Tag: docsearls

Nobody owns podcasting like nobody owns the net

RSS + MP3 V.2

Ok before people come down hard on my title, its not an absloute statement rather a general idea. Something which came across loud and clear in Doc Searls blog

Nobody is going to own podcasting.

By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)

Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.

Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.

He’s right, when Apple weighted in with iTunes I did think here we go, but even after a long time hearing those words…

Subscribe to us on iTunes, give us a rating on iTunes, etc. I’m glad the ecosystem of podcasting stayed diverse and theres some innovation and creativity in the field even after 15+ years. Of course I can easily imagine much more creativity as described before.

Of course its a great thing no one owns Podcasting as some question if podcasting can save the world. Ok super cheesy but Doc Searls did say this which I thought was quite inspiring and fascinating too..

Maybe podcasting is the best way we have to start working out our problems with race, gender, politics and bad habits of culture that make us unhappy and thwart progress of all kinds. I say that because 1) the best podcasting I know deals with these things directly and far more constructively than anything I have witnessed in other media, and 2) no bigfoot controls it.

There is something (in)credible about the human voice. Maybe in the world where we strive for more human connection; real podcasting’s open discussions are a welcomed relief from all the other crap we get fed?

Customer commons and VRM day

There’s been quite a bit of action around data ethics and its well worth highlighting something I saw recently.

Its VRM day next Monday 26th April. VRM is vender relationship management day. Doc Searls is heading it all up and it takes place around the Internet Identity Workshop at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calfornia. As with the best workshops, its a unconference style allowing for emergent topics to be raised.

We have no speakers, no keynotes, no panels. All sessions are breakouts, and the topics are chosen and led by participants… identity is just a starting point. Many other topics come up and move forward as well. In the last few IIWs, hot topics have included personal clouds, privacy, data liberation, transparency, VRM, the Indie Web, the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, trust frameworks, free and open devices and much more

Wish I could be there, who knows maybe one day?

It was Doc Seals post A Way off the Ranch, which connected me with many things including Customer Commons, which I couldn’t believe I’ve never actually come across before.

The internet is the singularity?

It was something David and Doc said on Twit’s Trianglation #186.

David compared the internet to the transformation of language. Doc added the internet renders distance to zero, which is pretty amazing to think about when looking at the cluetrain rules especially my favourite one – Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. This is only possible because of the internet era.

This got me thinking, if the internet is as transformational as language, and there’s thought that language could be one of the first singularities. Then that would make the internet the singularity?

This raises a ton of observations I and others have wondered about.

  • What technologies are likely to cause the next singularity?
  • When will the next singularity happen?

and my own…

  • Will we know, we are experiencing a singularity as we are in one? (getting meta about the singularity). Maybe the internet is the singularity and things like the cluetrain is actually carving out the new rules?

Luckily, Doc and David will be talking to us via the singularity in Manchester for the Commonground launch event. You can still get tickets. How’s that for a launch event? We are forever thankful they agreed to take part.

'The Singularity is Near'...very

Talking of singularities…

Ray Kurzweil and others have been talking about how they would like to see stricter controls on artificial intelligence, assuming the singularity is closer than we think.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, has estimated that robots will reach human levels of intelligence by 2029, purportedly leaving us about 14 years to reign supreme.

Of course theres always the other view, from the rich and educated.

Now I wonder what happened to the energy singularity?

Burning the midnight hour

Doc Searls writes about intelligence on his blog. But he talks about sleep too…

Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins,

Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQs usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.

After that Doc Searls launches into a discussion about what is IQ and how silly the whole notion of a IQ really is… But what got me was the idea of sleeping late and waking up late.

Since #mybrushwithdeath, back in May/June I’ve been changing my lifestyle around. One of those changes is to do with my time I go to bed. Before I would generally go to bed about 2-3am and wake up about 10am on a week day and on a weekend sometimes go to bed about 9am and wake up about 2pm. Yeah quite shocking… But now I’m going to bed about 12am and getting up about 9am everyday (even weekends).

However things are starting slip, not purposely. Although I’m sticking to the new routine, I’m finding once again that I’m much more productive late evening and at night. I don’t know why, I just am.

I got a feeling I’m fighting nature/biology on this one.