Status-Q

Podcasts are becoming more and more important to me. Every day, while shaving or dressing, I get to listen to about 20 mins of interesting, educational stuff, usually talks from conferences that I didn’t get to attend. Now I can ‘attend’ them without any cost in money or time! If I had a daily commute to work, it would be even more valuable.

I’ve always been a big fan of radio. The quality of radio & TV broadcasting here is one of the few things about Britain that still makes me proud of my country. The more I travel, the more I realise that our publicly-funded BBC really is the best in the world. And I’m ever more aware that, despite this, its days in its current form are numbered.

But if I, as an enthusiastic supporter of radio in Britain, find myself spending more time listening to podcasts than the radio, no wonder it’s taking off at such a rate in the rest of the world! I don’t expect, for example, when I turn on the radio, to hear any commercials, but for most of the world the simple matter of podcasts being largely advertisement-free is probably enough of an incentive in itself.

My good friend Dale made what I think is an exceedingly interesting discovery. Let me quote a bit of his email:

For reasons related to a joke, I did a search on Halliburton in Google. Got the following response:

Halliburton

Home page of Halliburton with links to many newspaper articles rebutting critics’ allegations of improper conduct.
www.halliburton.com/ – 17k – Cached – Similar pages

Okay. But, I don’t see that text in the page. Nor in the page source. This description, with a prominent mention of rebuttal of improper conduct, doesn’t seem to be in either the current page or the cached page. So who came up with this description? Google?

No, DMOZ.
See
http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Business/Allegedly_Unethical_Firms/ Halliburton/Opposing_Views/.

So the description comes from the open directory project. An entry quite deep, and in an dissenting view. Could just anyone become a volunteer editor for certain categories and modify the entries of major websites to be whatever they wanted? Why should Google or I trust this?

Or am I missing something?

A very good question – thoughts anyone? Is this just somebody at Google being mischievous? Dale later pointed out that the same is true of IBM. Google’s description of their home page is taken from here, and while that description’s uncontraversial, it does raise the same question…

Update: What’s more, it happens even on important sites! Google’s description of Status-Q also comes from DMoz. I think I submitted this entry, back in the days when the weblogs section had a couple of dozen entries!

The general problem here, I guess, is to decide whether the owner of a site gives a more balanced description of it than the editors of some moderated third-party site. Perhaps it’s not such a bad practice after all. Unless you’re Halliburton.

Well, I’ve done it! Regular readers will notice that, after nearly 4 years, Status-Q has a new look. Actually, this is temporary and there’s lots of tweaking to be done yet. It’ll soon look a bit more like its old self.

But the underlying reason for it is that Status-Q is no longer produced using the Radio Userland software package, but with the very nice new web-based WordPress. Setting up and running WordPress was easy. Importing all my old posts and trying to make sure that all my old URLs still worked was rather more challenging. I’ve been writing up the process on the WordPress wiki in the hope that it may be of use to future pilgrims following the same trail.

So why the change? Well, Radio Userland was a wonderful program in many ways. As a combination of scripting engine, database, webserver, outliner, RSS viewer with a nice front-end, it was pretty revolutionary in its day and you could do some very cute things with it. It also had the advantage that you could write as much as you liked while disconnected and then upstream to your server when you were next online. All very cool.

However, when it went wrong, which it seemed to do from time to time for absolutely no reason, it was a devil of a thing to debug. The documentation was impossible to find, the scripting language and error messages often rather unhelpful, and since Dave Winer departed from Userland Software there doesn’t seem to have been much active development on it. And I could count the times that working offline has been important to me on the fingers of, well, no hands.

So I’ve been meaning to move to something else for some time, but the task of converting my past posts and keeping my URLs intact seemed pretty daunting. I’d looked at doing it with Movable Type and it appeared that a lot of manual editing would be involved. When Radio died again just over a week ago, though, it gave me the incentive to go and find out just how difficult it would be with WordPress, and the answer was, with a bit of hacking, not too hard at all. So here I am! Let’s see how it goes…