Rant: Why Podcasts Go Bad...

I started listening to podcasts in 2006, during my Ph.D., or right around the time that they started becoming really popular. There have always been radio shows, of course, but the convenience of being able to listen to shows about topics of interest on my own schedule was hard to beat. I kept trying out new shows regularly, and eventually found a good mix of goofy and serious to listen to while commuting, doing lab work, or exercising.

Unfortunately, I've found that I have to keep changing up my 'mix', sometimes because shows eventually stop (bye, bye, 1Up Network), or more frustrating, because most podcasts eventually 'go bad'. I've discussed this at some length with a buddy, and I have an opinion as to why.

I think that all good podcasts begin with a clear plan: topic(s), segment layout, approximate length in minutes, etc. After some growing pains as the participants to get used to the flow of speaking on the mic, the show gains popularity in the form of a healthy number of subscribers. Simple enough, except that it inevitably appears to go to the host's heads.

In the world of radio, people love personalities - some folks make for particularly entertaining shows and segments. However, I feel like a lot of podcasters, once they've established a fan base, seem to think that people are tuning in to listen to them and not what they're actually saying.

An example, the Tested.com podcast (This is Only a Test) is ostensibly about technology news and reviews (though they've started throwing in some very light 'science'). Their shows used to be ~1 hr and followed the format of discussing tech-related news, talking about the pros and cons of new products, then answering listener questions. As of late though, their podcasts have become more and more bloated with irrelevant junk, like lengthy discussions about the best way to cook hamburgers, boring 'inside baseball' personal anecdotes (you've moved into a new office? Good for you), and long drawn out segments about things that aren't really related to technology except in the most tortuously roundabout ways (I don't care about how nice the hotel was at Comic Con). Oh, and the shows are now > 2 hrs. I've found myself only listening to a few minutes before deleting them and it's likely that I'll unsubscribe soon.

I've singled out Tested as an example, but this phenomenon seems rather common. I'm sure that there are a decent number of people who just want to hear their favorite radio personalities talk and, to be fair, some of the best moments in podcasts come from funny non-sequiturs and tangents. Nevertheless, my criticism here is editorial rather than proscriptive: Just like word counts force you to write clearly and concisely, sticking to a podcasting plan and time-frame keeps said tangents to only the most interesting and at least somewhat relevant.

New podcasts compete for the ears of subscribers and tend to go to much greater pains to stay on track, keep quality high, and edit out uninteresting, extraneous material. Once they hit the 'big-time', at least as far as subscriber counts go, a lot of this tends to go by the wayside in what I assume is the failure to appreciate the qualities of the show that made in popular in the first place. In podcasting, like so many things, I'm beginning to think that it may be better to burn out rather than fade away.

In my experience, the most consistently high-quality podcasts are those that stick to a plan/format and edit judiciously in order to maintain high-quality. I may have a lot of opportunity to listen to shows, but there are always new podcasts competing for my time.

P.S. Another couple of podcast gripes: 1) Audio quality. The best podcasts are generally recorded in studios, though I've heard some excellent Skype-based ones as well. Regardless, even the best 'cast can be ruined by a single participant with awful call quality. If someone keeps dropping from the call, it's better to axe them altogether rather than force your listeners to put up with incomprehensible gibberish. 2) Bad hosts/guests. Not everyone is a good public speaker and there's nothing wrong with admitting that. The official podcast of a particular magazine, for example, doesn't have to have every staff member on the show out of some perverse sense of 'completeness'. Someone who stutters, interrupts the flow of the show, or doesn't have anything interesting to say drags everything down. 

Rationalizing Piracy (or not)...

I had a short conversation with a friend on Facebook where I noted that, for the past several years, I've adopted a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to 'piracy'. I've never been the kind of person who downloads music, movies, or games for free, but I certainly shared tunes during the Napster craze in college. I'd also delved pretty deeply into classic system 'emulation' before my 20s. I have mixed and somewhat complex feelings about the causes and effects of piracy in modern media, but by not partaking in it myself I can put my money where my mouth is and support those creators whose stuff I feel is is worth keeping afloat.

