration. Nora: Right. Clay: Not the part of the old society that breaks, which, you know, that happens. Here’s the thing that worries me. Openness creates experimentation, again, with cheap enough technology, openness creates experimentation. Experiments create value. Value creates an incentive. But, the incentive, if all the incentive tied back to was more openness, right? We have this lovely, virtuous feedback loop. And in the early days of any medium, it looks like that’s what we get. But, incentive is actually completely value-neutral. The spammers are responding to the incentives of email just as surely as you and I are. People trying to spam Twitter, people trying to game voting systems online, certainly the people, you know, identity fraud, credit card theft, all of these things are responses to openness just as surely as people blogging about their life’s experiences or Twittering to their friends or updating their Facebook status is. And one of the things we’ve seen, particularly with Wikipedia, is that past a certain point, openness becomes indefensible. The only response is to partially close down. And so, the history of the last three or four years of Wikipedia’s governance structure has been a very targeted attempt to find those places where the incentives are the most deleterious to the enterprise as a whole, they tend to be around biographies of living persons, and to do things like having semi-protected status, locking articles, flagging revisions, a whole variety of techniques for saying, it’s the encyclopedia anybody can edit but either, and not you, or, and not now. What we don’t know is, is this an arms race where it’s just fought to a kind of stalemate that, you know, each side kind of ups the ante but basically some new steady state is reached; or are we in the middle of a process of progressive decay, where at a certain point, the number of people who want something like Wikipedia to fail essentially lock out its initial promise from most of its current participants – I hope, because it’s something I want to believe is true about the universe, frankly, this is now just deep desire, it has nothing to do with analytics – I hope that the kind of bargains we’ve seen in the design of constitutional democracies can start to enter this sphere, which is to say, look, it’s a group of people who’ve got conflicting needs, and here’s how we’re going to balance it out. But, I also recognize that there are systems, and we have examples in the past, like CommuniTree, this bulletin board that was overrun by high school kids and eventually just pulled the plug, they just shut themselves down because they couldn’t withstand the onslaught, that there are models where it’s not like the design of the Constitution, it’s like the sack of Rome… [laughter] Nora: Right. Clay: … Where the people coming in intent on destroying can simply have the upper hand, have or gain the upper hand. And we’ve seen more models that are like constitutional design than like the sack of Rome, but you can’t write off the desire of people to destroy things they don’t like or don’t trust, and that’s still an open possibility. Nora: Clay Shirky, thanks so much. Clay: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Nora. Nora: That was my full, unedited interview with author Clay Shirky. An edited version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark. If you like hearing these kinds of full, uncut interviews, you can subscribe to the Spark Plus podcast. You’ll get all the regular weekly episodes of Spark plus bonus blog?only audio. It’s totally free, really easy, so check it out at our website, cbc.ca/spark. And thanks for listening. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-26,25471420 Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:57:48 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, Transcripts, user interface design, clay shirky, digital design http://odeo.com/episodes/25471421-Full-Interview-Gabriella-Coleman-on-digital-book-piracy Over the past decade or so, digital piracy has been a major headache for the music business, the movie business, and the television business. Less so for the book publishing industry. But that may be about to change. Yesterday, Nora talked to Gabriella Coleman about online book piracy. Gabriella is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Culture, & Communication at New York University. They talked about why online book piracy is poised to shake up the book biz, and what smart publishers can do to stop it. A shorter version of this interview will air on  Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 21:11] Download audio file (spark_20091124_gabriellacoleman.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by mecredis] Over the past decade or so, digital piracy has been a major headache for the music business, the movie business, and the television business. Less so for the book publishing industry. But that may be about to change. Yesterday, Nora talked to Gabriella Coleman about online book piracy. Gabriella is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Culture, & Communication at New York University. They talked about why online book piracy is poised to shake up the book biz, and what smart publishers can do to stop it. A shorter version of this interview will air on  Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 21:11] Download audio file (spark_20091124_gabriellacoleman.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by mecredis] Over the past decade or so, digital piracy has been a major headache for the music business, the movie business, and the television business. Less so for the book publishing industry. But that may be about to change. Yesterday, Nora talked to Gabriella Coleman about online book piracy. Gabriella is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Culture, & Communication at New York University. They talked about why online book piracy is poised to shake up the book biz, and what smart publishers can do to stop it. A shorter version of this interview will air on  Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 21:11] Download audio file (spark_20091124_gabriellacoleman.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by mecredis] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-26,25471421 Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:00:58 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus Books, audio, Piracy, gabriella coleman http://odeo.com/episodes/25471422-Full-interview-Mark-Graham-on-Wikipedia%E2%80%99s-geographic-blind-spots The map above shows the geographic distribution of Wikipedia articles. Darker blues mean more geotagged articles per country. According to researcher Mark Graham, who created the map, Wikipedia has some pretty prominent blind spots: Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia). This morning, Nora talked to Mark about representation on Wikipedia, and how sometimes, our virtual worlds don’t match up to the real world. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 15:56] Download audio file (spark_20091124_markgraham.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, ... The map above shows the geographic distribution of Wikipedia articles. Darker blues mean more geotagged articles per country. According to researcher Mark Graham, who created the map, Wikipedia has some pretty prominent blind spots: Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia). This morning, Nora talked to Mark about representation on Wikipedia, and how sometimes, our virtual worlds don’t match up to the real world. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 15:56] Download audio file (spark_20091124_markgraham.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] The map above shows the geographic distribution of Wikipedia articles. Darker blues mean more geotagged articles per country. According to researcher Mark Graham, who created the map, Wikipedia has some pretty prominent blind spots: Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia). This morning, Nora talked to Mark about representation on Wikipedia, and how sometimes, our virtual worlds don’t match up to the real world. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 93, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 15:56] Download audio file (spark_20091124_markgraham.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-24,25471422 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:38:15 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, maps, wikipedia, representation, cartography, mark graham http://odeo.com/episodes/25471423-Spark-92-%E2%80%93-November-22-24-2009 On this episode of Spark: FloH club, new media literacy, and getting the old age you deserve. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091122_23387.mp3) Sean Cole tries out the FloH Club, a new computer service aimed at older people Your Job Before the Internet: Todd Thicke and Michele Nasraway, co-executive producers of America’s Funniest Videos Jenna McWilliams teaches new media literacy (full interview) Nora mentions that the Amazon Kindle is now available in Canada Cyrus Farivar visits UCLA for the 40th anniversary of the Internet Joe Coughlin from MIT’s AgeLab on the future of aging (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Clips from This Is Your Life Melton Berle “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “eighteen pieces (soda)” by soda “attackoftheemorobots” by Windom Earle “Haliflight” by Chad Crouch Music from “Music for Cooking” by Podington Bear “Accidental Beatnik” by Coc... On this episode of Spark: FloH club, new media literacy, and getting the old age you deserve. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091122_23387.mp3) Sean Cole tries out the FloH Club, a new computer service aimed at older people Your Job Before the Internet: Todd Thicke and Michele Nasraway, co-executive producers of America’s Funniest Videos Jenna McWilliams teaches new media literacy (full interview) Nora mentions that the Amazon Kindle is now available in Canada Cyrus Farivar visits UCLA for the 40th anniversary of the Internet Joe Coughlin from MIT’s AgeLab on the future of aging (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Clips from This Is Your Life Melton Berle “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “eighteen pieces (soda)” by soda “attackoftheemorobots” by Windom Earle “Haliflight” by Chad Crouch Music from “Music for Cooking” by Podington Bear “Accidental Beatnik” by Coconut Monkeyrocket from Comfort Cake “I Hate To Think That You’ll Grow Old”  (1933) by Ramona & Her Grand Piano You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by AMagill] On this episode of Spark: FloH club, new media literacy, and getting the old age you deserve. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091122_23387.mp3) Sean Cole tries out the FloH Club, a new computer service aimed at older people Your Job Before the Internet: Todd Thicke and Michele Nasraway, co-executive producers of America’s Funniest Videos Jenna McWilliams teaches new media literacy (full interview) Nora mentions that the Amazon Kindle is now available in Canada Cyrus Farivar visits UCLA for the 40th anniversary of the Internet Joe Coughlin from MIT’s AgeLab on the future of aging (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: Clips from This Is Your Life Melton Berle “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “eighteen pieces (soda)” by soda “attackoftheemorobots” by Windom Earle “Haliflight” by Chad Crouch Music from “Music for Cooking” by Podington Bear “Accidental Beatnik” by Coconut Monkeyrocket from Comfort Cake “I Hate To Think That You’ll Grow Old”  (1933) by Ramona & Her Grand Piano You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by AMagill] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-20,25471423 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:43:11 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus new media, Episodes, kindle, ucla, literacy, cyrus farivar, joe coughlin, jenna mciwilliams, sean cole, afv, todd thicke, FloH Club, america's funniest home videos, michele nasraway http://odeo.com/episodes/25471424-Full-Interview-Jenna-McWilliams-on-New-Media-Literacy Nowadays, we have access to a huge amount of information, credible and otherwise. And for better or worse, traditional media gatekeepers and filters are disappearing. So how do we become our own filters? How do we learn to spot the difference between quality info and crackpot conspiracy theories? According to Jenna McWilliams, part of the answer is something called new media literacy. Jenna is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, and the former curriculum specialist for Project New Media Literacies. This morning, Nora interviewed Jenna via Skype. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 92, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:32] Download audio file (spark_20091119_jennamcwilliams.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with i... Nowadays, we have access to a huge amount of information, credible and otherwise. And for better or worse, traditional media gatekeepers and filters are disappearing. So how do we become our own filters? How do we learn to spot the difference between quality info and crackpot conspiracy theories? According to Jenna McWilliams, part of the answer is something called new media literacy. Jenna is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, and the former curriculum specialist for Project New Media Literacies. This morning, Nora interviewed Jenna via Skype. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 92, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:32] Download audio file (spark_20091119_jennamcwilliams.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by dalbera] Nowadays, we have access to a huge amount of information, credible and otherwise. And for better or worse, traditional media gatekeepers and filters are disappearing. So how do we become our own filters? How do we learn to spot the difference between quality info and crackpot conspiracy theories? According to Jenna McWilliams, part of the answer is something called new media literacy. Jenna is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, and the former curriculum specialist for Project New Media Literacies. This morning, Nora interviewed Jenna via Skype. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 92, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:32] Download audio file (spark_20091119_jennamcwilliams.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by dalbera] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-19,25471424 Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:05:06 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, new media, literacy, jenna mcwilliams http://odeo.com/episodes/25447375-Full-Interview-Joe-Coughlin-on-the-future-of-aging How old does someone have to be before you consider them "old?" We put that question to Joe Coughlin recently and guess what he said? Mid-forties! Yes, one of the leading researchers on aging says that in his lab, mid-forties is the threshold for older age. Thanks goodness he has a sense of humour about it. Coughlin is the director of the Agelab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Agelab looks at the intersection of aging and technology, culture and public policy. Nora spoke with Joe Coughlin about why he wants us to rethink our misconceptions around aging, what the baby boomers will expect from their golden years, and how we can make decisions now, so that we get the elder years we deserve. Plus, Joe gives us some longevity planning homework. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 26:07]. Download audio file (spark_20091113_coughlin.mp3) If you like heari... How old does someone have to be before you consider them "old?" We put that question to Joe Coughlin recently and guess what he said? Mid-forties! Yes, one of the leading researchers on aging says that in his lab, mid-forties is the threshold for older age. Thanks goodness he has a sense of humour about it. Coughlin is the director of the Agelab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Agelab looks at the intersection of aging and technology, culture and public policy. Nora spoke with Joe Coughlin about why he wants us to rethink our misconceptions around aging, what the baby boomers will expect from their golden years, and how we can make decisions now, so that we get the elder years we deserve. Plus, Joe gives us some longevity planning homework. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 26:07]. Download audio file (spark_20091113_coughlin.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] How old does someone have to be before you consider them "old?" We put that question to Joe Coughlin recently and guess what he said? Mid-forties! Yes, one of the leading researchers on aging says that in his lab, mid-forties is the threshold for older age. Thanks goodness he has a sense of humour about it. Coughlin is the director of the Agelab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Agelab looks at the intersection of aging and technology, culture and public policy. Nora spoke with Joe Coughlin about why he wants us to rethink our misconceptions around aging, what the baby boomers will expect from their golden years, and how we can make decisions now, so that we get the elder years we deserve. Plus, Joe gives us some longevity planning homework. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 26:07]. Download audio file (spark_20091113_coughlin.