Thursday, April 5, 2007

Podcast Pick of the Day - Cranky Geeks

Cranky Geeks
Episode 58
Run Time: 30:38

Hosted by Marketwatch and PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak, Cranky Geeks is a weekly podcast discussing the latest tech news. In addition to the head crank, editorial director of PCMagCast.com Sebastian Rupley, the rectangular table includes Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Mark Ranalli, CEO of Helium.com. The discussion touches on SONY BMG making it a employee requirement to blog, death threats against a female U.K. blogger, models of user generated content and what can and cannot be trusted, the demise of print media, and different competing versions of Wikipedia.

In addition, Mark describes how Helium offers the chance of an author’s work being read based on the quality of the work. Authors compete by writing essays on the same topic, and the best essays share a portion of the revenue. The three factors going into the revenue stream are: the quality of the article, the sum of interest of the subject and the value to the sponsor.

Wales provides excellent insight into Wikipedia, which now boasts 1.75 million articles in English, and has articles in 125 languages. He admits one of the biggest problems facing Wikipedia is the live editing of articles.

The podcast can be found on iTunes and here.

Additonal Links.
Wikipedia.com

Helium.com

2 comments:

scott said...

exceptional post!

John said...

Live editing of Wikipedia is its greatest strength...