Category Archives: podcast

Transcript of 9 minutes ‘Rebooting the News’, episode 82

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I have listened to all 82 episodes of ‘Rebooting the News‘, the podcast series by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer. (This probably means that I’m their biggest fan and/or that I should get a life)

I felt an urge to transcribe the following 9-minute passage from episode 82, recorded on February 14, 2011. (More about that later)

Forgive the occasional typos and other glitches.

How is that for a gesture? :-)

http://soundcloud.com/josschuurmans/rbtn82-9mins

[STARTING AT 04:43]

Jay Rosen: ‘Find me stuff that I’m interested in‘.

Dave Winer: Yeah, oh, that’s not a question for me, is it?

J: That’s an opening for our next theme here. This is something that’s interested you for a while; it’s interested me for a while.

D: I don’t know. No, actually this is a recent thing. This is recent. This is like the mantra, you know, when you are a product developer camped out in a category, you know – if you’re listening -, you know what people want. I mean, you get that short list of features that everybody wants and on that list are some thiings that you have no clue how to do. But you’re listening and trying to understand it. And *this* is at the top of the list.

Absolutely the one that you hear the most often is: ‘Just find me what I want.’ Now, my brain kinda turns off when I hear that, ’cause what I think is going to happen if you ever trust somebody to do that for you, they are not going to give you what *you* want; they are gonna give you what *they* want you to have.

That’s what I worry about, that you’re not gonna get… So, any diet of news that I’m interested in has to also include subscriptions to places that are going to give me news that I don’t know that I’m interested in.

J: That’s one of the problems.

D: Well, that’s easily solved, actually. Just take… but you know, here is the model. You might say that I’m addicted to Amazon. I just, like, in an idle moment, if there’s nothing happening in the world, I’ll go to Amazon, I’ll go through their recommendations, right?

J: Recommendations for what?

D: For products that they want me to buy. Things they want me to buy. So I can influence that, I can definitely influence it. Like, I was looking for a lamp a couple of weeks ago. And now they show me lamps. Or, I buy a lot of shirts through Amazon and… I always get shirts. I buy a lot of books, I get a lot of books. I’ve bought stereo equipment, computer nerd stuff, vitamins… This is an interesting mix…

J: It’s just reacting to what you bought before.

D: And I can manipulate it by just looking at things. I can inform them that this is an interest of mine. And they will start recommending things for me. I think, well, the epiphany was, why don’t we do this for news?

What we need is a way of expressing an interest in a news area, right?

J: Right.

D: In other words, the equivalent of looking at lamps. Or the equivalent of looking at cameras. Well, I look at a story about prince Charles, right? So, the system infers… Maybe I don’t look at a story, but I tweet a link to it.

J: Well that would be a stronger signal.

D: And maybe that’s the only signal I want it to use, is the fact that – and this is a way that I have become… I think of this as becoming my own editor-in-chief.

J: Yeah, I would love that. If it took everything that I tweeted…

D: Actually, you know, the technology…

J: That’s not a bad idea.

D: The technology here is…

J: It can’t be that far away.

D: It’s not far away. I was about to say, we know how to do this. This is like a well-worn path. It’s not something, not a whole lot of innovation, *no* innovation needed here.

The bad new is that, as far as I could tell, only one or two people reading that blog post understood what I was talking about. ‘Cause the responses that I got were like, oh that’s already been done.

J: People always say that.

D: They do. And they’re always wrong. Because usually they are the people who made the product and they are pitching it. They are trying to sneak in all their spam there.

So, I don’t know, if anybody listening to this wants to do this, just let me know. I want to do it. I’d like to get into a position to do this.

J: Every time I look at a product that [claims] to be able to do this, to send me a quote-unquote ‘personalized news stream’, the problem I find is that they have these pre-fab categories that represent what *they* think of as the significant divisions of news, right? Like: ‘business’. Well, I’m not interested in ‘business’.

D: That’s bogus. This is why I get bored, my eyes glaze over…

J: It’s a category of production, it’s not a category of use.

D: Correct.

J: And that’s the problem…

D: Do you know why it’s a problem for them, is that they’re not… First of all, this wouldn’t work for everybody. Okay? Let’s be clear about this.

J: Right. What I want is something that works for me.