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-13,25447375 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:03:05 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus interviews, robots, future, aging, mit, mir, glen hougan, joe coughlin, agelab http://odeo.com/episodes/25447374-Spark-91-%E2%80%93-November-15-17-2009 On this episode of Spark: CAPTCHAs, data visualization and romancing the phone. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091115_23049.mp3) Luis von Ahn fights spam and digitizes books with CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA GWAP: Games With a Purpose Jon Lee plays matchmaker for mismatched shoes with unevenfeet.com Daemon Fairless investigates texting and dating, or in other words, “romancing the phone” Funky Brown Chick Twanna Hines Nora mentions her full interview with MIT AgeLab director Joe Coughlin (full interview) December’s issue of Esquire magazine has an augmented reality cover Hannah Classen wonders why we don’t have robotic butlers Rehman Merali, PhD student in Autonomous Space Robotics Fernanda Viegas visualizes data with Many Eyes Lawrence Lessig explains the perils of openness in government (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Butta Fly’s Jazz Handz” by KCentric “Wadidyusay?&#8... On this episode of Spark: CAPTCHAs, data visualization and romancing the phone. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091115_23049.mp3) Luis von Ahn fights spam and digitizes books with CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA GWAP: Games With a Purpose Jon Lee plays matchmaker for mismatched shoes with unevenfeet.com Daemon Fairless investigates texting and dating, or in other words, “romancing the phone” Funky Brown Chick Twanna Hines Nora mentions her full interview with MIT AgeLab director Joe Coughlin (full interview) December’s issue of Esquire magazine has an augmented reality cover Hannah Classen wonders why we don’t have robotic butlers Rehman Merali, PhD student in Autonomous Space Robotics Fernanda Viegas visualizes data with Many Eyes Lawrence Lessig explains the perils of openness in government (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Butta Fly’s Jazz Handz” by KCentric “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “At Last” by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 Clips from Dating: Do’s and Don’ts (1949) “acclimate” by General Fuzz Clips from Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940) “Toboggan” and “Sunday Morning” by Podington Bear You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by D Sharon Pruitt] On this episode of Spark: CAPTCHAs, data visualization and romancing the phone. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091115_23049.mp3) Luis von Ahn fights spam and digitizes books with CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA GWAP: Games With a Purpose Jon Lee plays matchmaker for mismatched shoes with unevenfeet.com Daemon Fairless investigates texting and dating, or in other words, “romancing the phone” Funky Brown Chick Twanna Hines Nora mentions her full interview with MIT AgeLab director Joe Coughlin (full interview) December’s issue of Esquire magazine has an augmented reality cover Hannah Classen wonders why we don’t have robotic butlers Rehman Merali, PhD student in Autonomous Space Robotics Fernanda Viegas visualizes data with Many Eyes Lawrence Lessig explains the perils of openness in government (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Butta Fly’s Jazz Handz” by KCentric “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “At Last” by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 Clips from Dating: Do’s and Don’ts (1949) “acclimate” by General Fuzz Clips from Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940) “Toboggan” and “Sunday Morning” by Podington Bear You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by D Sharon Pruitt] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-13,25447374 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:16:01 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus Dating, spam, Government, robots, Episodes, texting, ibm, CAPTCHA, transparency, openness, Many Eyes, recaptcha, hannah classen, twanna hines, daemon fairless, GWAP, MIT agelab, joe coughlin, john lee, fernanda viegas, uneven feet, lawrence lessign, Luis von Ahn http://odeo.com/episodes/25417257-Spark-84-repeat-broadcast This week on the radio, a repeat broadcast of Spark. For more information, and to listen to this episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Q: Why a repeat broadcast? A: The Spark team has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks, working on a new project, which we hope is going to turn into something wonderful. We needed to carve out some extra time to work on it. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back with a brand new episode next week. Q: Why isn’t there a repeat podcast, too? A: Because people hate repeat podcasts. If you want to listen to the episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Download audio file (spark_20091108_22688.mp3) This week on the radio, a repeat broadcast of Spark. For more information, and to listen to this episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Q: Why a repeat broadcast? A: The Spark team has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks, working on a new project, which we hope is going to turn into something wonderful. We needed to carve out some extra time to work on it. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back with a brand new episode next week. Q: Why isn’t there a repeat podcast, too? A: Because people hate repeat podcasts. If you want to listen to the episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Download audio file (spark_20091108_22688.mp3) This week on the radio, a repeat broadcast of Spark. For more information, and to listen to this episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Q: Why a repeat broadcast? A: The Spark team has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks, working on a new project, which we hope is going to turn into something wonderful. We needed to carve out some extra time to work on it. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back with a brand new episode next week. Q: Why isn’t there a repeat podcast, too? A: Because people hate repeat podcasts. If you want to listen to the episode, go to the show notes for Spark 84. Download audio file (spark_20091108_22688.mp3) tag:odeo.com,2009-11-07,25417257 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:23:16 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes http://odeo.com/episodes/25388079-Full-Interview-Lawrence-Lessig-on-government-transparency Yesterday, Nora interviewed Lawrence Lessig about his recent article in The New Republic, “Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government” including a question from Russell McOrmond. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 22:53]. Download audio file (spark_20091104_lessig.mp3) Special thanks to Daniel Dennis Jones of Radio Berkman for technical help with this interview. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Yesterday, Nora interviewed Lawrence Lessig about his recent article in The New Republic, “Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government” including a question from Russell McOrmond. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 22:53]. Download audio file (spark_20091104_lessig.mp3) Special thanks to Daniel Dennis Jones of Radio Berkman for technical help with this interview. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Yesterday, Nora interviewed Lawrence Lessig about his recent article in The New Republic, “Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government” including a question from Russell McOrmond. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3 [runs 22:53]. Download audio file (spark_20091104_lessig.mp3) Special thanks to Daniel Dennis Jones of Radio Berkman for technical help with this interview. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25388079 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:53:02 -0800 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews http://odeo.com/episodes/25388080-Spark-90-%E2%80%93-November-1-3-2009 On this episode of Spark: The pleasures and sorrows of work, continuous partial attention, and email apnea. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091101_22305.mp3) As Nora says in the episode, this week, we’ve made a different kind of show. We’re going to feature two longer form interviews. In part, that’s because the Spark team is working on a separate project, which we hope will turn into something fabulous, and we need a little time to work on it.  But also, we’ve hand picked these two guests because they have a lot to say about modern life. Alain de Botton on the pleasures and sorrows of work (full interview) Linda Stone on continuous partial attention and email apnea Nora mentions her downloadable breathing exercises This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Plan Your Escape” by gmz Music from “Music For Sailing On A Starry Night” by Podington Bear &... On this episode of Spark: The pleasures and sorrows of work, continuous partial attention, and email apnea. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091101_22305.mp3) As Nora says in the episode, this week, we’ve made a different kind of show. We’re going to feature two longer form interviews. In part, that’s because the Spark team is working on a separate project, which we hope will turn into something fabulous, and we need a little time to work on it.  But also, we’ve hand picked these two guests because they have a lot to say about modern life. Alain de Botton on the pleasures and sorrows of work (full interview) Linda Stone on continuous partial attention and email apnea Nora mentions her downloadable breathing exercises This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Plan Your Escape” by gmz Music from “Music For Sailing On A Starry Night” by Podington Bear “These MCs (Instrumental)” by DJ.E-State You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image from George Eastman House] On this episode of Spark: The pleasures and sorrows of work, continuous partial attention, and email apnea. Click to listen (runs 54:00): Download audio file (spark_20091101_22305.mp3) As Nora says in the episode, this week, we’ve made a different kind of show. We’re going to feature two longer form interviews. In part, that’s because the Spark team is working on a separate project, which we hope will turn into something fabulous, and we need a little time to work on it.  But also, we’ve hand picked these two guests because they have a lot to say about modern life. Alain de Botton on the pleasures and sorrows of work (full interview) Linda Stone on continuous partial attention and email apnea Nora mentions her downloadable breathing exercises This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Plan Your Escape” by gmz Music from “Music For Sailing On A Starry Night” by Podington Bear “These MCs (Instrumental)” by DJ.E-State You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image from George Eastman House] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-30,25388080 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:19:57 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus work, Episodes, Alain de Botton, Linda Stone, continuous partial attention, email apnea http://odeo.com/episodes/25388081-Learn-to-breathe-with-Nora-Young When we were putting together this week’s interview with tech visionary, Linda Stone, we started thinking a lot about breath. If you’ve listened to the interview already, you know that Linda’s work these days focuses on what she calls email apnea. When we’re interacting with all the screens in our lives: computer screen, mobile device, etc, we tend to stop breathing, or have really shallow breaths.  As I’ve mentioned on the show, I’ve been doing yoga for a long time, about 20 years, and we thought, hey, why not include some yoga breathing techniques with the podcast, so when you’re finished with all that email apnea, you can relax and breathe. Are you game? You can listen to the breathing exercises below, or download the MP3. [runs 3:13] Download audio file (spark_20091030_breathing.mp3) When we were putting together this week’s interview with tech visionary, Linda Stone, we started thinking a lot about breath. If you’ve listened to the interview already, you know that Linda’s work these days focuses on what she calls email apnea. When we’re interacting with all the screens in our lives: computer screen, mobile device, etc, we tend to stop breathing, or have really shallow breaths.  As I’ve mentioned on the show, I’ve been doing yoga for a long time, about 20 years, and we thought, hey, why not include some yoga breathing techniques with the podcast, so when you’re finished with all that email apnea, you can relax and breathe. Are you game? You can listen to the breathing exercises below, or download the MP3. [runs 3:13] Download audio file (spark_20091030_breathing.mp3) When we were putting together this week’s interview with tech visionary, Linda Stone, we started thinking a lot about breath. If you’ve listened to the interview already, you know that Linda’s work these days focuses on what she calls email apnea. When we’re interacting with all the screens in our lives: computer screen, mobile device, etc, we tend to stop breathing, or have really shallow breaths.  As I’ve mentioned on the show, I’ve been doing yoga for a long time, about 20 years, and we thought, hey, why not include some yoga breathing techniques with the podcast, so when you’re finished with all that email apnea, you can relax and breathe. Are you game? You can listen to the breathing exercises below, or download the MP3. [runs 3:13] Download audio file (spark_20091030_breathing.mp3) tag:odeo.com,2009-10-30,25388081 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:19:53 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio http://odeo.com/episodes/25360250-Spark-89-%E2%80%93-October-25-27-2009 On this episode of Spark: Traditional knowledge, instant film, and online borders. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091025_22008.mp3) Nora leads a breathing exercise V. K. Gupta protects ancient wisdom in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library Jeremy de Beer on traditional knowledge and intellectual property Spark Quest: Grant Lawrence tries out Sony’s Party-shot camera accessory Nora checks in with André Bosman of The Impossible Project Nora’s full interview with André from January 2009 Spark listeners wish they could stream television from other countries Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty: Mignon advises Patrick Horneker about writing for an international audience on the web Should you capitalize the word internet/Internet? Nora explains why the world wide web and the internet are different Tim Berners-Lee supports net neutrality Pete Nowak updates Nora on Canadian net neutrality CRTC issues net neutrality rules Dan Misener explains geoblocking wi... On this episode of Spark: Traditional knowledge, instant film, and online borders. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091025_22008.mp3) Nora leads a breathing exercise V. K. Gupta protects ancient wisdom in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library Jeremy de Beer on traditional knowledge and intellectual property Spark Quest: Grant Lawrence tries out Sony’s Party-shot camera accessory Nora checks in with André Bosman of The Impossible Project Nora’s full interview with André from January 2009 Spark listeners wish they could stream television from other countries Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty: Mignon advises Patrick Horneker about writing for an international audience on the web Should you capitalize the word internet/Internet? Nora explains why the world wide web and the internet are different Tim Berners-Lee supports net neutrality Pete Nowak updates Nora on Canadian net neutrality CRTC issues net neutrality rules Dan Misener explains geoblocking with help from: Mark Hayes of Hayes eLaw Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab Roger Martin explains why design thinking in business (full interview) Roger’s book: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “110 Downtempo Electronic” by teru “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Superfluous Umbrella” by Tyler Walker “LA TRIPLETA” by virtualdjmax “pling”  by jaspertine Clips from Photography (1946) Music from Music For Autumn by Podington Bear “Carioca” by Neurowaxx You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by chaps1] spark_20091025_22008.mp3 On this episode of Spark: Traditional knowledge, instant film, and online borders. Click to listen (runs 54:00) Download audio file (spark_20091025_22008.mp3) Nora leads a breathing exercise V. K. Gupta protects ancient wisdom in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library Jeremy de Beer on traditional knowledge and intellectual property Spark Quest: Grant Lawrence tries out Sony’s Party-shot camera accessory Nora checks in with André Bosman of The Impossible Project Nora’s full interview with André from January 2009 Spark listeners wish they could stream television from other countries Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty: Mignon advises Patrick Horneker about writing for an international audience on the web Should you capitalize the word internet/Internet? Nora explains why the world wide web and the internet are different Tim Berners-Lee supports net neutrality Pete Nowak updates Nora on Canadian net neutrality CRTC issues net neutrality rules Dan Misener explains geoblocking with help from: Mark Hayes of Hayes eLaw Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab Roger Martin explains why design thinking in business (full interview) Roger’s book: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “110 Downtempo Electronic” by teru “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Superfluous Umbrella” by Tyler Walker “LA TRIPLETA” by virtualdjmax “pling”  by jaspertine Clips from Photography (1946) Music from Music For Autumn by Podington Bear “Carioca” by Neurowaxx You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by chaps1] spark_20091025_22008.mp3 tag:odeo.com,2009-10-23,25360250 Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:47:41 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes, Yoga, copyright, polaroid, patent, Grammar Girl, Ron Deibert, Tim Berners-Lee, andre bosman, geolocation, grant lawrence, mignon fogarty, roger martin, design thinking, sony part-shot, pete nowak, tkdl, mark hayes, the impossible project, v.k. gupta, geoblocking, jeremy de beer, traditional knowledge, spark quest, traditional knowledge digital library http://odeo.com/episodes/25312511-Full-interview-Roger-Martin-on-Design-Thinking-in-the-Workplace Ever wonder why organizations that start out as innovators can become rigid and stuck in their ways? Heck, maybe you work in an organization that’s lost its creative, innovative edge. If so, you’ll want to listen to Nora’s interview with Roger Martin. Roger is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 89, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:56] Download audio file (spark_20091019_rogermartin.