Then I had a brief exchange with a man working at a used record store last weekend during which he brought up an interesting philosophical point: What about media that is no longer in print, but isn't old enough to have fallen into the public domain? Is it ok to download PDF versions of such books, or ripped copies of such movies or video games?

The law is fairly clear on this: So long as someone holds the copyright on a work, you're not allowed to reproduce it, even if it's out of print. The only real recourse that you have to obtain it for yourself is to attempt to find it used1. I only said 'fairly clear' because actually finding out whether someone holds the copyright to a work can be pretty tricky. Apparently, when a company goes out of business without finding a buyer for its assets, it's fairly popular for them to 'write off' intelectual property as a loss for tax and bankruptcy purposes. While there's no clear legal standing to such material - apparently 'scholars' are unclear on whether such material automatically becomes 'public domain' - it has spawned the software concept of 'abandonware', or software whose copyright holders have relinquised their legal hold on the material. If someone still owns this stuff, they're not complaining. See Abandonia or XTCAbandonware for examples of sites that openly distribute such software.

But let's put Abandonware aside. Rather, consider only media whose publishers are still in business, but who no longer actually publish or support said work. I have to admit that I can't morally justify its piracy to myself: There's always the possibility that the publisher will re-release the work at a future time. I've already experienced this with a recent book: it had been out of print for almost a decade, but was re-released last year as a Kindle e-book. 

Despite my inability to justify such piracy to myself, even I can admit that there are some titles that are highly unlikely to see re-release. For instance, some games were programmed during in an era when it wasn't common to create extensive backups or were designed for systems with architecture so unique that it's almost impossible to 'port' them to modern computers in any form2. Similarly, certain TV shows and movies incorporated licensed music or themes whose contracts have expired, and any attempt at re-releasing them would require extensive renegotiation of royalties.

The one somewhat legitimate argument (and I use legitimate here in the literal sense of 'justifiable') that was made by the gentleman in the store is that of 'cultural preservation'. We would balk at the idea that Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's work could be lost to the ether of time because of legal disputes over who owns the rights. We're lucky that because they're written down on fairly durable material, which survived the expiration of its copyright, it's unlikely that every single copy of Hamlet or Sense and Sensibility could be somehow lost. However, because it's impossible to buy legal copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special, were it not for all the nerds uploading it to sharing sites, it could become a tragedy of time3. Disks and magnetic tape don't last for ever, unfortunately.

I'm pretty cynical, and I'm willing to bet that 95% of people who claim that they're involved in 'preservation' of media are actually just rationalizing what amounts to theft. There are organizations dedicated to keeping a record of the history of classic works - Project Guttenberg for books, or The Lost Levels for unreleased videogames - and you can usually tell if they're legit by whether or not they have 'skin in the game' (are they investing time, effort, and cash in 'preservation' or just hosting pirated works on an anonymous, free service?). But then again, if someone is honest with themselves and admits that the only recourse they have if they want to experience a particular piece of media is to pirate it, it's difficult to condemn them... Which, I suppose, is just one more argument for why making one's catalog available digitally at a market-reasonable price is a great start to curbing piracy. 

1This is creating a massive headache for people looking towards the future of media. If you read the End User License Agreements of digital goods (and who does?), you'll often find that there are provisions indicating that the provider has no obligation to provide access to the good indefinitely. Some services, such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader or MP3 store basically give you a copy of the files, so you can be responsible and back them up yourself. Other services - especially as relates to movies and software - require authorization keys locking the media to a particular piece of hardware, and/or access to internet servers to authenticate the product everytime it's used. When those servers go down, what happens? 

2For anyone interested, it's really fascinating to look up the details of the failed videogame console known as the Sega Saturn. The Saturn was such a unique and custom piece of hardware that software designed on it was almost impossible to run on other systems. Just for starters, it was a 3D system that rendered quadrilateral polygons rather than the triangular polygons used by every other system up to present, meaning that it was incompatible with the design software used by everyone else. To this day, it remains one of the most difficult if not nigh impossible systems to emulate, and almost no big originally Saturn-specific titles have ever been released on retro-gaming services, legal or otherwise.

3Yes, I did intentionally, implicitly compare the Star Wars Holiday Special to Hamlet.  

The Net is a Dangerous Place...