D: Exactly. And you would be easy, because we already have a very good handle on your stuff.

J: [Well, I would be...]

D: We have it in a database. I have your links in a database, right?

J: Right.

D: So, building it for you would be easy. And you know, once you get a little critical mass thing going there, it is just self-maintaining. Because the things I link to, you know, if I have a hundred people in this mix, I can now do collaborative filtering. That’s the name for the technology you use here.

J: Right, so give me a quick sketch: what is collaborative filtering? I think I know, but…

D: ‘People who like this, also like this’. That’s the idea.

J: Right right right.

D: It’s like Facebook recommending friends to you. It has noticed that you and this person are friends with five other people. Therefore we might guess that you might like anybody that this person is a friend with. So we’ll start suggesting this to you.

[Technician:] …products…

J: Product, yes, Amazon does that.

D: News is a product just like that. There is no reason news can’t submit to this. Also there is another source of valuable information here that could be used is your blog. You know, I’ve been blogging for god know how long. That is an incredible base of information about my interests.

J: Right.

D: So, I’ve always said Google ought to take that into account. I ought to be able to tell Google, ‘Hey Google, this is my blog and I can prove it to you.’ Okay? Now I want… or, why should I have to prove it? All I’m saying is I want my search results to be customized for the author of this blog.

J: Right.

D: Period. You know, that’s how Google… Everybody says, oh, we need a new generation of search. Why hasn’t anybody tried this yet?

J: Right. So, instead of using consumption behavior as the signal, you use authoring behavior as the signal.

D: That’s correct. Yeah.

J: Now we’re cooking.

D: I think we’re definitely cooking. I think, this is a business model by the way that would work for editorial organizations because the way we evolve something like this requires an understanding of news. Which the tech industry typically, as you have noted, doesn’t really have.

J: And also, the more of your user base you have authoring, the better the recommendation engine gets.

D: Always. That’s exactly how this stuff works.

J: And that’s the incentive – right? – to get more people blogging at your site an recommending things and sending links and comments and… yeah.

D: Well I don’t want people blogging on anybody else’s site. ’cause I want them to operate their own infrastructure.

J: Right.

D: But we’ll get to that later.

J: But you could affiliate your blog with the news system you’re using and it could therefore learn from what you blog about [...]

D: Oh, absolutely. Just give me the pointer to the feed. Or give me the pointer to the blog, from there you can get to everything. There is no… absolutely. But I think… just because you use Tumblr and I use Tumblr doesn’t mean we have anything in common as far as our interests are. [...] the list of feeds that I subscribe to might give you another good idea.

J: Here’s what I like to do. I don’t read most 99% of the news or commentary written about the NBA. I’m not a big fan of the NBA. However, if anybody writes and article about race and the NBA, I want it. Because it’s like this hidden subject that almost never gets talked about. Like, black players, white players, white coaches, black players, the compositions, the racial mix, different ways that these things play out in the politics of the sport. Like, I’m totally fascinated by that. But, the system as it stands says, ‘Do you want NBA news?’ No, I only want ‘race and the NBA’-news.

D: You can’t… I think that the point here is that you could never ever customize… you can never be the editor-in-chief of your own news channel by setting up queries like that. It has to be done with gestures. It has to be inferred from…

J: ‘With gestures’. What do you mean by that?

D: Gestures would mean pointing to… pointing to an article is a gesture. Reading an article is also a gesture.

J: Right.

D: As you pointed out, pointing to intuitively feels as a stronger endorsement, a stronger gesture if you will.

J: Well, let’s move on. That’s definitely need.

[ENDING AT 13:53]

Transcript: IT Conversations | Tech Nation | ‘John Hagel: Small Moves Equal Big Changes’

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Transcript: IT Conversations | Tech Nation | 'John Hagel: Small Moves Equal Big Changes'

I was intrigued by this interview with John Hagel about his co-authored book, 'The Power of Pull'. A lot of the things he talks about link in with Cluetail's value proposition, including some of his observations about the importance of serendipity, the notion that we don't know what to search for anymore, and some of his ideas about the use of social media.

The other day I was looking for a transcript or a way to generate a transcript. Didn't buy any speech-to-text software, nor used any "Mechanical Turk"-like services. Decided instead to transcribe the podcast show myself.

