Carrying the Lantern

Here's Ben Hammersley's entertaining slides from his hilarious presentation at Reboot, "Etiquette, and the singularity," about the eerie similarities between micropublishing and coffeehouse culture in Enlightenment England and the current state of blogging.

1.2 MB PDF Link

[Boing Boing]

- Posted by William A. Riski - 1:05:18 PM - comment []

Bill R.: Dave Winer can be hard to get along with, but in this case he is absolutely right! Someone has rewritten podcasting history to erase his very important role and contributions. This is a shame and a travesty.

I frequently use the wikipedia; very timely and usually informative. But in this case it's page on podcasting - which used to be very informative - has been simplified to the ridiculous. It no longer reflects the history of podcasting in an accurate manner.

I mean come on; the history of podcasting without Winer is like the history of Apple without Wozniak - incomplete and uninformative.

I don't know who or why this editing hack is being done to Dave, but I can tell you this. The last wikipedia page with Dave's name associated with podcasting is this one time stamped 05:56, 23 May 2005. The very next version of the page is this one time stamped 06:04, 23 May 2005 and edited by 68.174.103.8. A 'Who Is?' search on that IP address leads to this ISP: Road Runner. And the fact that the editor chose not to register with the wikipedia so as not to be identified reveals lots about his/her character. I have to leave it to others to try and carry this bit of sleuthing any further.

Anyhow, it's a shame Dave is being treated this way. Sad example of normal person + anonymity + audience = fw!

People with erasers.

The Wikipedia history of podcasting has been carefully rewritten to eliminate any mention of my work. The open approach has the same problem that the proprietary one has, it can easily be manipulated by people with an axe to grind. It's nice that they give such prominent credit to Chris Lydon and Adam Curry, but the technical innovation in both cases was my work. And my podcasts were the inspiration for Curry's. How is WIkipedia going to prevent from this from happening again? That's a serious issue. It's not the first time it's happened. This is why I've never been a strong advocate of Wikipedia.

And the WIkipedia entry for RSS has been rewritten to be an ad for a competitive format. I don't dare even open my biographical page.

This is what makes innovating so damned unsatisfying. It's a total burnout to create new stuff and have other people take credit for it, over and over. Makes me want to put on the brakes and start taking out patents. This is the point I've been trying to make with the people who encourage programmers to give away all their IP. There are good reasons not to do it, there are no accolades, no incentive to be generous.

Barry Bowen sent a pointer to an Internet Archive page of an older version of the article on podcasting.

- Posted by William A. Riski - 11:46:38 AM - comment []