So I have moved to my own domain and will continue with the new blog there. All posts from this blog have been migrated across, though unfortunately not comments. Maybe later I will figure out how to do that, that will be part of the experimenting I wanted to do.

The learning never stops, it just moves on to the better pastures.

Today’s  collection had a comment that gave me a double take. It went like this:

–strange junk–
Kiel
vi fartas?
–spam links–
G^is revido

Which is obviously esperanto for ‘How are you’ and ‘See you later’ (though I prefer x notation myself in Gxis revido).

So, what happened there? I can see three options:

1. Esperanto speaking spammer who decided to switch the ‘hello’ text upon seeing an Esperanto category in my blog
2. Automatic software that looked for all blogs that mentioned Esperanto with hopes that the ‘less frequent’ language will not trigger spam filters
3. Some sort of automatic spam algorithm picking out greetings based on the content of the blog; if that’s the case, the fact that somebody bothered adding Esperanto to their list is – in a perverse way – a cause to celebrate

I don’t think I will ever find out what happened, unless the original spammer comes back and comments on this post with the answer. Still, it is a food for thought.

I believe into podcasting‘s future because it is here already for me. I have a 40 minute walk to work each day, so I have over six hours of content a week I can consume. And being quite busy during days, nights and weekends, I try to use that walk time constructively as well. I have been listening to the podcasts from before they were called that and, so, had some time to get my bearings. And they are basically aligned with what the concept of Long Tail teaches us.

Strangely enough, BusinessWeek did not even mention any of the concepts that are important for me and my podcast consumption. That’s how I know the article is missing many points. It is not really unexpected, as it takes a while to get past the beginner’s understanding and actually see the real depth of the concept.

My current collection is at 25 podcasts and I have discarded over time probably twice that number. Less than a third of the podcasts on the list would be considered even vaguely popular by normal measures, the rest are plainly hyper-specialized to my needs and interests.

Over time, I had dutifully sampled and eventually discarded Adam Curry, Dave Winer and Gillmor Gang podcasts. They sporadically have some interesting content, but so infrequently that I find myself frustrated with all the filler. Gillmor Gang specifically I have given 3 or 4 tries over years, but I think they were most interesting during their ITConversations’ days.

I also don’t have any popular radio podcasts. I find the latest news to be easiest to consume in an aggregated or RSS format on my computer. That way if a news item is interesting, I can follow up on its references or setup keywords alert for the future notifications. Podcasts, in my mind, are much more suitable for content that has already undergone some thought process by its producer. I know that for some people, the reasoning is different but just as valid (for them).

I break my subscriptions into roughly 5 categories:

• Technical News – In my industry (IT) it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. Without these podcasts I feel that I would not notice what is coming down the line until it would be too late and I would be stuck maintaining Cobol-equivalent systems forevermore.
• Trend watching – Many interesting things are happening in the world if one just happens to be in the right place at the right time. These podcasts put me into that place and do it very early in the ideas’ lifecycles: somewhere between a cutting edge and an early adoption stage. I may not have time to participate, but sometimes the knowledge I get allows me to leapfrog the conventional process. For example, I have been on a cheap Voice-over-IP service (Lingo) for nearly two years and saved myself money and hustle of dealing with Verizon and its ilk.
• Learning new skills in a background – I may not have time to allocate several active hours a week on a useful, but not currently essential skill, but podcasts in these category allow me to learn something through osmosis over time. Later, when I would need those skills, I would have already absorbed enough to be a very quick learner.
• Language learning – I am studying Spanish now and before that I was learning French and Esperanto and there is always some improvement I could do to my English. These podcasts provide additional learning (or meta-learning) material. Some of them are also good edutainment.
• Entertainment – Some podcasts are just funny or interesting or have my friends in them. They round up the collection nicely.