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by jordanfischer] Ever wonder why organizations that start out as innovators can become rigid and stuck in their ways? Heck, maybe you work in an organization that’s lost its creative, innovative edge. If so, you’ll want to listen to Nora’s interview with Roger Martin. Roger is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 89, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:56] Download audio file (spark_20091019_rogermartin.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by jordanfischer] Ever wonder why organizations that start out as innovators can become rigid and stuck in their ways? Heck, maybe you work in an organization that’s lost its creative, innovative edge. If so, you’ll want to listen to Nora’s interview with Roger Martin. Roger is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 89, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:56] Download audio file (spark_20091019_rogermartin.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by jordanfischer] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-19,25312511 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:22:03 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, roger martin, design thinking http://odeo.com/episodes/25298854-Sheila-Heti-reads-Cape-Cod-Shoe Here’s a special, blog-only audio treat for you this Friday afternoon. Sheila Heti reads her story Cape Cod Shoe, written for the Significant Objects Project. Download audio file (spark_20091016_capecodshoe.mp3) An excerpt of Sheila’s story is heard in Spark 88, along with an interview with Rob Walker, co-curator of the Significant Objects Project. [Download MP3] Here’s a special, blog-only audio treat for you this Friday afternoon. Sheila Heti reads her story Cape Cod Shoe, written for the Significant Objects Project. Download audio file (spark_20091016_capecodshoe.mp3) An excerpt of Sheila’s story is heard in Spark 88, along with an interview with Rob Walker, co-curator of the Significant Objects Project. [Download MP3] Here’s a special, blog-only audio treat for you this Friday afternoon. Sheila Heti reads her story Cape Cod Shoe, written for the Significant Objects Project. Download audio file (spark_20091016_capecodshoe.mp3) An excerpt of Sheila’s story is heard in Spark 88, along with an interview with Rob Walker, co-curator of the Significant Objects Project. [Download MP3] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-16,25298854 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:46:29 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio http://odeo.com/episodes/25296598-Spark-88-%E2%80%93-October-18-20-2009 On this episode of Spark: Tracking trash, the real value of stories, and social media for businesses. Click to listen: Download audio file (spark_20091018_21631.mp3) Nora mentions her interview with Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer on open cities David Eaves explains VanTrash Jennifer Dunnam tracks trash with MIT’s Sensible City Lab’s Trash | Track Sheila Heti reads from her short story “Cape Cod Shoe“ Rob Walker co-curates the Significant Objects Project Derek K. Miller thinks people should remember geography Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty gives advice about email subject lines Members of the Spark community read their most useless email subject lines Rick Fogarty uses Skype for hairstyle consultations Bernd Boesemeyer deals with a negative review of his B&B on TripAdvisor Mitch Joel explains why businesses should embrace online conversations Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton on the beauty of work This episode features Creative Co... On this episode of Spark: Tracking trash, the real value of stories, and social media for businesses. Click to listen: Download audio file (spark_20091018_21631.mp3) Nora mentions her interview with Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer on open cities David Eaves explains VanTrash Jennifer Dunnam tracks trash with MIT’s Sensible City Lab’s Trash | Track Sheila Heti reads from her short story “Cape Cod Shoe“ Rob Walker co-curates the Significant Objects Project Derek K. Miller thinks people should remember geography Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty gives advice about email subject lines Members of the Spark community read their most useless email subject lines Rick Fogarty uses Skype for hairstyle consultations Bernd Boesemeyer deals with a negative review of his B&B on TripAdvisor Mitch Joel explains why businesses should embrace online conversations Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton on the beauty of work This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Window like” by echoed “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “The Light” by spliffvalley “Cash For Your Trash” by Fats Waller (1941) “Summer” by General Fuzz “Curious Process” by Chad Crouch “Music for Tree Climbing” by Podington Bear “I Can Read Between The Lines” by Mildred Bailey & Her Orchestra (1939) “Barbers“ You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by D'arcy Norman] On this episode of Spark: Tracking trash, the real value of stories, and social media for businesses. Click to listen: Download audio file (spark_20091018_21631.mp3) Nora mentions her interview with Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer on open cities David Eaves explains VanTrash Jennifer Dunnam tracks trash with MIT’s Sensible City Lab’s Trash | Track Sheila Heti reads from her short story “Cape Cod Shoe“ Rob Walker co-curates the Significant Objects Project Derek K. Miller thinks people should remember geography Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty gives advice about email subject lines Members of the Spark community read their most useless email subject lines Rick Fogarty uses Skype for hairstyle consultations Bernd Boesemeyer deals with a negative review of his B&B on TripAdvisor Mitch Joel explains why businesses should embrace online conversations Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton on the beauty of work This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Window like” by echoed “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “The Light” by spliffvalley “Cash For Your Trash” by Fats Waller (1941) “Summer” by General Fuzz “Curious Process” by Chad Crouch “Music for Tree Climbing” by Podington Bear “I Can Read Between The Lines” by Mildred Bailey & Her Orchestra (1939) “Barbers“ You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by D'arcy Norman] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-16,25296598 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:57:47 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes, email, garbage, mitch joel, mit, trash, Vancouver, Grammar Girl, TripAdvisor, sheila heti, open data, mignon fogarty, andrea reimer, rob walker, open cities, vantrash, Bernd Boesemeyer, david eaves, Sensible City Lab, jennifer dunnam, Rick Fogarty, derek k. miller http://odeo.com/episodes/25278769-Full-Interview-Rob-Walker-on-Significant-Objects Want to get the best possible price for that junk you’re selling on eBay? Maybe you should write a short story to go along with it. That’s the idea behind the Significant Objects project. It’s an online experiment designed measure how stories can change the value of ordinary, everyday objects. Curators Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn buy inexpensive things from yard sales and thrift shops, then pair the items with writers, who write short stories inspired by the object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! For example, this porcelain shoe originally cost $4. After being paired with an original story by Sheila Heti, the final price was $77.51. This morning, Nora interviewed Rob Walker about the project. A shorter version of this interview will air on the October 18 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview b... Want to get the best possible price for that junk you’re selling on eBay? Maybe you should write a short story to go along with it. That’s the idea behind the Significant Objects project. It’s an online experiment designed measure how stories can change the value of ordinary, everyday objects. Curators Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn buy inexpensive things from yard sales and thrift shops, then pair the items with writers, who write short stories inspired by the object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! For example, this porcelain shoe originally cost $4. After being paired with an original story by Sheila Heti, the final price was $77.51. This morning, Nora interviewed Rob Walker about the project. A shorter version of this interview will air on the October 18 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 14:52] Download audio file (spark_20091013_robwalker.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Want to get the best possible price for that junk you’re selling on eBay? Maybe you should write a short story to go along with it. That’s the idea behind the Significant Objects project. It’s an online experiment designed measure how stories can change the value of ordinary, everyday objects. Curators Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn buy inexpensive things from yard sales and thrift shops, then pair the items with writers, who write short stories inspired by the object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! For example, this porcelain shoe originally cost $4. After being paired with an original story by Sheila Heti, the final price was $77.51. This morning, Nora interviewed Rob Walker about the project. A shorter version of this interview will air on the October 18 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 14:52] Download audio file (spark_20091013_robwalker.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-13,25278769 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:56:31 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, upcycling, significant objects, rob walker http://odeo.com/episodes/25223517-Full-Interview-Alain-de-Botton-on-the-beauty-of-work This week, Nora had an opportunity to speak with writer Alain de Botton about his newest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Nora and Alain talked about how work has changed in recent years, and why we should try to see work as beautiful, and not boring. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:06] Download audio file (spark_20091002_alaindebotton.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] photo by Untitled blue This week, Nora had an opportunity to speak with writer Alain de Botton about his newest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Nora and Alain talked about how work has changed in recent years, and why we should try to see work as beautiful, and not boring. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:06] Download audio file (spark_20091002_alaindebotton.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] photo by Untitled blue This week, Nora had an opportunity to speak with writer Alain de Botton about his newest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Nora and Alain talked about how work has changed in recent years, and why we should try to see work as beautiful, and not boring. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 27:06] Download audio file (spark_20091002_alaindebotton.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] photo by Untitled blue tag:odeo.com,2009-10-02,25223517 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:32:08 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, work, interviews, Alain de Botton, pleasures and sorrows of work http://odeo.com/episodes/25223516-Spark-87-%E2%80%93-October-4-6-2009 On this episode of Spark: Open science, general knowledge, and doctors before the internet Tom Howell fixes his leaky sink with a little help from his father (and Skype) Daemon Fairless learns cabinetmaking, cooking, and guitar on YouTube Nora announces Spark’s “name that disappearing technology sound” contest Jenny Carpenter explains Open Science Open Notebook Science Author Michael Nielsen on The Future of Science Galaxy Zoo The Open Dinosaur Project Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) explains where to place emoticons and links in email messages Your Job Before the Internet: Dr. Stewart Cameron Nora digs into the CBC Archives Francois Jacques worries about covert Googling at his pub trivia night Brian Cathcart wonders, Is Google Killing General Knowledge? (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “226,” “204,” “219,” “Sunday Mornin... On this episode of Spark: Open science, general knowledge, and doctors before the internet Tom Howell fixes his leaky sink with a little help from his father (and Skype) Daemon Fairless learns cabinetmaking, cooking, and guitar on YouTube Nora announces Spark’s “name that disappearing technology sound” contest Jenny Carpenter explains Open Science Open Notebook Science Author Michael Nielsen on The Future of Science Galaxy Zoo The Open Dinosaur Project Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) explains where to place emoticons and links in email messages Your Job Before the Internet: Dr. Stewart Cameron Nora digs into the CBC Archives Francois Jacques worries about covert Googling at his pub trivia night Brian Cathcart wonders, Is Google Killing General Knowledge? (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “226,” “204,” “219,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Toboggan” by Podington Bear “Theres Something Wrong” by Brad Sucks “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “My Handy Man” by Ethel Waters and Andy Razaf  (1928) “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter” by Fats Waller (1935) “lucubrationofthevoice” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Up To No Good” from Backtime by Lee Rosevere “Spaced” and “Sat.” by CapoFrets “Forever blue (March Rosetta re-imagined version)” by Fabrizio Paterlini “second thoughts” by General Fuzz “Proliferate” by Chad Crouch Download audio file (spark_20091004_21059.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Marcin Wichary] On this episode of Spark: Open science, general knowledge, and doctors before the internet Tom Howell fixes his leaky sink with a little help from his father (and Skype) Daemon Fairless learns cabinetmaking, cooking, and guitar on YouTube Nora announces Spark’s “name that disappearing technology sound” contest Jenny Carpenter explains Open Science Open Notebook Science Author Michael Nielsen on The Future of Science Galaxy Zoo The Open Dinosaur Project Nora mentions her full interview with Alain de Botton Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) explains where to place emoticons and links in email messages Your Job Before the Internet: Dr. Stewart Cameron Nora digs into the CBC Archives Francois Jacques worries about covert Googling at his pub trivia night Brian Cathcart wonders, Is Google Killing General Knowledge? (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “226,” “204,” “219,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Toboggan” by Podington Bear “Theres Something Wrong” by Brad Sucks “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “My Handy Man” by Ethel Waters and Andy Razaf  (1928) “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter” by Fats Waller (1935) “lucubrationofthevoice” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Up To No Good” from Backtime by Lee Rosevere “Spaced” and “Sat.” by CapoFrets “Forever blue (March Rosetta re-imagined version)” by Fabrizio Paterlini “second thoughts” by General Fuzz “Proliferate” by Chad Crouch Download audio file (spark_20091004_21059.