I've been a bit troubled by the recent trend among several world governments who've attempted to pass sweeping legislation with the intent of 'regulating' the internet. Some of these bills, such as this one in Canada, basically allow warrantless 'wiretapping' of internet traffic in the name of protecting 'children' from vague threats1. Others, such as the US SOPA or CISPA bills, are ostensibly about preventing online piracy or protecting national security, but the muddied wording and over-reaching nature of the legislation makes any specific intention debatable.

The specifics of the actual laws vary, of course. Some indemnify corporations against litigation should they provide personal information to the government that violates specific privacy laws, while others allow require internet service providers (ISPs) to keep copious records. Another popular form of bill allows companies to hold web hosting services liable for the content that their users upload. Cutting through the noise, all of these 'initiatives' pretty much have the same thing in common: They all try to argue that things done on the internet are somehow markedly different from things done in other 'mediums', and therefore require that someone be given more power in regulating it.

Not wanting to treat these sorts of issues with the same black-and-white mentality that I've seen used by many pundits, there are obviously aspects to the modern internet that allow rapid, mostly anonymous dissemination of copyrighted and/or even illegal material. In addition, I'm sure that modern criminals are able to use this anonymity to their advantage.

However, I'm sure that the advent of cellular phones was a boon to crime syndicates everywhere, and yet we didn't start widespread warrantless monitoring of the public's cell phone use (before the PATRIOT act anyways, to the best of my knowledge). I think it's pretty safe to say that a criminal element will spring up in any medium where an incentive exists for people to participate in such a thing. To paraphrase Balzac (or G. Gordon Liddy): If crime didn't pay, there would be far fewer criminals. I'm sure that governments would love to trample all over our constitutional rights to privacy, but I'm willing to bet that these 'protection' bills are heavily sponsored by the same folks who want all of the 'anti-piracy' bills to go through (see below).

The problem with 'piracy' is a bit more complicated - I don't think that it's the internet that's the problem, but rather that people place little-to-no value on 'digital' goods. I've had conversations with perfectly reasonable, intelligent people who proudly showed me their collection of ~$25,000 worth of pirated software without batting an eye; but would never think of shoplifting a chocolate bar. It's also clear that the cultures of some entire countries simply don't encourage paying for any media.

All this being said, I'm not exactly sure how fighting this theft is materially any different from fighting any other theft. I mean, every other business is plagued by opportunistic 'free rides'. When I was a kid, people routinely copied tapes and movies, shared books, etc. I never heard lamentations from studio execs and publishers that every time I loaned a CD to someone, it was a lost sale. But all of a sudden, Hollywood accountants come in to tell us that piracy is costing them more by the day than they make in a year and that everyone needs to be monitored to make sure that we're all playing by the 'rules'2.

Call me cynical, but I think that there's more than a little 'rent-seeking' going on here. Giant, powerful corporations are springing out of the technology revolution and seem to be doing just fine, whereas all of these archaic giants are clinging to outdated business models and crying foul. Perhaps a younger generation doesn't 'value' a film at $20, or a hardcover book at $30, or an album at $15, etc. What's the artist's cut on those figures anyways? Methinks that these young turks - the Netflixes, Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks - have found a much more efficient and cost effective content distribution model that leaves all of the good old boys in the dust.

As always some radicals are going to use the internet to organize and cause mischief. Some jerks are going to rip off the occasional Lady Gaga album (though it's questionable if they would have bought it were it not available through pirated means), and many, many fools are going to be too slow to figure out how to keep monetizing what people no longer value as highly as they once did. But in all of this I'm sitting in front of what is undoubtedly the greatest tool in human history in terms of disseminating and democratizing information, fostering cross-cultural interaction, and generally lifting the veil of opaqueness that's settled over that question of 'what's going on over there' for thousands and thousands of years. It's a marketplace of ideas that will compete for mental real estate with a much smaller barrier to entry than traditional mediums - that is, so long as it's kept free of what largely amounts to special-interest sponsored tampering.

The net is a dangerous place, at least in the traditional sense of the word, meaning 'threatening'. The question is 'threatening to whom'?   

