You know how sometimes an institution comes so close to getting it, but then stops short? If it’s the US government, you kinda wanna scream a little, don’t you?
Case in point: the Securities and Exchange Commission. There’s a credit meltdown going on these days, and I was using EDGAR to check up on my broker’s claims of safety in certain bonds. Somehow — I don’t quite remember how — I stumbled across the SEC’s podcast.
Guess what? sec.gov has been at it for a while (the feed has episodes from May, 2005), the content is great and the production vales ain’t bad. You might be thinking, “Hey, they get it.” (Actually, I was thinking, “The SEC gets it better than some of my clients, for whom podcasting is still like motorized vehicles are to Amish folks.)
They got so tantalizingly close: they make a podcast, they put up an RSS feed (I have clients today for whom podcasting means, “Record something and post it on the website”) and they’ve stuck with it. I can even forgive Uncle Sam for burying it somewhere obscure on their website.
But, at the end of the day, they ran outta steam: they failed to list the podcast in iTunes. They’ve guaranteed themselves obscurity.
I’ll bet the iTunes selection staff would’ve been happy to feature it. (I dream of having a podcast featured in the iTunes store!) Putting the sec.gov podcast into every (free!) podcasting directory was a no-brainer.., an easy, logical end-step they clearly could’ve done. After all, they clearly understand most of the rest of what makes a podcast a podcast.
So, no cigar for Uncle SEC. Too bad, I would’ve digged a geek government.
I’ve written here before about the almost religious feelings I have about WordPress (here and here)…and about the amazing community it has spawned. It was a big disappointment for me that I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp last month. As a consolation, PodCamp Boston 2 is coming up and I can’t wait.
One of the most famous voices in the WordPress world is Lorelle VanFossen. Ms. VanFossen is gaining the kind of well-deserved fame that an original in a new medium deserves. Lately, she’s been getting attention from the mainstream press for her stand on content theft (and more recently on nytimes.com, registration required).
Lorelle, I couldn’t agree more. It pisses me off, too. Especially since you are a working author, I completely agree that it’s like stealing food from your mouth.
But, I have to say one thing about Lorelle on WordPress: sometimes I find it incomprehensible. There’s so much content, I am overwhelmed. And for some reason, I can’t grok the organization of this blog. It all seems like one long stream of text. I have trouble telling one post from another. Sometimes, it’s such a sea of links (all admittedly useful) that I lose all context about the actual post. And it may be picky, but since we read English left to right, I think it adds cognitive dissonance to have a left-hand column in the way of the post content.
However, I sure do appreciate the presbyoia-friendly font on Lorelle’s blog.
I expect to be told I’m an idiot and worse. But, at least my idiot mind will make it impossible for me to steal content from Lorelle.
Though I am not a native Bostonian, I have some experience with authentic Boston accents.
My lovely wife can occasionally be unintelligible (“Alex, have you seen the sizzzahs?”). To wile away traffic-jam time, I sit in the car and mimic Tom Finneran. Finneran, a WRKO talk-show radio host, former Massachusetts legislative big-wig and (unsurprisingly) a plea-bargained felon, has an amazingly real Boston accent, one you can hear in every word.
You know that you can hear the real thing, even if you can’t imitate it, when your ears bleed listening to Matt Damon in The Departed. This actor’s attempt is among the worst fake Boston accents I’ve ever heard, and a complete embarrassment to everyone in Chelsea, Malden and Lynn, not to mention Southie itself.
Anyway, when I first heard about CAPTCHAs, I thought it was a killer pun: someone from CMU must have had a Boston background. Maybe so, but really it means something else entirely, and only sounds like it was invented in a drunken episode at the Black Rose.
I manage a bunch of blogs that have been increasingly become the victim of comment spam, usually from China and always complimentary. I now realize that dude in Guangdong who reads my posts mutliple times and always says, “Good post” isn’t really into my content. Naivety mixed with ego had me manually marking these as spam just in case there was a real gem from somewhere in the Middle Kingdom.
The volume has gotten so large that it’s been driving me crazier than Matt Damon’s inability to banish the letter “R” from his spoken English.
Enter reCAPTCHA. An easy way (there’s a simple WordPress plug-in) to stop the comment spam and build a digital library. Can’t beat it. Took five minutes to implement on all the blogs I manage.
Now, it’s off to the Cape and them lobstah rolls.
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