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Marcin Wichary] tag:odeo.com,2009-10-02,25223516 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:58:48 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus skype, google, Episodes, trivia, Grammar Girl, tom howell, mignon fogarty, cabinets, jenny carpenter, general knowledge, michael nielsen, stewart cameron, open science, brian cathcart, daemon fairless, francoise jacques http://odeo.com/episodes/25199081-Full-Interview-Is-Google-Killing-General-Knowledge Quick! Can you name the first five prime numbers? Or the atomic weight of Xenon? Or the phases of meiosis? Can you do it without consulting the web? Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University, and recently, he wrote an article called “Is Google Killing General Knowledge?” In it, he wonders if a younger generation values facts the same way previous generations have: I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work. The average student [...] seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration. Last week, Nora interviewed Brian Cathcart about this phenomenon. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 87, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3.... Quick! Can you name the first five prime numbers? Or the atomic weight of Xenon? Or the phases of meiosis? Can you do it without consulting the web? Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University, and recently, he wrote an article called “Is Google Killing General Knowledge?” In it, he wonders if a younger generation values facts the same way previous generations have: I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work. The average student [...] seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration. Last week, Nora interviewed Brian Cathcart about this phenomenon. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 87, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:27] Download audio file (spark_20090928_cathcart.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Quick! Can you name the first five prime numbers? Or the atomic weight of Xenon? Or the phases of meiosis? Can you do it without consulting the web? Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University, and recently, he wrote an article called “Is Google Killing General Knowledge?” In it, he wonders if a younger generation values facts the same way previous generations have: I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work. The average student [...] seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration. Last week, Nora interviewed Brian Cathcart about this phenomenon. A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 87, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:27] Download audio file (spark_20090928_cathcart.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-28,25199081 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:51:55 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews http://odeo.com/episodes/25184561-Episode-86-%E2%80%93-September-27-29-2009 On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Pas... On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye at 10 PM. Eastern and Pacific time. Hannah Classen discovers what ever happened to the food pill Nora follows up last week’s item on augmented reality by mentioning Canadian AR project Discover Anywhere Mobile Dan Misener looks at the “new old” way to be a pirate: Usenet Gizmodo’s John Herrman Steven M. Bellovin Peter Nowak of cbc.ca/technology drops by for a Net Neutrality update This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Baby” by cdk “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “elevenpithyminutes” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Unforgettable” by Nat ”King” Cole Feat. Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra (1952) “A Peek Inside” by General Fuzz “Dropping Out of School” by Brad Sucks “Second Thoughts” by General Fuzz “Scary Yachts for Hire” by Tyler Walker “Morning Mist” by Chad Crouch “Monkeyball” by Tyler Walker Download audio file (spark_20090927_20754.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Dano] On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye at 10 PM. Eastern and Pacific time. Hannah Classen discovers what ever happened to the food pill Nora follows up last week’s item on augmented reality by mentioning Canadian AR project Discover Anywhere Mobile Dan Misener looks at the “new old” way to be a pirate: Usenet Gizmodo’s John Herrman Steven M. Bellovin Peter Nowak of cbc.ca/technology drops by for a Net Neutrality update This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Baby” by cdk “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “elevenpithyminutes” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Unforgettable” by Nat ”King” Cole Feat. Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra (1952) “A Peek Inside” by General Fuzz “Dropping Out of School” by Brad Sucks “Second Thoughts” by General Fuzz “Scary Yachts for Hire” by Tyler Walker “Morning Mist” by Chad Crouch “Monkeyball” by Tyler Walker Download audio file (spark_20090927_20754.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Dano] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-25,25184561 Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:13:58 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Episodes, teens, Piracy, usenet, salutations, net neutrality, lsd, gina trapani, Grammar Girl, anil dash, peter nowak, mignon fogarty, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, hannah classes, steven bellovin, andrew feldmar, jehn herrman, lynn glazier http://odeo.com/episodes/25298855-Spark-86-%E2%80%93-September-27-29-2009 On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Pas... On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye at 10 PM. Eastern and Pacific time. Hannah Classen discovers what ever happened to the food pill Nora follows up last week’s item on augmented reality by mentioning Canadian AR project Discover Anywhere Mobile Dan Misener looks at the “new old” way to be a pirate: Usenet Gizmodo’s John Herrman Steven M. Bellovin Peter Nowak of cbc.ca/technology drops by for a Net Neutrality update This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Baby” by cdk “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “elevenpithyminutes” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Unforgettable” by Nat ”King” Cole Feat. Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra (1952) “A Peek Inside” by General Fuzz “Dropping Out of School” by Brad Sucks “Second Thoughts” by General Fuzz “Scary Yachts for Hire” by Tyler Walker “Morning Mist” by Chad Crouch “Monkeyball” by Tyler Walker Download audio file (spark_20090927_20754.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Dano] On this episode of Spark: Digital forgetting, email salutations, and food pills Andrew Feldmar is barred from entering the US after a border guard Googled his name and found his article, “Entheogens and Psychotherapy“ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital technology should forget. Viktor is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (full interview and transcript) James Martin receives a vexing Facebook friend request Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about email salutations and parentheses (or are they brackets?) Nora mentions her interview with Anil Dash and Gina Trapani about Last Year’s Model Lynn Glazier explores the culture of sexual harassment among teens in “It’s a Teen’s World: Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips.” You can hear Lynn’s 3-part radio series on Ideas starting Wednesday September 30. You can watch the one-hour TV documentary on Monday, October 5 on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye at 10 PM. Eastern and Pacific time. Hannah Classen discovers what ever happened to the food pill Nora follows up last week’s item on augmented reality by mentioning Canadian AR project Discover Anywhere Mobile Dan Misener looks at the “new old” way to be a pirate: Usenet Gizmodo’s John Herrman Steven M. Bellovin Peter Nowak of cbc.ca/technology drops by for a Net Neutrality update This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Baby” by cdk “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “elevenpithyminutes” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Unforgettable” by Nat ”King” Cole Feat. Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra (1952) “A Peek Inside” by General Fuzz “Dropping Out of School” by Brad Sucks “Second Thoughts” by General Fuzz “Scary Yachts for Hire” by Tyler Walker “Morning Mist” by Chad Crouch “Monkeyball” by Tyler Walker Download audio file (spark_20090927_20754.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Dano] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-25,25298855 Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:13:58 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Episodes, teens, Piracy, usenet, salutations, net neutrality, lsd, gina trapani, Grammar Girl, anil dash, peter nowak, mignon fogarty, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, hannah classes, steven bellovin, andrew feldmar, jehn herrman, lynn glazier http://odeo.com/episodes/25164818-Full-Interview-Viktor-Mayer-Sch%C3%B6nberger-on-forgetting-in-a-digital-age In his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is a natural human process, and that digital technology and cheap storage are creating all sorts of problems, from an assault on privacy, to an inability to make decisions. Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all. This morning, Nora interviewed Viktor about forgetting in a digital age. A shorter version of this interview will air on the September 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interv... In his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is a natural human process, and that digital technology and cheap storage are creating all sorts of problems, from an assault on privacy, to an inability to make decisions. Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all. This morning, Nora interviewed Viktor about forgetting in a digital age. A shorter version of this interview will air on the September 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 25:56] Download audio file (spark_20090922_delete.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] In his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is a natural human process, and that digital technology and cheap storage are creating all sorts of problems, from an assault on privacy, to an inability to make decisions. Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all. This morning, Nora interviewed Viktor about forgetting in a digital age. A shorter version of this interview will air on the September 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 25:56] Download audio file (spark_20090922_delete.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-22,25164818 Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:19:51 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, authors, delete, forgetting, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger http://odeo.com/episodes/25298856-Spark-85-%E2%80%93-September-20-22-2009 On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter T... On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter THWOMP revives classic video game music in their “Nintendo cover band,” and Alison Myers listens in This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “One Two Three O’Leary” by Count Basie & His Orchestra (1941) “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “Get a Groove,” “acclimate,” and “Ray Squared” by General Fuzz “amomentgiventothose_imiss” and “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Help Yourself (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) Download audio file (spark_20090922_20414.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by In Veritas Lux] Bruce Sterling On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter THWOMP revives classic video game music in their “Nintendo cover band,” and Alison Myers listens in This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “One Two Three O’Leary” by Count Basie & His Orchestra (1941) “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “Get a Groove,” “acclimate,” and “Ray Squared” by General Fuzz “amomentgiventothose_imiss” and “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Help Yourself (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) Download audio file (spark_20090922_20414.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by In Veritas Lux] Bruce Sterling tag:odeo.com,2009-09-18,25298856 Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:25:18 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, jazz, Episodes, chiptune, Rural Broadband, Cathi Bond, kind of bloop, andy baio, luis suarez, email overload, thwomp, broadband canada, radio berkman, marla thirsk, hype cycle, daniel dennis jones, waxy.org http://odeo.com/episodes/25146796-Episode-85-%E2%80%93-September-20-22-2009 On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter T... On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter THWOMP revives classic video game music in their “Nintendo cover band,” and Alison Myers listens in This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “One Two Three O’Leary” by Count Basie & His Orchestra (1941) “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “Get a Groove,” “acclimate,” and “Ray Squared” by General Fuzz “amomentgiventothose_imiss” and “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Help Yourself (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) Download audio file (spark_20090922_20414.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by In Veritas Lux] Bruce Sterling On this episode of Spark: Augmented reality, chiptune jazz, and a world without email Spark listeners confess the number of email messages in their inboxes Nora mentions Luis Suarez’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Outside the Inbox Luis Suarez explains how he got rid of corporate email and replaced it with social software tools Nora mentions Yammer, which is like Twitter for companies Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband Broadband Canada National Broadband Maps Spark Lite, the low-bandwidth podcast version of Spark Cathi Bond explains two trends in augmented reality: games and advertising Augmented reality enthusiast and science fiction author Bruce Sterling contemplates the future implications of AR The Hype Cycle Daniel Jones from the Radio Berkman podcast tells the story of NBC versus the pirates Andy Baio reimagines Kind of Blue as a chiptune cover album called Kind of Bloop, and pays for the project through crowdfunding with Kickstarter THWOMP revives classic video game music in their “Nintendo cover band,” and Alison Myers listens in This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “One Two Three O’Leary” by Count Basie & His Orchestra (1941) “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “Get a Groove,” “acclimate,” and “Ray Squared” by General Fuzz “amomentgiventothose_imiss” and “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Help Yourself (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) Download audio file (spark_20090922_20414.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by In Veritas Lux] Bruce Sterling tag:odeo.com,2009-09-18,25146796 Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:25:18 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, jazz, Episodes, chiptune, Rural Broadband, Cathi Bond, kind of bloop, andy baio, luis suarez, email overload, thwomp, broadband canada, radio berkman, marla thirsk, hype cycle, daniel dennis jones, waxy.org http://odeo.com/episodes/25108806-Episode-84-%E2%80%93-September-13-15-2009 On this episode of Spark: Regrettable videos, Open Textbooks, and Twittering Taco Trucks Timothy Tackett (AKA Mr UNSTABL3) takes a bath in a Burger King sink Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki on regrettable online videos, and what to do about them (full interview) Hannah Classen wonders what happened to the promise of a flying car Video: Nora tries out Hannah’s hovercraft Eric Frank from Flat World Knowldge publishes open textbooks (full interview) Kate Arkless Gray and the BBC’s World Service preserve endangered sounds with Save our Sounds Nora mentions Beatles Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the uncanny valley Nora’s interview with Katherine Monk about film, CGI, and the uncanny valley Cyrus Farivar dines at Twittering taco trucks This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Sunset Stroll Into The Wood” by Podington Bear “Morning Dream” by Gurdonark “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Baby” by cdk “Grief&#... On this episode of Spark: Regrettable videos, Open Textbooks, and Twittering Taco Trucks Timothy Tackett (AKA Mr UNSTABL3) takes a bath in a Burger King sink Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki on regrettable online videos, and what to do about them (full interview) Hannah Classen wonders what happened to the promise of a flying car Video: Nora tries out Hannah’s hovercraft Eric Frank from Flat World Knowldge publishes open textbooks (full interview) Kate Arkless Gray and the BBC’s World Service preserve endangered sounds with Save our Sounds Nora mentions Beatles Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the uncanny valley Nora’s interview with Katherine Monk about film, CGI, and the uncanny valley Cyrus Farivar dines at Twittering taco trucks This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Sunset Stroll Into The Wood” by Podington Bear “Morning Dream” by Gurdonark “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Baby” by cdk “Grief” by Podington Bear cs400 amp.wav by THE_bizniss “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 “amellifluousdistortion” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “I Will” by Podington Bear “Tacos, Enchiladas, & Beans” by Sam Donahue And His Orchestra Feat. Shirley Lloyd Download audio file (spark_20090913_20125.