Should I have posted this on a wiki instead? That way, others could edit and enhance, e.g. adding time codes…

So here comes:

G = Dr. Moira Gunn
H = John Hagel III

[STARTS]

G: Today on Tech Nation, I speak with Deloitte's John Hagel, about 'The Power of Pull – How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things In Motion'.

The global economy is in disarray. And it's not just because the banks and financial institutions have made a mess of it. We keep hearing that we all have to go back to how we used to do business. I asked John Hagel, who heads Deloitte's Center for the Edge, how wrong is that?

H: It's very wrong. In fact, that was one of the key motivators for writing this book. The Power of Pull was the notion that so many of these executives we deal with are clearly under great stress right now but they have this still a sense of complacency that somehow, sometime, we're gonna come out of this downturn and things will go back to normal. And we hope this book is a bit of a clarion call to say: Not so fast. There are some longer term trends that have been playing out and we don't see them abading at all, so.

Continue reading →

How the Finnish law on public tenders discourages agile projects – A podcast conversation with Antti Tarvainen

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Download 090814_Agile.mp4 (UPLOADED: August 16, 2009)

Download 090814_Agile.mp3 (UPLOADED: August 18)

I just had an interesting telephone conversation with Antti Tarvainen (blog), a board member at Agile Finland, who is hoping to influence law makers as the Finnish parliament will be reviewing the law on public tenders this autumn.

Antti is collecting data from businesses that are conducting agile software development projects through public tenders. My company, Cluetail Ltd., is currently running such an agile project to build a proof of concept of a Web-based content life-cycle management, analysis and recommendation tool as an ASP service.

His day job is at Leonidas Oy, a software house from Tampere who incidentally were one of ten companies that responded to our public tender invitation back in May.

Antti and I decided beforehand to record our conversation and make it available online as an audio file or podcast show. I haven't done this before (except with technical help, internally, in Nokia), so… fingers crossed.

Our conversation stretches 48:42 minutes.

We talked about Cluetail's experience in inviting software companies
through a public tender, and also about why the public tender
procedure, in Antti's view, may not be working quite as well as it
could.

His impression is that, due to the bureaucracy associated with the
law on public tenders – in particular the legal requirement to
implement objective selection criteria -, project owners are
unnecessarily discouraged to apply agile methods and often prefer a
traditional waterfall approach to software development.

The assumption being that there is less legal risk in volved, i.e.
it is easier to meet the legal requirement of objective selection since
all requirements for the software project can be fixed at the outset.
Agile development methods, on the other hand, are designed for
flexibility and changes in the scope and objectives during the project.


Technicalities

I recorded the call on my Nokia N97. That's the easiest way I figured out to do this – the only downside being that there's a beep on the line every so many seconds [LATER: actually, that beep is not heard in the resulting audio file]. I believe the sound quality is quite acceptable.

I emailed the .mp4 file from the phone to myself in order to listen back, edit if necessary, and convert it to .mp3 using Audacity on a PC.

[HELP: The .mp4 file really doesn't sound right in Audacity. I need to find a different way to convert it to .mp3. Or do I need to?]

[LATER: Okay, I don't have time to fix this right now. Note-to-self, action points:

  • Download/upgrade Audacity. (Done, August 14, 2009)
  • Re-listen to the .mp4 file. (Done, August 14)
  • Put the .mp4 file online. (Done, August 16)
  • Download and install SUPER © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer. (Done, August 17)
  • Convert it to .mp3, using SUPER. (Done, August 17 - first at a bit rate of 128 k, but that file became to big for TypePad to accept. Then at bit rate of 64 k, it was okay.)
  • Put the .mp3 file online. (Done, August 18)
  • Embed Flash player in this blog post.
  • Figure out a better way.

CONCLUSIONS:

  • .mp4 works.
  • I don't know if it is advisable to offer .mp3 as well, but I did just in case.
  • SUPER works for .mp4 to .mp3 conversion, at a bit rate of 64 k.
  • File upload to TypePad is slow; I'm testing to use Posterous instead.]

Capturables from Rebooting the News #10

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Just arrived to the office. Lots of stuff I feel like unloading.

On my way here I listened to episode 10 of Rebooting the News. I think it was one of the best shows in the series so far (among the first 10, that is – I have some catching up to do).