1I have this constant, nagging problem with pretty much everything I hear about children (in the broad sense) these days. See, I did all kinds of stuff that I'm now being told is psychologically devastating to children, but I turned out just fine. I played insanely violent video games (there were no ratings back then), watched M-rated movies, read 'adult' fiction, and went to some of the most disturbing sites on the net regularly. In fact, we all did and most of us turned out ok. I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know who didn't turn out so well that can't be explained by a terrible family situation or a series of 'real life' problems. I certainly can't think of any kid who say, glanced at pornography, only to have his or her life go spiraling out of control despite the best efforts of their family and friends. I think we're yet again completely misplacing our fears in the direction of things that old people can't understand, like rock-and-roll, or comics. Oh, and if you're concerned about the 'legions' of pedophiles lurking on the internet, then don't let your kid use it. Or maybe you could educated them or whatever before you buy them that iPhone.

2Have you ever tried to read one of these 'End-User License Agreements' that comes with software? They're ridiculous.

Audiobook Club: Steve Jobs - Part 2...

In my first post about Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, I said that I'd divide my thoughts about it into 3 parts, but I got so busy that I ended up listening to the entire book before I got to blog about it again. Thus, this shall be a 2 part-er.

The second section of Job's biography concerns his exploits after having been ousted from Apple in 1985 and illustrated for me the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of his (and ultimately Apple's) vision and philosophy of total integration of hardware and user experience. 

Shortly after leaving Apple, Jobs founded a company called NeXT, which sought, disastrously, to apply Macintosh-like principles to the academic and high-end server market. I say 'disastrously' because, as someone who has been involved in pricing, building, and purchasing high-end PCs for academic computational needs, I cannot think of anything more useless to me than an expensive, fancy-looking box, with proprietary, incompatible hardware and software, and little-to-no expandability1. It's actually kind-of crazy: Jobs wanted schools and companies to buy workstations at exorbitant costs, due almost entirely to weird custom-design decisions and proprietary uselessness. It was a colossal flop in terms of sales of computers, but the object-oriented language that they developed did become the foundation for the present Mac OS X.

Obviously a large part of the book goes on to discuss Jobs' building of Pixar Studios into the juggernaut that it is today (this is where he made most of his fortune, incidentally), but I'd like to focus more on the market decisions that eventually brought about Apple's present success.

When you look at products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it's pretty easy to see how a completely integrated hardware-software approach worked. A huge part of Apple's dominance in these three areas came from their entering into markets with good ideas, but making the experience much, much better for the user. They weren't the first to enter any of these areas, but they were arguably the first to make it sleek, fun, and user-friendly - at a premium, or course. It's easy for people to voice opinions about how product X or Y has more features, blah, blah, blah, but the fact of the matter - and what Apple had always advocated - is that the vast majority of people just want their products to 'work'.

The fundamental difference between these hardware markets and the original PC market is that unlike MP3 players, cell phones, and content-consuming tablets, PCs were so new in the 70s-80s that the only kinds of people that wanted to use them were also the kinds of people that were willing to sacrifice ease-of-use for options. The iPad costs more than many competing tablets, but what you're getting for the premium price is reasonably clear to the average consumer. In 1984, the massive premium price of the Macintosh wasn't at all such a clear justification, nor was the NeXT workstation (what workstation user wants anything less than a command-line interface anyways? Or furthermore, what academic lab wants to pay a premium for anything?).

With the gift of hindsight, it's easy to see how IBM's decision to license DOS from Microsoft, rather than buy it outright, was a horrible decision. But at the time, the market was in its infancy, and no one can be faulted for not knowing whether the money was in the hardware or software. In a similar vein, it's clear that electronics markets needed to mature before Jobs' vision made sense. Furthermore, it's amazing that only a single company has really pulled off what Apple has: No other hardware manufacturer has such an elegance and user-accessibility of both software and hardware (it really is amazing how utterly terrible the software that come with some devices can be). However, it's also the case that most companies arguably make way too many products - Apple focuses very conscientiously on a select number of markets that they feel that they can dominate.

Love them or hate them, it's pretty clear that Apple's products have developed enormous appeal, and it can mostly be traced back to one guy's absolute obsession that every single aspect of every device they produced was meticulously designed (sometimes leading to weird snafus like the iPhone 4 antenna issue).