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by pheezy] On this episode of Spark: Regrettable videos, Open Textbooks, and Twittering Taco Trucks Timothy Tackett (AKA Mr UNSTABL3) takes a bath in a Burger King sink Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki on regrettable online videos, and what to do about them (full interview) Hannah Classen wonders what happened to the promise of a flying car Video: Nora tries out Hannah’s hovercraft Eric Frank from Flat World Knowldge publishes open textbooks (full interview) Kate Arkless Gray and the BBC’s World Service preserve endangered sounds with Save our Sounds Nora mentions Beatles Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the uncanny valley Nora’s interview with Katherine Monk about film, CGI, and the uncanny valley Cyrus Farivar dines at Twittering taco trucks This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Sunset Stroll Into The Wood” by Podington Bear “Morning Dream” by Gurdonark “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Baby” by cdk “Grief” by Podington Bear cs400 amp.wav by THE_bizniss “awakemyfriendandwelcomespring” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 “amellifluousdistortion” by _i (not CC, used with permission) “I Will” by Podington Bear “Tacos, Enchiladas, & Beans” by Sam Donahue And His Orchestra Feat. Shirley Lloyd Download audio file (spark_20090913_20125.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by pheezy] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-11,25108806 Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:08:26 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes, hannah classen, cyrus farivar, Bill Wasik, hal niedzviecki, eric frank, timothy tackett, kate arkless gray, mr unstabl3, bk bather http://odeo.com/episodes/25108807-Full-interview-Bill-Wasik-and-Hal-Niedzviecki-on-why-we-post-regrettable-videos-online On this week’s show, Nora sits down with Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki to talk about why the heck we post regrettable videos on the internet. It’s one thing to do the embarrassing or foolish or inappropriate thing, but it’s a whole other problem when we record a video and upload it on YouTube for the world to see. In the interview, Nora, Bill and Hal talk about why some of us fail to think twice before posting online, why so many of us are drawn to these videos, and how to handle things if your stupid video has been found by the masses. Bill Wasik is a contributing editor with Harper’s Magazine and he’s the author of And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture . Hal Niedzviecki’s book is called The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors . A shorter version of the interview will air on Episode 84, but you can hear the uncut version below, or downloading the MP3. Download audio... On this week’s show, Nora sits down with Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki to talk about why the heck we post regrettable videos on the internet. It’s one thing to do the embarrassing or foolish or inappropriate thing, but it’s a whole other problem when we record a video and upload it on YouTube for the world to see. In the interview, Nora, Bill and Hal talk about why some of us fail to think twice before posting online, why so many of us are drawn to these videos, and how to handle things if your stupid video has been found by the masses. Bill Wasik is a contributing editor with Harper’s Magazine and he’s the author of And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture . Hal Niedzviecki’s book is called The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors . A shorter version of the interview will air on Episode 84, but you can hear the uncut version below, or downloading the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090911_bill_hal.mp3) And we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to post a regrettable video of our own. Who knew you could make a homemade hovercraft with a leaf blower? Nora test drives one in this video. And don’t try this at home! On this week’s show, Nora sits down with Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki to talk about why the heck we post regrettable videos on the internet. It’s one thing to do the embarrassing or foolish or inappropriate thing, but it’s a whole other problem when we record a video and upload it on YouTube for the world to see. In the interview, Nora, Bill and Hal talk about why some of us fail to think twice before posting online, why so many of us are drawn to these videos, and how to handle things if your stupid video has been found by the masses. Bill Wasik is a contributing editor with Harper’s Magazine and he’s the author of And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture . Hal Niedzviecki’s book is called The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors . A shorter version of the interview will air on Episode 84, but you can hear the uncut version below, or downloading the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090911_bill_hal.mp3) And we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to post a regrettable video of our own. Who knew you could make a homemade hovercraft with a leaf blower? Nora test drives one in this video. And don’t try this at home! tag:odeo.com,2009-09-11,25108807 Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:40:21 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus interviews, video, youtube, regret, Bill Wasik, hal niedzviecki http://odeo.com/episodes/25062774-Full-Interview-Luis-Suarez-explains-how-to-quit-email Earlier this week, I wrote about Luis Suarez and his quest to completely rid his life of corporate email. Today, Nora talked to Luis via Skype, and if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by electronic communication, you’ll want to listen to this interview. In it, Luis explains how he made the leap from email to social software, the challenges he faced, and he offers advice to others who are thinking about cutting email out of their workplace diet. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090902_luis.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by JasonRogersFooDogGiraffeBee] Earlier this week, I wrote about Luis Suarez and his quest to completely rid his life of corporate email. Today, Nora talked to Luis via Skype, and if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by electronic communication, you’ll want to listen to this interview. In it, Luis explains how he made the leap from email to social software, the challenges he faced, and he offers advice to others who are thinking about cutting email out of their workplace diet. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090902_luis.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by JasonRogersFooDogGiraffeBee] Earlier this week, I wrote about Luis Suarez and his quest to completely rid his life of corporate email. Today, Nora talked to Luis via Skype, and if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by electronic communication, you’ll want to listen to this interview. In it, Luis explains how he made the leap from email to social software, the challenges he faced, and he offers advice to others who are thinking about cutting email out of their workplace diet. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090902_luis.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by JasonRogersFooDogGiraffeBee] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-02,25062774 Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, email, luis suarez http://odeo.com/episodes/25057142-Full-interview-BBM-Canada%E2%80%99s-Jim-McLeod-on-Portable-People-Meters Last month, Nora interviewed radio guru Mark Ramsey about Portable People Meters (PPMs), the new pager-like devices that BBM Canada has rolled out to measure radio and television audiences in Canada. The PPMs went live yesterday, and the first reports were published this morning: BBM’s PPM devices are carried daily by approximately 9000 people across Canada.  In addition to national ratings, BBM will report PPM audiences in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, for radio and television, and Edmonton for radio. To talk more about this new measurement system, Nora interviewed Jim McLeod, CEO of BBM Canada. A shorter version of that interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download the mp3. Download audio file (spark_20090901_bbm.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [S... Last month, Nora interviewed radio guru Mark Ramsey about Portable People Meters (PPMs), the new pager-like devices that BBM Canada has rolled out to measure radio and television audiences in Canada. The PPMs went live yesterday, and the first reports were published this morning: BBM’s PPM devices are carried daily by approximately 9000 people across Canada.  In addition to national ratings, BBM will report PPM audiences in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, for radio and television, and Edmonton for radio. To talk more about this new measurement system, Nora interviewed Jim McLeod, CEO of BBM Canada. A shorter version of that interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download the mp3. Download audio file (spark_20090901_bbm.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Last month, Nora interviewed radio guru Mark Ramsey about Portable People Meters (PPMs), the new pager-like devices that BBM Canada has rolled out to measure radio and television audiences in Canada. The PPMs went live yesterday, and the first reports were published this morning: BBM’s PPM devices are carried daily by approximately 9000 people across Canada.  In addition to national ratings, BBM will report PPM audiences in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, for radio and television, and Edmonton for radio. To talk more about this new measurement system, Nora interviewed Jim McLeod, CEO of BBM Canada. A shorter version of that interview will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download the mp3. Download audio file (spark_20090901_bbm.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-09-01,25057142 Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:35:27 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Television, audio, radio, interviews, measurement, PPM, bbm, broadcastingm, jim mcleod http://odeo.com/episodes/25037745-Video-Industry-Minister-at-Toronto-copyright-town-hall After last night’s copyright town hall in Toronto, the press (Search Engine’s Jesse Brown, the Globe and Mail, and I) had a chance to scrum Industry Minister Tony Clement. (My apologies for the quality of the video. It was my first attempt at recording radio and video, while trying to adjust levels, look at my notebook and ask questions at the same time! I had to drop the video a couple of times in order to do it all. Clearly, I need to find a better way to do this.) The government is in the middle of cross country consultations as it prepares a new copyright bill. Most of these are invite-only roundtable discussions, but the event last night was open to the first 300 or so people who registered online. As several people have pointed out, including Jesse Brown, the music industry was quick to get to the registration list. Here’s what the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist says: My own view is that it was so over-the-top that their message was lost in light ... After last night’s copyright town hall in Toronto, the press (Search Engine’s Jesse Brown, the Globe and Mail, and I) had a chance to scrum Industry Minister Tony Clement. (My apologies for the quality of the video. It was my first attempt at recording radio and video, while trying to adjust levels, look at my notebook and ask questions at the same time! I had to drop the video a couple of times in order to do it all. Clearly, I need to find a better way to do this.) The government is in the middle of cross country consultations as it prepares a new copyright bill. Most of these are invite-only roundtable discussions, but the event last night was open to the first 300 or so people who registered online. As several people have pointed out, including Jesse Brown, the music industry was quick to get to the registration list. Here’s what the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist says: My own view is that it was so over-the-top that their message was lost in light of such an obvious orchestrated attempt to stack the deck. This was not a real townhall that brought together differing views, but rather an all-out effort by the industry to scoop up the available seats, guarantee themselves a dominant voice, and exclude many alternative voices in the process. You can watch the town hall for yourself by checking out this wmv file. Were you there at the town hall, or did you watch it online? What do you think of Clement’s comments in the video? Let us know by posting a comment below. After last night’s copyright town hall in Toronto, the press (Search Engine’s Jesse Brown, the Globe and Mail, and I) had a chance to scrum Industry Minister Tony Clement. (My apologies for the quality of the video. It was my first attempt at recording radio and video, while trying to adjust levels, look at my notebook and ask questions at the same time! I had to drop the video a couple of times in order to do it all. Clearly, I need to find a better way to do this.) The government is in the middle of cross country consultations as it prepares a new copyright bill. Most of these are invite-only roundtable discussions, but the event last night was open to the first 300 or so people who registered online. As several people have pointed out, including Jesse Brown, the music industry was quick to get to the registration list. Here’s what the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist says: My own view is that it was so over-the-top that their message was lost in light of such an obvious orchestrated attempt to stack the deck. This was not a real townhall that brought together differing views, but rather an all-out effort by the industry to scoop up the available seats, guarantee themselves a dominant voice, and exclude many alternative voices in the process. You can watch the town hall for yourself by checking out this wmv file. Were you there at the town hall, or did you watch it online? What do you think of Clement’s comments in the video? Let us know by posting a comment below. tag:odeo.com,2009-08-28,25037745 Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:29:59 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus video, copyright, industry, toronto, Consultation, town hall, michael geist, jesse brown, tony clement http://odeo.com/episodes/25020829-Full-Interview-Eric-Frank-on-Open-Textbooks Earlier this month, I wrote about the future of textbooks — if traditional hard-bound books might someday be replaced be electronic editions, or if the industry might go the way of music and movies, with many people downloading pirated versions from peer-to-peer services like Bittorrent. After that blog post, the Spark community weighed in on the future of the textbook. Jack Andrew Chapman wrote: In two of my units we don’t have textbooks. Instead the lecturer uploads PDFs of book chapters and journal articles to the University’s “Learning Management System” Lianne said: I think eTextbooks would be a good idea. For some courses. For example, in literature or history classes, and the like. But for Maths and Sciences? Forget it And Karim Kanji wrote: I know that every year I was at York University I had to purchase NEWER versions of the same textbook. Why? We were told that the older (one year old) texts were outdated and needed updating. The real truth: ... Earlier this month, I wrote about the future of textbooks — if traditional hard-bound books might someday be replaced be electronic editions, or if the industry might go the way of music and movies, with many people downloading pirated versions from peer-to-peer services like Bittorrent. After that blog post, the Spark community weighed in on the future of the textbook. Jack Andrew Chapman wrote: In two of my units we don’t have textbooks. Instead the lecturer uploads PDFs of book chapters and journal articles to the University’s “Learning Management System” Lianne said: I think eTextbooks would be a good idea. For some courses. For example, in literature or history classes, and the like. But for Maths and Sciences? Forget it And Karim Kanji wrote: I know that every year I was at York University I had to purchase NEWER versions of the same textbook. Why? We were told that the older (one year old) texts were outdated and needed updating. The real truth: Professors had written these texts and where supplementing their “teaching” income by also selling “newer” textbooks. Well, recently Nora talked to Eric Frank, the co-founder of one company that’s trying to reinvent the textbook publishing industry. The company is called Flat World Knowledge, and it publishes “open textbooks” which are free works that can be edited, updated, and remixed into custom course materials.” These open textbooks are free to read online, but if you want, say, a printed copy or an audio version, you’ll have to pay. A shorter version of Nora’s interview with Eric will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090825_fwk.mp3) Also, if your textbook needs aren’t covered by Flat World Knowledge, the Gadgetwise blog from the New York Times suggests checking out the free Bigwords iPhone app for textbook price comparison. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by House of Sims] Earlier this month, I wrote about the future of textbooks — if traditional hard-bound books might someday be replaced be electronic editions, or if the industry might go the way of music and movies, with many people downloading pirated versions from peer-to-peer services like Bittorrent. After that blog post, the Spark community weighed in on the future of the textbook. Jack Andrew Chapman wrote: In two of my units we don’t have textbooks. Instead the lecturer uploads PDFs of book chapters and journal articles to the University’s “Learning Management System” Lianne said: I think eTextbooks would be a good idea. For some courses. For example, in literature or history classes, and the like. But for Maths and Sciences? Forget it And Karim Kanji wrote: I know that every year I was at York University I had to purchase NEWER versions of the same textbook. Why? We were told that the older (one year old) texts were outdated and needed updating. The real truth: Professors had written these texts and where supplementing their “teaching” income by also selling “newer” textbooks. Well, recently Nora talked to Eric Frank, the co-founder of one company that’s trying to reinvent the textbook publishing industry. The company is called Flat World Knowledge, and it publishes “open textbooks” which are free works that can be edited, updated, and remixed into custom course materials.” These open textbooks are free to read online, but if you want, say, a printed copy or an audio version, you’ll have to pay. A shorter version of Nora’s interview with Eric will air on an upcoming episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090825_fwk.mp3) Also, if your textbook needs aren’t covered by Flat World Knowledge, the Gadgetwise blog from the New York Times suggests checking out the free Bigwords iPhone app for textbook price comparison. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by House of Sims] tag:odeo.com,2009-08-25,25020829 Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:42:47 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Books, audio, interviews, textbooks, flat world knowledge, open textbooks, eric frank http://odeo.com/episodes/24993922-Full-interview-Andy-Baio-on-remaking-Miles-Davis-and-crowdfunding Fifty years ago this week, Miles Davis released his iconic and influental album, Kind of Blue. To celebrate, Andy Baio released his CD project, Kind of Bloop. Kind of Bloop is what happens when you ask chiptune musicians to cover Davis’ famous tracks and they come out sounding like Nintendo classics. Nora spoke to Andy about the cover songs, and how he crowdfunded the money for the project through Kickstarter, where he also happens to be the CTO. Andy also runs the blog Waxy.org. Later this week, I’ll edit this interview and mix it with music into a short montage, but you can listen to the whole interview now by clicking below, or downloading it. Download audio file (spark_20090819_andybaio.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Fifty years ago this week, Miles Davis released his iconic and influental album, Kind of Blue. To celebrate, Andy Baio released his CD project, Kind of Bloop. Kind of Bloop is what happens when you ask chiptune musicians to cover Davis’ famous tracks and they come out sounding like Nintendo classics. Nora spoke to Andy about the cover songs, and how he crowdfunded the money for the project through Kickstarter, where he also happens to be the CTO. Andy also runs the blog Waxy.org. Later this week, I’ll edit this interview and mix it with music into a short montage, but you can listen to the whole interview now by clicking below, or downloading it. Download audio file (spark_20090819_andybaio.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Fifty years ago this week, Miles Davis released his iconic and influental album, Kind of Blue. To celebrate, Andy Baio released his CD project, Kind of Bloop. Kind of Bloop is what happens when you ask chiptune musicians to cover Davis’ famous tracks and they come out sounding like Nintendo classics. Nora spoke to Andy about the cover songs, and how he crowdfunded the money for the project through Kickstarter, where he also happens to be the CTO. Andy also runs the blog Waxy.org. Later this week, I’ll edit this interview and mix it with music into a short montage, but you can listen to the whole interview now by clicking below, or downloading it. Download audio file (spark_20090819_andybaio.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-08-20,24993922 Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:53:04 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, Miles Davis, chiptune, 8-bit, Kind of Blue, kind of bloop, andy baio http://odeo.com/episodes/24982199-Full-interview-Mark-Ramsey-on-Portable-People-Meters-and-measuring-what-matters For decades, the radio industry in Canada has measured listeners using diaries. Here’s how it would work: the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (the industry-owned organization that measures TV and radio ratings in Canada) would mail out paper diaries to randomly selected Canadians and ask them to record their radio tuning for a full week. Listeners would keep track of their listening habits and mail the diary back to the BBM. Then the data would be assembled into a report, which would be used as a reference when setting radio advertising rates. But at the end of this month, the paper diary system will be replaced in four major Canadian cities: Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver (the system was replaced in Montreal last year). On August 31, 2009, the BBM will start measuring radio and television audiences using something called a Portable People Meter, or PPM. It’s a  small device about the size of a pager that tracks radio and television habits by listening for hid... For decades, the radio industry in Canada has measured listeners using diaries. Here’s how it would work: the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (the industry-owned organization that measures TV and radio ratings in Canada) would mail out paper diaries to randomly selected Canadians and ask them to record their radio tuning for a full week. Listeners would keep track of their listening habits and mail the diary back to the BBM. Then the data would be assembled into a report, which would be used as a reference when setting radio advertising rates. But at the end of this month, the paper diary system will be replaced in four major Canadian cities: Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver (the system was replaced in Montreal last year). On August 31, 2009, the BBM will start measuring radio and television audiences using something called a Portable People Meter, or PPM. It’s a  small device about the size of a pager that tracks radio and television habits by listening for hidden audio codes in broadcasts. According to the BBM’s Tom Jenks, the PPMs will be rolled out to 4300 homes across Canada at the end of August, measuring both television and radio. To talk more about this technological way of measuring a very old medium, Nora talked to Mark Ramsey. He’s a media consultant who works in audience research and brand development for companies like Clear Channel, CBS Radio, and Sirius/XM. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upisode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090818_ramsey.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by Eric Rhoads] For decades, the radio industry in Canada has measured listeners using diaries. Here’s how it would work: the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (the industry-owned organization that measures TV and radio ratings in Canada) would mail out paper diaries to randomly selected Canadians and ask them to record their radio tuning for a full week. Listeners would keep track of their listening habits and mail the diary back to the BBM. Then the data would be assembled into a report, which would be used as a reference when setting radio advertising rates. But at the end of this month, the paper diary system will be replaced in four major Canadian cities: Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver (the system was replaced in Montreal last year). On August 31, 2009, the BBM will start measuring radio and television audiences using something called a Portable People Meter, or PPM. It’s a  small device about the size of a pager that tracks radio and television habits by listening for hidden audio codes in broadcasts. According to the BBM’s Tom Jenks, the PPMs will be rolled out to 4300 homes across Canada at the end of August, measuring both television and radio. To talk more about this technological way of measuring a very old medium, Nora talked to Mark Ramsey. He’s a media consultant who works in audience research and brand development for companies like Clear Channel, CBS Radio, and Sirius/XM. A shorter version of this interview will air on an upisode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090818_ramsey.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [original image by Eric Rhoads] tag:odeo.com,2009-08-18,24982199 Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:15:12 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, radio, interviews, advertising, cbc, ratings, bbm http://odeo.com/episodes/24745193-Episode-83-%E2%80%93-June-24-27-2009 On this episode of Spark: Corrupted files, what I wore, and email sabbaticals Lauren explains why “I lost my USB key” is the new “my dog ate my homework” Nora explains Corrupted-Files.com Scott Jaschik on trust and digital cheating in the classroom (full interview coming soon) Dan Misener looks at “What I Wore”-style blogs like: Jessica Schroeder’s What I Wore my edit What I Wore Today Flick’s wardrobe_remix group weardrobe Dan Misener’s What Dan Wore What do your text messages say about you? Jenny Carpenter investigates forensic linguistics and sentiment analysis danah boyd takes an email sabbatical (full interview coming soon) Nora explains Spark’s summer plans and announces Spark’s new length and timeslot This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “baby steps” by General Fuzz “You Look Good to Me&#8221... On this episode of Spark: Corrupted files, what I wore, and email sabbaticals Lauren explains why “I lost my USB key” is the new “my dog ate my homework” Nora explains Corrupted-Files.com Scott Jaschik on trust and digital cheating in the classroom (full interview coming soon) Dan Misener looks at “What I Wore”-style blogs like: Jessica Schroeder’s What I Wore my edit What I Wore Today Flick’s wardrobe_remix group weardrobe Dan Misener’s What Dan Wore What do your text messages say about you? Jenny Carpenter investigates forensic linguistics and sentiment analysis danah boyd takes an email sabbatical (full interview coming soon) Nora explains Spark’s summer plans and announces Spark’s new length and timeslot This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “baby steps” by General Fuzz “You Look Good to Me” by Fats Waller “Curious Process” and “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch “DC 3000″ by Thievery Corporation from The WIRED CD Download audio file (spark_20090624_17338.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by loyaldefender2004] On this episode of Spark: Corrupted files, what I wore, and email sabbaticals Lauren explains why “I lost my USB key” is the new “my dog ate my homework” Nora explains Corrupted-Files.com Scott Jaschik on trust and digital cheating in the classroom (full interview coming soon) Dan Misener looks at “What I Wore”-style blogs like: Jessica Schroeder’s What I Wore my edit What I Wore Today Flick’s wardrobe_remix group weardrobe Dan Misener’s What Dan Wore What do your text messages say about you? Jenny Carpenter investigates forensic linguistics and sentiment analysis danah boyd takes an email sabbatical (full interview coming soon) Nora explains Spark’s summer plans and announces Spark’s new length and timeslot This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Computer” by State Shirt “baby steps” by General Fuzz “You Look Good to Me” by Fats Waller “Curious Process” and “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch “DC 3000″ by Thievery Corporation from The WIRED CD Download audio file (spark_20090624_17338.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by loyaldefender2004] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-23,24745193 Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:00:21 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus fashion, Episodes, Danah Boyd, scott jaschik, sentiment analysis, dan misener, corrupted-files.com, jessica schroeder, jenny carpenter, forensic linguistics, what i wore, email sabbatical http://odeo.com/episodes/24745194-Full-Interview-danah-boyd-on-email-sabbaticals Here is danah boyd’s idea of a vacation: She hits the road, and while she’s away, she programs her email to refuse any new messages. Any emails sent to her address during her holidays go straight to the trash folder. She never sees them, and it’s like they never happened. When she comes back to work, she sits down to an empty inbox, and doesn’t have to play catch-up to a pile of old messages. She calls this an email sabbatical. danah chatted with Nora about why she does it, why she loves it, and how you can do it too. danah is a social media researcher with Microsoft. The edited version of this interview will air on the June 23 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_danahboyd.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subs... Here is danah boyd’s idea of a vacation: She hits the road, and while she’s away, she programs her email to refuse any new messages. Any emails sent to her address during her holidays go straight to the trash folder. She never sees them, and it’s like they never happened. When she comes back to work, she sits down to an empty inbox, and doesn’t have to play catch-up to a pile of old messages. She calls this an email sabbatical. danah chatted with Nora about why she does it, why she loves it, and how you can do it too. danah is a social media researcher with Microsoft. The edited version of this interview will air on the June 23 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_danahboyd.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Image from Joi Here is danah boyd’s idea of a vacation: She hits the road, and while she’s away, she programs her email to refuse any new messages. Any emails sent to her address during her holidays go straight to the trash folder. She never sees them, and it’s like they never happened. When she comes back to work, she sits down to an empty inbox, and doesn’t have to play catch-up to a pile of old messages. She calls this an email sabbatical. danah chatted with Nora about why she does it, why she loves it, and how you can do it too. danah is a social media researcher with Microsoft. The edited version of this interview will air on the June 23 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_danahboyd.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Image from Joi tag:odeo.com,2009-06-23,24745194 Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:54:48 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews http://odeo.com/episodes/24745195-Full-Interview-Scott-Jaschik-on-cheating-in-the-digital-age On this week’s episode of Spark, Nora talks with Scott Jaschik, the editor of Inside Higher Ed , an education news website. Recently, Scott came across a website that sells students corrupted files. The idea is, if you’re running out of time to finished your homework assignment, instead of handing in a half-finished paper, you send the prof  the corrupted file.   According to the site, “It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is “unfortunately” corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!” Is this cheating? Scott joined Nora for a discussion about the site and from there they had a great yap about academic integrity in the digital age. An edited version of this interview will air on the June 24 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full version below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_scottjaschik.mp3) Corrupted-files.com did not respond to our em... On this week’s episode of Spark, Nora talks with Scott Jaschik, the editor of Inside Higher Ed , an education news website. Recently, Scott came across a website that sells students corrupted files. The idea is, if you’re running out of time to finished your homework assignment, instead of handing in a half-finished paper, you send the prof  the corrupted file.   According to the site, “It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is “unfortunately” corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!” Is this cheating? Scott joined Nora for a discussion about the site and from there they had a great yap about academic integrity in the digital age. An edited version of this interview will air on the June 24 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full version below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_scottjaschik.mp3) Corrupted-files.com did not respond to our emails, but Scott did receive a reply, which he writes about in his story. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] On this week’s episode of Spark, Nora talks with Scott Jaschik, the editor of Inside Higher Ed , an education news website. Recently, Scott came across a website that sells students corrupted files. The idea is, if you’re running out of time to finished your homework assignment, instead of handing in a half-finished paper, you send the prof  the corrupted file.   