Jay Rosen makes two very pertinent connections between the tech world and journalism. The first connection is about bug catching, a very common and appreciated practice in software development, but very under-utilized and unappreciated in journalism.

In software development, everyone acknowledges that you cannot ship a perfect product. There will always be bugs and users are actually thanked for pointing them out. In journalism however, the expectation is that journalist check and double-check before they publish, and then ship a "perfect" product. If a reader points out a mistake or contradiction, typically the journalist either doesn't respond at all, or responds in a defensive fashion. Jay explains it as tribalism.

Blogging seems to allow for a less defensive attitude. Blog posts are perceived as less finished or less perfect, and bloggers seem more willing to correct and update their copy, while acknowledging readers' feedback.

It's an interesting phenomenon to point out and certainly something that needs to be addressed in the "new news system".

The second connection Jay makes is about usability. Why are geeks not better at making things easy to use? Dave Winer says it's because it's so damn hard to do. And it requires a great sense of empathy – the ability to put oneself in the users' shoes. He mentions Martin Scorsese and Marlon Brando.

Jay sees a nice parallel in that journalism is about making it easy for users to user their own democracy, lowering barriers to participate without much prior knowledge. (This is so true and elegant!)

What else? The Church of the Savvy. That's Jay's description of the undeclared religion of the press. Above anything else, journalists will value, remain loyal to and defend their savvy-ness.

Jay's inspiration of the week is Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic, 'What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding'.

Note-to-self: action points:

  1. Check out Jay's tumblr blog – I didn't know he had one, and I was wondering why Google Reader hasn't served me any blog content from Jay lately (I've subscribed to PressThink);
  2. Check out blogtalkradio, which is what Dave is using for these podcasts. I need to figure out a way to produce podcasts easily and economically.

[REPEAT from June 1: Dave built a dedicated site for 'Rebooting the News', at http://rebootnews.com/. He also created an RSS feed of this podcast series, at http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml. And a package of the first ten episodes which he uploaded as a torrent to Mininova at http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891. He announced all of this here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/30/rebootingTheNews110.html]

And don't miss the FriendFeed room either!

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #7

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http://badhair.us/2009/08/07/00025.html

Just finished listening to Bad Hair 7. Five minutes before the end of the show, Dave asks for feedback from listeners as to whether Marshall and Dave should run the show just the two of them, or if they should invite guests to the show.

Well, as it happens, I referred to this point in my post 'Capturables from Bad Hair Day #3', where I wrote:

"(…) there has been more "positive tension" between Dave and Marshall [in the first two shows], and a
more dynamic "debate", than there was in this 3rd episode. Having two
people sparring perhaps just works better, is more interesting, than
having three people. It felt as if not everyone was sufficiently
engaged all the time, and sometimes the whole trio fell silent. (…)"

And in my post 'Capturables from Bad Hair Day #4', I remarked:

"(…) something in the dynamic of the conversation changed when the show's
format changed from having just Dave and Marshall (as in the first two
episodes) to having guests as well. But never mind; perhaps the
positive tension between the two wouldn't have lasted over a longer
series of shows anyway. (…)"

I think the two of them are just "awesome", to borrow one of Marshall's expressions. Yet I also agree with them that once in while, it's nice to have a guest or two. Plus I'm a bit concerned that if they never had any guests, the format might wear out a bit faster.

So what else is worth capturing from this show? Quite a bit of what Marshall and Dave talked about I had already read on their blogs or elswhere (podcast patent case; study on "too large social networks" hurting innovation; Breaking News Online, etc.).

Perhaps the "deeper" issue – and it has been mentioned in previous shows as well – is the fact that with rssCloud, Dave is taking the opportunity to improve RSS 2.0. For more on the topic, their discussion with Anil Dash about the Pushbutton Web in Bad Hair Day #6 fits right in.

Marshall talked about an interesting hyper-local news site, he called outside.in. Dave is involved in a local multi-blog, InBerkely.com. Both could serve as inspiration for hyperlocal (or should we say "hyperspecific"?) initiatives here in Finland. I'd love to get involved in something like that.

I had a quick look at InBerkely and created a Yahoo! Pipe, i.e. and RSS feed, to filter in only Dave's posts.