I'd like to end with a comment about Jobs as a person. As I pointed out in my first post, it was actually quite difficult to get through the first sections of the audiobook because Jobs' personality is presented as completely intolerable. He's just not a relatable individual to me at all. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn't really mellow with age, and his temper tantrums and regular awful treatment of employees (and friends) continued to his death. Interestingly (to me anyways), Isaacson, in his wrap-up epilogue, addresses the idea of whether Jobs had to be such an asshole to achieve what he did and comes to the conclusion that he did not. His outbursts were not motivational, were frequently unwarranted, and his treatment of certain members of his family (such as his first daughter) are unforgivable.

I love my MacBook and my iPhone, but I can't understand the cult-like worship of Jobs the man. His story is fascinating (helped a lot by my living and working in the locations frequently discussed in the book), but he's not on my list of famous people that I would've liked to have met.  

1I need to be clear here: There are many high-end Mac computational workstations in labs nowadays, but this is because they're completely different from the original Macintosh - they use Intel processors and a Linux architecture. The old school Mac wasn't compatible with anything, had custom-designed parts, and case that you couldn't even open if you wanted to. 

'Gamifying' my Exercise...

Apologies for the lack of posts lately but work has become... stimulating. I'm currently in the process of drafting a manuscript about one project as well as developing a protocol for another, and therefore it feels as though my reading/writing time is best reserved for work-related purposes at the moment. That being said, I'm taking this Saturday morning to hammer out a quick blog post about a neat 'toy' that I've been trying out.

'Gamification' is a quite modern concept of adding reward systems, such as those implemented in table-top and video games, to non-game activities as an incentive to enhance interest in them. For example, when I was in elementary school, a local library posted a notice board indicating the number of books that each kid had read, turning reading into a competition for bragging rights. It's fairly easy to see how the advent of social media allows the potential to turn such 'leaderboards' into large-scale activities.

It is with this intent that I purchased an app on my iPhone called Zombies, Run!, which is quite clever and, I think, has the potential to kick off something quite huge:

The idea behind Zombies, Run! is quite simple: It's essentially a classic radio play centered around your role as a runner supporting a small town holding out in a zombie apocalypse. Each segment of the play is divided into jogging missions of about 1/2 hour during which you hear voice acted, narrative scenes interspersed among a playlist of the music you have on your device. The first scene sets up your mission and subsequent interstitials reveal more of an unfolding story (you may be asked to run through a 'forest' in order to lure zombies away from the town with home base relaying instructions and updates as to your progress over the course of the mission, for example).

The narrative is coupled to a game mechanic, the GPS on your phone measures your total distance and speed (direction and position aren't taken into account for obvious safety reasons). As you jog, you automatically 'find' and 'pick up' supplies for the town. The longer you jog, the more supplies you find. In between missions, you choose how to distribute these supplies to the various areas of the town (Armoury, Recreational Facilities, Housing, Medical Tents, etc.) in order to cause it to grow, unlocking more missions and extra bonuses. 

Here's a shot of the 'game' screen showing your town's status, population, and allowing you to divvy up supplies as well as read 'codex' entries about the various characters, locations, and events related to the narrative.

As we all know, if your goal is to stay fit, your perception of progress only comes in infrequent milestones. The idea here is that you get immediate feedback regarding your exercise progress, thus incentivizing you to keep it up. I'd run regardless, but it is a cool perk.

There's one other optional feature to the game that simulates something more akin to interval training. You can enable 'zombie chases', wherein you'll peridocically receive audio cues indicating that fast zombie are on your tail and that you need to pick up the pace. They're tough to avoid (getting caught makes you drop supplies) and are intended for people jogging in open, unobstructed environments such as a track. I turned them off when I was caught by a zombie horde because I refused to ignore a red light in Palo Alto...

I've only run three missions so far, but I can already say that I'm quite taken with the concept. The radio drama is of high quality and the interstitals add some unique flavor to each jog. My only concern is that I have no sense of the depth of the town-building segment and can't evaluate whether it's just a gimmick or something legitimately addictive. Regardless, the app lays the groundwork for an explosion in gamification of various activities. Some already gamified things, such as checking into burger joints in Foursquare are of dubious social utility; but as economists advocate, behavior is all about incentives, and positively reinforcing exercise seems like an awesome idea.