Charles on… anything that comes along

I’ve been busy again in the Technology supplement. (And this is a day late because I’ve been writing a script to automate doing this process, which works!)

First up: Listen here: Technology Guardian launches podcast
The word first appeared in these pages - and now Guardian Technology has its own podcast too: Tech Weekly.

What I find interesting is to listen to our work (iTunes feed!) and then compare it to what’s coming out of other places - such as the New York Times. Listen to ours (mp3 link) and then to theirs (link - you can play it inline there) and come on, you have to agree that Aleks Krotoski is a much better presenter, and that we sound like we’re having more fun, and hope you are too.

Opinions welcome, of course.

I also wrote the Quiz for 2007 - first question:

1) How much did Steve Jobs’s wrongly dated stock options cost?
(a) $137.25m (b) $84m (c) $0

.. and 26 more (though it’s better in print - the answers are upside-down and in smaller type, which makes cheating harder..).

I reviewed 2007 as though it were a gadget in Technophile: Version, 2.007, is about to expire: it wasn’t a bad stab, offering some neat new gadgets and graphics…

and then looked at the arising question, of Why does Google want to compete with Wikipedia?
Google intends to let people write a ‘knol’ (newly defined as ‘a unit of knowledge’), even on the same subject as others, and in effect take part in a Darwinian struggle to see theirs made most popular.

I think that the Googlepedia will just let Wikipedia write even better articles, with attribution; if you have an open source system (in Google) it can’t be better than another one, and Wikipedia has the advantage of being written by anyone.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Quiz: know your online security? (23 August 2004; score: 68.49%)
• The answer to one is "pants".. (17 June 2005; score: 54.01%)
• Dowling on Adam Curry: nailed in a second; and looking back at predictions for 2005 (23 January 2006; score: 49.08%)