My previous posts on Bad Hair:

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

P.S.: I'm looking at recording a podcast over Skype this week. How do I do that on a PC running Vista, or a PC running Ubuntu, or an ASUS EeePC running Xandros, or a Nokia N97? (Sorry, that's all I have – no Mac).

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #6

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http://badhair.us/2009/07/31/00025.html

Every once in a while I review my blog hosting options. The first time I did this was in this post: 'Is it worth switching from TypePad to WordPress?' I was impressed with Anil Dash's swift comment. What prevented me from moving to another platform back then was Anil's point that I would loose "the ability to get professional support right within the application".

In 'If you were to start blogging today…', I tried to compare different platforms as systematically as I could.

The last time I compared blog platforms, in my post 'Hopes and fears of switching to WordPress', I again came to the conclusion to stick with TypePad. The main reason this time was that I haven't figured out how to export my blog's content from TypePad and import it into, say, WordPress, in such a way that the URLs of all my entries would remain the same after domain-mapping WordPress. I still don't know how to do this; if you do, please let me know.

Anyway, Anil was a guest at Marshall Kirkpatrick's and Dave Winer's Bad Hair Day podcast this week. He is SixApart's chief evangelist (the makers of TypePad) and has a keen eye for the latest social Internet technology.

The threesome talked about Anil's vision of the pushbutton web, on which he wrote an insightful post recently, how this relates to Dave's recent work on rssCloud, and to Google's PubSubHubBub.

From Anil's post, 'The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real':

"(…) Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or
Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to
repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can
optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to
come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and
resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a
lot of people. (…)

Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of
affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that
there's a new message, but the content of the message itself.
And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to
read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the
message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it. (…)

  1. You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
  2. Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
  3. The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you (…)"

The result is that updates happen within a second or two. The live streams can have powerful applications. One application Anil dreams about in the show is of a spreadsheet which' cells are populated with formulas and live RSS feeds, so that streaming data can be analyzed in realtime.

Interesting stuff!

My previous posts on Bad Hair:

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #2

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http://badhair.us/2009/07/02/00017.html In the second podcast episode of Bad Hair Day, Dave Winer and Marshall Kirkpatrick talk about many interesting things.

For me, the main take-aways include Marshall talking about his editorial research workflow and mentioning that he runs a greasemonkey script which shows Twitter search results at the top of his google search results page. Need to try!

Also, they're talking about OPML as if it was the best thing since sliced bread. I've so many references to OPML lately, I've got find out more.

Granted, these are very practical picks from the show. The whole show is very much worth listening to, as was the previous one. Do subscribe.

And see also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #1

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http://badhair.us/2009/06/18/00015.html Google Wave and a Twitter data analysis tool which lets you map Twitterers' "inner circle of public conversation".

Those are the two "most interesting" apps Marshall mentions when asked by Dave.

I'll have to re-listen to get the name of the second app when back at my desk. I'm catching up with podcast listening, on the Nokia N97.

Quick notes like this one, when I have my hands free for a moment, work quite nicely.

Firing up Flock

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The first time I heard about Flock was through a talk by Bart Decrem, from the Participation Revolution session at Pop!Tech 2005, as podcast on IT Conversations. The other day I downloaded and installed Flock version 1.2.3, and now I’m actually firing it up.

We read:

“(…) Flock hopes to evolve the tools of the browser to match the excitement of creating and sharing content and social connections on the network. (…)”

What I like so far is that the interface is familiar from Firefox. I could import Firefox bookmarks, history and stuff in a snap, and the menu structure seems very similar; that’s nice. I want to get deeper into the more “social” or participatory features.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I want to immediately archive, bookmark, digg and blog about what I browse.

I hope that Flock will do at least as good a job as Firefox, and will serve as inspiration for how it might or should work on connected mobile devices as well…

Dugg: Geek Army Knife #4 – chatting to Charlie about livestreams

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My friendly and knowledgeable colleague Charlie Schick in a podcast interview by Geek Army Knife.

Charlie "(…) spoke about lifestreaming and how it led [him] to thinking about semantics. [He] mentioned a bunch of folks along the way, including Friendfeed, Socialthing, Socialbrain [or Second|Brain?], Lovely Systems, and TagCrowd. (…)"

(Via Charlie Schick)

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