According to the site, “It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is “unfortunately” corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!” Is this cheating? Scott joined Nora for a discussion about the site and from there they had a great yap about academic integrity in the digital age. An edited version of this interview will air on the June 24 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full version below, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090623_scottjaschik.mp3) Corrupted-files.com did not respond to our emails, but Scott did receive a reply, which he writes about in his story. If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-23,24745195 Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:16:25 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, school, plagiarism, University, cheating, scott jaschik, corrupted-files.com, academic integrity. http://odeo.com/episodes/24715312-Episode-82-%E2%80%93-June-17-20-2009 On this episode of Spark: Teen texting tales, accessible technology, and viral culture Terrifying teen texting tales Spark listeners call in with their terrifying teen texting tales Nora mentions a Nielsen survey that says US teens send and receive 2,272 text messages per month (NYT article) Al Rae tries to send and receive 80 texts in one day Nora mentions Ira Basen’s documentary radio series News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media, which will air on The Sunday Edition on June 21 and 28, 2009 Nora visits the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto Video from the ATRC Bill Wasik on how the internet is changing culture This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Irie Dub” by Neurowaxx Clips from Age of Turmoil (1953) “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “Just A Message” by Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys (1940) “Birthday Party” by Kim &... On this episode of Spark: Teen texting tales, accessible technology, and viral culture Terrifying teen texting tales Spark listeners call in with their terrifying teen texting tales Nora mentions a Nielsen survey that says US teens send and receive 2,272 text messages per month (NYT article) Al Rae tries to send and receive 80 texts in one day Nora mentions Ira Basen’s documentary radio series News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media, which will air on The Sunday Edition on June 21 and 28, 2009 Nora visits the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto Video from the ATRC Bill Wasik on how the internet is changing culture This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Irie Dub” by Neurowaxx Clips from Age of Turmoil (1953) “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “Just A Message” by Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys (1940) “Birthday Party” by Kim & Buran from Swingin’ Singles “Get a Groove” by General Fuzz Download audio file (spark_20090617_17076.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting On this episode of Spark: Teen texting tales, accessible technology, and viral culture Terrifying teen texting tales Spark listeners call in with their terrifying teen texting tales Nora mentions a Nielsen survey that says US teens send and receive 2,272 text messages per month (NYT article) Al Rae tries to send and receive 80 texts in one day Nora mentions Ira Basen’s documentary radio series News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media, which will air on The Sunday Edition on June 21 and 28, 2009 Nora visits the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto Video from the ATRC Bill Wasik on how the internet is changing culture This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Irie Dub” by Neurowaxx Clips from Age of Turmoil (1953) “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “Just A Message” by Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys (1940) “Birthday Party” by Kim & Buran from Swingin’ Singles “Get a Groove” by General Fuzz Download audio file (spark_20090617_17076.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting tag:odeo.com,2009-06-16,24715312 Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:27:55 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes http://odeo.com/episodes/24693093-Full-Interview-Bill-Wasik-on-Viral-Culture Today, I interviewed Bill Wasik. He’s a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, and the author of the new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories live and Die in Viral Culture. Bill knows a thing or two about viral culture. He is the originator of the “flash mob” phenomenon. And Then There’s Thisis a funny, insightful look at the effects of our current speedy media culture. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 17th and 20th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090611_billwasik.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Original image by Daquella manera Today, I interviewed Bill Wasik. He’s a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, and the author of the new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories live and Die in Viral Culture. Bill knows a thing or two about viral culture. He is the originator of the “flash mob” phenomenon. And Then There’s Thisis a funny, insightful look at the effects of our current speedy media culture. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 17th and 20th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090611_billwasik.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Original image by Daquella manera Today, I interviewed Bill Wasik. He’s a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, and the author of the new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories live and Die in Viral Culture. Bill knows a thing or two about viral culture. He is the originator of the “flash mob” phenomenon. And Then There’s Thisis a funny, insightful look at the effects of our current speedy media culture. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 17th and 20th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090611_billwasik.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] Original image by Daquella manera tag:odeo.com,2009-06-11,24693093 Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:41:27 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, viral culture, Bill Wasik http://odeo.com/episodes/24685268-You-send-HOW-many-text-messages A couple of weeks ago, the Nielsen Company released some research that made our jaws drop. It reports that in the fourth quarter of 2008, U.S. teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 texts per month! That’s almost 80 texts per day. We sat down to talk about how we should cover this story, and came up with the idea to challenge a parent to text like a teenager. We called funny man Al Rae in Winnipeg and asked him to send and receive 80 texts a day, just like your average teen. Al is the artistic director of the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, writes for CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and Monsoon House, but best of all, he’s a dad. We’ll feature Al’s story on the June 17 & 20 episode of Spark, but here’s a sneak peek of some of the tape he recorded with his daughter. Click below to play the clip, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090610_alrae_clip.mp3) Do you have a teen who texts like crazy? Leave us a comment below with yo... A couple of weeks ago, the Nielsen Company released some research that made our jaws drop. It reports that in the fourth quarter of 2008, U.S. teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 texts per month! That’s almost 80 texts per day. We sat down to talk about how we should cover this story, and came up with the idea to challenge a parent to text like a teenager. We called funny man Al Rae in Winnipeg and asked him to send and receive 80 texts a day, just like your average teen. Al is the artistic director of the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, writes for CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and Monsoon House, but best of all, he’s a dad. We’ll feature Al’s story on the June 17 & 20 episode of Spark, but here’s a sneak peek of some of the tape he recorded with his daughter. Click below to play the clip, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090610_alrae_clip.mp3) Do you have a teen who texts like crazy? Leave us a comment below with your story and we’ll try to work it into the next show. [photo by FaceMePLS] A couple of weeks ago, the Nielsen Company released some research that made our jaws drop. It reports that in the fourth quarter of 2008, U.S. teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 texts per month! That’s almost 80 texts per day. We sat down to talk about how we should cover this story, and came up with the idea to challenge a parent to text like a teenager. We called funny man Al Rae in Winnipeg and asked him to send and receive 80 texts a day, just like your average teen. Al is the artistic director of the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, writes for CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and Monsoon House, but best of all, he’s a dad. We’ll feature Al’s story on the June 17 & 20 episode of Spark, but here’s a sneak peek of some of the tape he recorded with his daughter. Click below to play the clip, or download it. Download audio file (spark_20090610_alrae_clip.mp3) Do you have a teen who texts like crazy? Leave us a comment below with your story and we’ll try to work it into the next show. [photo by FaceMePLS] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-10,24685268 Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:50:26 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, texting, teens, teenager, behind the scenes, Help Us Out!, al rae http://odeo.com/episodes/24693094-Episode-81-%E2%80%93-June-10-13-2009 On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Nora mentions Spark’s Twitter haiku contest Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto (full interview) Nora asks for help with next week’s episode. We’re looking for stories about teens who text like crazy. This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way... On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Nora mentions Spark’s Twitter haiku contest Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto (full interview) Nora asks for help with next week’s episode. We’re looking for stories about teens who text like crazy. This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way Clip from Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “We’re Not Getting Any Younger” by Color Theory “I Bought Myself A Book” by Una Mae Carlisle  (1950) Download audio file (spark_20090610_16799.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Justin Marty] On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Nora mentions Spark’s Twitter haiku contest Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto (full interview) Nora asks for help with next week’s episode. We’re looking for stories about teens who text like crazy. This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way Clip from Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “We’re Not Getting Any Younger” by Color Theory “I Bought Myself A Book” by Una Mae Carlisle  (1950) Download audio file (spark_20090610_16799.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Justin Marty] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-09,24693094 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:28:02 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Books, twitter, Amazon, Broadband, japan, Episodes, Publishing, rfid, cigarettes, oECD, CANARIE, bill st. arnaud, michael keferl, Rayay Deonandan, bookcamp, twaiku, csout, hugh mcguire http://odeo.com/episodes/24677541-Episode-81-June-10-13-2009 On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way Clip from Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “We’re Not Getting Any Younger” by Color Theory “I Bought Mysel... On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way Clip from Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “We’re Not Getting Any Younger” by Color Theory “I Bought Myself A Book” by Una Mae Carlisle  (1950) Download audio file (spark_20090610_16799.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Justin Marty] On this episode of Spark: Canadian broadband, Twaiku poetry, Cigarette vending machines, and Bookcamp Nora mentions Amazon’s AWS Import/Export service CANARIE’s Bill St. Arnaud explains the current state of Canadian broadband, and comments on the OECD’s recent broadband report (full interview) Raywat Deonandan writes Twitter haiku poems, or “twaiku” Michael Keferl of CScout Japan explains Taspo, the Japanese RFID-enabled “tabacco passport” Hugh McGuire explores the future of books and publishing in the digital age at BookCamp Toronto This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “Sleep” by The Autumn Film “Gruyere” by Podington Bear “Morningwalk” by Tilopa from By The Way Clip from Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco “Klezmer Nova” by The Alexandria Kleztet “We’re Not Getting Any Younger” by Color Theory “I Bought Myself A Book” by Una Mae Carlisle  (1950) Download audio file (spark_20090610_16799.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by Justin Marty] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-09,24677541 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:28:02 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Books, twitter, Amazon, Broadband, japan, Episodes, Publishing, rfid, cigarettes, oECD, CANARIE, bill st. arnaud, michael keferl, Rayay Deonandan, bookcamp, twaiku, csout, hugh mcguire http://odeo.com/episodes/24667658-Full-Interview-Hugh-McGuire-on-the-Future-of-Books This morning, I interviewed Hugh McGuire. Hugh has a long history at the crossroads of book culture and technology. He founded Librivox, a volunteer-based service, which takes public domain books and turns them into audiobooks. He’s also co-founder of Book Oven, a new start-up that aims to be a collaborative space for making books. He’s also one of the people behind BookCamp, an unconference held in Toronto on June 6th. Hugh came into CBC’s Montreal studios to talk about the future of publishing, and the buzz at BookCamp. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10th and 13th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090609_hughmcguire.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] This morning, I interviewed Hugh McGuire. Hugh has a long history at the crossroads of book culture and technology. He founded Librivox, a volunteer-based service, which takes public domain books and turns them into audiobooks. He’s also co-founder of Book Oven, a new start-up that aims to be a collaborative space for making books. He’s also one of the people behind BookCamp, an unconference held in Toronto on June 6th. Hugh came into CBC’s Montreal studios to talk about the future of publishing, and the buzz at BookCamp. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10th and 13th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090609_hughmcguire.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] This morning, I interviewed Hugh McGuire. Hugh has a long history at the crossroads of book culture and technology. He founded Librivox, a volunteer-based service, which takes public domain books and turns them into audiobooks. He’s also co-founder of Book Oven, a new start-up that aims to be a collaborative space for making books. He’s also one of the people behind BookCamp, an unconference held in Toronto on June 6th. Hugh came into CBC’s Montreal studios to talk about the future of publishing, and the buzz at BookCamp. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10th and 13th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Download audio file (spark_20090609_hughmcguire.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-08,24667658 Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:59:03 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, interviews, Publishing, copyright, Digital Books http://odeo.com/episodes/24645647-Full-Interview-Bill-St-Arnaud-on-the-state-of-Canadian-broadband About a year ago, we talked to Bill St. Arnaud. Bill is the Chief Research Officer for CANARIE, and last April, he had this to say about Canadian broadband: We were number two in broadband rankings around the world about 10 years ago. But that gave us a false sense of security. Then we didn’t continue to invest in that infrastructure and upgrading it, and now we’ve fallen down. We’re now eighth or tenth ranking in the world, and dropping fast. According to a recent OECD report on broadband internet access, Canada is at number nine. As Michael Geist wrote in his most recent Toronto Star column At first glance, the numbers do not seem that bad [...] Yet the situation becomes far more troubling once the OECD delves deeper into Canadian broadband pricing and speed. Indeed, Canada’s broadband access is expensive (”ranking 14th for monthly subscription costs at US$45.65 per month”) and slow (”24th out of the 30 OECD countries”). With this in mind, Nora talked... About a year ago, we talked to Bill St. Arnaud. Bill is the Chief Research Officer for CANARIE, and last April, he had this to say about Canadian broadband: We were number two in broadband rankings around the world about 10 years ago. But that gave us a false sense of security. Then we didn’t continue to invest in that infrastructure and upgrading it, and now we’ve fallen down. We’re now eighth or tenth ranking in the world, and dropping fast. According to a recent OECD report on broadband internet access, Canada is at number nine. As Michael Geist wrote in his most recent Toronto Star column At first glance, the numbers do not seem that bad [...] Yet the situation becomes far more troubling once the OECD delves deeper into Canadian broadband pricing and speed. Indeed, Canada’s broadband access is expensive (”ranking 14th for monthly subscription costs at US$45.65 per month”) and slow (”24th out of the 30 OECD countries”). With this in mind, Nora talked to Bill St. Arnaud yesterday to get the lay of the Canadian broadband land. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Special thanks to Mark and Mark whose Twitter-sourced questions Nora used in the interview. Download audio file (spark_20080602_billstarnaud.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by g_aquarian] About a year ago, we talked to Bill St. Arnaud. Bill is the Chief Research Officer for CANARIE, and last April, he had this to say about Canadian broadband: We were number two in broadband rankings around the world about 10 years ago. But that gave us a false sense of security. Then we didn’t continue to invest in that infrastructure and upgrading it, and now we’ve fallen down. We’re now eighth or tenth ranking in the world, and dropping fast. According to a recent OECD report on broadband internet access, Canada is at number nine. As Michael Geist wrote in his most recent Toronto Star column At first glance, the numbers do not seem that bad [...] Yet the situation becomes far more troubling once the OECD delves deeper into Canadian broadband pricing and speed. Indeed, Canada’s broadband access is expensive (”ranking 14th for monthly subscription costs at US$45.65 per month”) and slow (”24th out of the 30 OECD countries”). With this in mind, Nora talked to Bill St. Arnaud yesterday to get the lay of the Canadian broadband land. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. Special thanks to Mark and Mark whose Twitter-sourced questions Nora used in the interview. Download audio file (spark_20080602_billstarnaud.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by g_aquarian] tag:odeo.com,2009-06-03,24645647 Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:00:45 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Broadband, michael geist, CANARIE, bill st. arnaud http://odeo.com/episodes/24693095-Episode-80-%E2%80%93-June-3-6-2009 On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Global Voices TED Talks and The TED Open Translation Project Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by s... On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Global Voices TED Talks and The TED Open Translation Project Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Global Voices TED Talks and The TED Open Translation Project Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting tag:odeo.com,2009-06-02,24693095 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:09:24 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Episodes, where 2.0, Ethan Zuckerman, mail goggles, cyrus farivar, andrea reimer, bad decision blocker, openstreetmap, social translation, machine translation http://odeo.com/episodes/24640373-Episode-80-June-3-6-2009 On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference Nora mentions OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast f... On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference Nora mentions OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting On this episode of Spark: Social Translation, Mapmaking 2.0, Drunk Dialing, and Open Cities Ethan Zuckerman explains social translation and the multilingual web (full interview) Cyrus Farivar reports back from the Where 2.0 conference Nora mentions OpenStreetMap Nora mentions Bad Decision Blocker iPhone app, and Gmail’s Mail Goggles feature Andrea Reimer explains Vancouver’s plan to open up municipal data (full interview) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Power Version” by HiFi Hustlers “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama Public domain audiobooks from Librivox “Electron Map” and “Filament” by Chad Crouch Clip from “Caught Mapping” (1940) “Atari Teenage Quiet” by Windom Earle “Computer” by State Shirt Download audio file (spark_20090603_16475.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting tag:odeo.com,2009-06-02,24640373 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:09:24 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Episodes, where 2.0, Ethan Zuckerman, mail goggles, cyrus farivar, andrea reimer, bad decision blocker, openstreetmap, social translation, machine translation http://odeo.com/episodes/24637351-Full-Interview-Andrea-Reimer-on-open-cities Last week, Vancouver City Council passed a motion (PDF) to endorse the principles of “making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications.” This afternoon, Nora interviewed Andrea Reimer, the Vancouver city councillor behind the open city motion. They talked about the costs and benefits of open data, how it can affect civic engagement, and the privacy and security concerns Vancouver will have to consider as it opens up its municipal data. Nora also asked crowdsourced questions from the Spark community, including Michael, Randall Ross, and Gizmo. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 3 and 6 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. UPDATE: You can also download the interview in OGG Vorbis format. Download audio file (spark_20090527_reimer.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why no... Last week, Vancouver City Council passed a motion (PDF) to endorse the principles of “making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications.” This afternoon, Nora interviewed Andrea Reimer, the Vancouver city councillor behind the open city motion. They talked about the costs and benefits of open data, how it can affect civic engagement, and the privacy and security concerns Vancouver will have to consider as it opens up its municipal data. Nora also asked crowdsourced questions from the Spark community, including Michael, Randall Ross, and Gizmo. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 3 and 6 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. UPDATE: You can also download the interview in OGG Vorbis format. Download audio file (spark_20090527_reimer.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by jmv] Last week, Vancouver City Council passed a motion (PDF) to endorse the principles of “making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications.” This afternoon, Nora interviewed Andrea Reimer, the Vancouver city councillor behind the open city motion. They talked about the costs and benefits of open data, how it can affect civic engagement, and the privacy and security concerns Vancouver will have to consider as it opens up its municipal data. Nora also asked crowdsourced questions from the Spark community, including Michael, Randall Ross, and Gizmo. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 3 and 6 episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. UPDATE: You can also download the interview in OGG Vorbis format. Download audio file (spark_20090527_reimer.mp3) If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark’s enhanced podcast? You’ll get regular weekly episodes, plus additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes] [Original image by jmv] tag:odeo.com,2009-05-27,24637351 Wed, 27 May 2009 12:54:21 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Open Source, Vancouver, open data, andrea reimer http://odeo.com/episodes/24610827-Episode-79-May-27-30-2009 On this episode of Spark: Digital preservation, Exclamation Marks (!!!) and SPIN Farming Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, explains digital preservation Watch Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation Nora mentions her trip to the CBC Radio archives Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about exclamation marks and interrobangs (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s punctuation contest Wally Satzewich starts a web-powered, veggie growing revolution called SPIN Farming (more info) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “It’s Up To You (instrumental mix),” “Help Yourself (instrumental mix),” and “20 Natural Disaster (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) 2 08 Br Lib amb footsteps.wav by ERH “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch “Love Letters” by Dick Haymes (1945) Download audio file ... On this episode of Spark: Digital preservation, Exclamation Marks (!!!) and SPIN Farming Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, explains digital preservation Watch Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation Nora mentions her trip to the CBC Radio archives Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about exclamation marks and interrobangs (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s punctuation contest Wally Satzewich starts a web-powered, veggie growing revolution called SPIN Farming (more info) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “It’s Up To You (instrumental mix),” “Help Yourself (instrumental mix),” and “20 Natural Disaster (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) 2 08 Br Lib amb footsteps.wav by ERH “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch “Love Letters” by Dick Haymes (1945) Download audio file (spark_20090527_16154.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by the Frankfurt School] On this episode of Spark: Digital preservation, Exclamation Marks (!!!) and SPIN Farming Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, explains digital preservation Watch Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation Nora mentions her trip to the CBC Radio archives Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) talks about exclamation marks and interrobangs (full interview) Nora mentions Spark’s punctuation contest Wally Satzewich starts a web-powered, veggie growing revolution called SPIN Farming (more info) This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “It’s Up To You (instrumental mix),” “Help Yourself (instrumental mix),” and “20 Natural Disaster (instrumental mix)” by Danny Echo (not CC, used with permission) 2 08 Br Lib amb footsteps.wav by ERH “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch “Love Letters” by Dick Haymes (1945) Download audio file (spark_20090527_16154.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by the Frankfurt School] tag:odeo.com,2009-05-26,24610827 Tue, 26 May 2009 12:14:32 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus audio, Episodes, University of Toronto, Grammar Girl, Punctuation, Digital Preservation, wally satzewich, mignon fogarty, exclamation marks, digiman, keith hart, faculty of information, sean prpcik, seamus ross, cbc radio archives, spin farming http://odeo.com/episodes/24592033-Contest-and-Full-Interview-Grammar-Girl-aka-Mignon-Fogarty We are so excited to have Grammar Girl on Spark! Nora interviewed Mignon Fogarty about the overuse (!!!) of exclamation marks in online writing, including emails! Mignon is a big star in the podcasting world, and she and Nora had a great yap about how to convey friendliness in an email without using exclamation marks. I’m glad to hear that the ! isn’t the worst sin you can commit in a professional email. That honour goes to the emoticon You can listen to the extended interview below, or download the MP3. An edited version of this chat will appear on the May 27 & 30 episode of Spark. Download audio file (spark_20090521_mignonfogarty.mp3) In the interview, Nora asks Mignon if we need a new punctuation to denote sarcasm in emails, since it’s sometimes hard to figure out what someone might really be trying to say. That got us thinking about a contest for this week. What new punctuation do you think we need? A sarcasm mark? An I’m-distracted-by-social-media m... We are so excited to have Grammar Girl on Spark! Nora interviewed Mignon Fogarty about the overuse (!!!) of exclamation marks in online writing, including emails! Mignon is a big star in the podcasting world, and she and Nora had a great yap about how to convey friendliness in an email without using exclamation marks. I’m glad to hear that the ! isn’t the worst sin you can commit in a professional email. That honour goes to the emoticon You can listen to the extended interview below, or download the MP3. An edited version of this chat will appear on the May 27 & 30 episode of Spark. Download audio file (spark_20090521_mignonfogarty.mp3) In the interview, Nora asks Mignon if we need a new punctuation to denote sarcasm in emails, since it’s sometimes hard to figure out what someone might really be trying to say. That got us thinking about a contest for this week. What new punctuation do you think we need? A sarcasm mark? An I’m-distracted-by-social-media mark? Add your idea in the comments below and we’ll enter your name into a draw for a Spark bag. We are so excited to have Grammar Girl on Spark! Nora interviewed Mignon Fogarty about the overuse (!!!) of exclamation marks in online writing, including emails! Mignon is a big star in the podcasting world, and she and Nora had a great yap about how to convey friendliness in an email without using exclamation marks. I’m glad to hear that the ! isn’t the worst sin you can commit in a professional email. That honour goes to the emoticon You can listen to the extended interview below, or download the MP3. An edited version of this chat will appear on the May 27 & 30 episode of Spark. Download audio file (spark_20090521_mignonfogarty.mp3) In the interview, Nora asks Mignon if we need a new punctuation to denote sarcasm in emails, since it’s sometimes hard to figure out what someone might really be trying to say. That got us thinking about a contest for this week. What new punctuation do you think we need? A sarcasm mark? An I’m-distracted-by-social-media mark? Add your idea in the comments below and we’ll enter your name into a draw for a Spark bag. tag:odeo.com,2009-05-21,24592033 Thu, 21 May 2009 15:02:49 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus interviews, contests, email, grammar, Punctuation, sarcasm point, grammmar girl, sarcasm mark, interrobang, exclamation mark, mignon fogarty http://odeo.com/episodes/24582117-Episode-78-May-20-23-2009 On this episode of Spark: Soaking dishes, driving tech innovation with porn, and cultural laziness Stef and Luigi disagree about soaking dishes online with Sidetaker.com Peter Nowak explains how the business of pornography fuels the business of technology Kate Rich runs Feral Trade, a “freight network outside of commercial systems” Cyrus Farivar admits his cultural laziness This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “ditto, ditto!” by DoKashiteru “Leafeaters,” “Re: Joyce,”  “Kitty in the Window,” and “New Skin” by Podington Bear “The Love God” by Martinibomb from Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka “Catscratch” by Windom Earle Luzern 09 080629.wav by LG senegal_music_montpellier-011.wav by mharo “Ambient-M (2003)” by Antony Raijekov Download audio file (spark_20090520_15846.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing... On this episode of Spark: Soaking dishes, driving tech innovation with porn, and cultural laziness Stef and Luigi disagree about soaking dishes online with Sidetaker.com Peter Nowak explains how the business of pornography fuels the business of technology Kate Rich runs Feral Trade, a “freight network outside of commercial systems” Cyrus Farivar admits his cultural laziness This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “ditto, ditto!” by DoKashiteru “Leafeaters,” “Re: Joyce,”  “Kitty in the Window,” and “New Skin” by Podington Bear “The Love God” by Martinibomb from Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka “Catscratch” by Windom Earle Luzern 09 080629.wav by LG senegal_music_montpellier-011.wav by mharo “Ambient-M (2003)” by Antony Raijekov Download audio file (spark_20090520_15846.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by independentman] On this episode of Spark: Soaking dishes, driving tech innovation with porn, and cultural laziness Stef and Luigi disagree about soaking dishes online with Sidetaker.com Peter Nowak explains how the business of pornography fuels the business of technology Kate Rich runs Feral Trade, a “freight network outside of commercial systems” Cyrus Farivar admits his cultural laziness This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects: “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama “ditto, ditto!” by DoKashiteru “Leafeaters,” “Re: Joyce,”  “Kitty in the Window,” and “New Skin” by Podington Bear “The Love God” by Martinibomb from Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka “Catscratch” by Windom Earle Luzern 09 080629.wav by LG senegal_music_montpellier-011.wav by mharo “Ambient-M (2003)” by Antony Raijekov Download audio file (spark_20090520_15846.mp3) You can download this episode as an MP3, or receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcast feeds: Free weekly podcast (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast + additional blog-only content (Subscribe in iTunes) Free weekly podcast (low bandwidth version) For more information (and instructions) visit cbc.ca/podcasting [Original image by independentman] tag:odeo.com,2009-05-19,24582117 Tue, 19 May 2009 13:56:49 -0700 no CBC: Spark Plus Episodes, peter nowak, cyrus farivar, sidetaker.com, kate rich, feral trade