My full list is available publically, but here is the breakdown by the categories as I see it:

• Technical news and interviews with people I could learn from
  • IT Conversations – The best podcast feed ever. I subscribe to full collection and listen to everything, but some of the biotech items.
  • The Java Posse – Good and often funny Java news source. I listened to them since before the JavaPosse name. I even went to their BOF session at JavaOne 2006.
  • Venture Voice
  • TalkCrunch
  • PodLeaders – Thought Leaders podcast
  • Interviews with Innovators: Jon Udell’s Friday Podcasts
  • O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit Podcasts – This is one-off single-conference feed. Eventually, it will get dropped when the content stops arriving.
• Trend watching
  • Distributing the Future – O’Reilly in general and this podcast specifically is definitely reporting from the cutting (and sometimes bleeding) edge. This podcast often points at a meme, before it even spreads.
  • Lulu Radio – Lulu is worth watching for Print-On-Demand market, though I am thinking that their new weekly format might be too much information for my needs. Monthly news would have been enough for me at this stage.
  • TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home – I like the blog (I even contributed once), but I am not so sure about their podcast yet. This one is on trial currently.
• Learning new skills in a background
  • this WEEK in MEDIA – Couple of old-hands talk about video-production, 3d, future of the media on the web and lots of other non-mainstraim topics that I think are getting more and more mainstream with each passing week. The 2nd half of the 27th episode was absolutely brilliant as they started to reminiscence about how things used to be. It brought back lots of good memories (of uphill both ways kind).
    
  • Woven Shadows: Digital Photography Tutorials (Video Podcast)
  • Izzy Video: DV Tutorials (Video Podcast)
  • 43 Folders – Ideas around Getting Things Done, the workflow I am trying to implement.
  • ONTOLOG forum podcast – Semantic web discussions. The sound quality is not great, but the content is really deep.
  • SLHS227 BoilerCast! – This is actually a lecture podcast on Elements of Linguistics from Purdue University. That’s a little hard ot find-out from either title or even the linked-to page. I found it via the Free Academic Podcasts blog entry.
    
• Language learning
  • Trying To Learn Spanish
  • Notes in Spanish Intermediate
  • NW Spanish News – NHK World Radio Japan
  • Rolling R’s: Free Spanish Lessons (Video Podcast)
  • Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing – funny and interesting tidbits on English grammar and writing style.
    
  • podictionary weekly – etymology of english words; lots of interesting little stories.
• Entertainment
  • The Onion Radio News – 1 minute segments that really brighten the day.
    
  • TEDTalks (audio) – TEDTalks are more inspirational than entertaining, but they are really well done and always have interesting topics.
    
  • Diffusion Science radio – Science radio show! from Australia! Done with irreverence and quirkiness! Has people I know in it! How could I not listen to this.

Are there more podcasts I would have liked to listen to? Certainly. I would love a podcast on computational linguistics. At the moment, even the bloggers on the topics are extremely rare.

I would also love a podcast on Scottish Country Dancing. There is just so much one could do with that. I know that at least one person have thought of it and given up as unsustainable, which is a real pity. I am tempted to start one myself just to prove her wrong.

Finally, I think there is a way to make a better language-learning podcast/video cast than the ones I found so far. I have mentioned some of the ideas to at least one person in a position to do that. Nothing happened yet, but such things take time. I will wait a while and, if nothing happens, will blog it here instead. I don’t mind prividing competitive advantage to a company that deserves it through good service, but will not sit on the ideas forever either.

To summarise the long post, I think that podcasting has legs and will succeed in the content niches that appeal to people based on their individual interests and needs. There is a lot of fluff and junk podcasts on the web at the moment, but it is getting better and, as with blogging, the absolute number of interesting podcasts is growing fast. It takes some time to find good content, but it really pays off in a long run.

Such seems to be the case with Suspense, no suspenso. From what I can tell, it is a complete detective story book written in Spanish for an intermediate language learner and even includes some exercises for the teacher’s use. It used to be a real book (with ISBN and all), but has obviously been released to the world at large since.

I cannot read it yet as I am still at the early beginner stage, but to find a text that is free, in plain HTML (for converting to other formats) and targetted specifically at the language reader is a rare delight. I hope someone ahead of me in learning spanish, will find it useful. Leave a comment, if you do.

And if there are enough people interested, maybe we could find some bilingual speakers to add an english translation to the text. Given that the book is clearly there not for commercial gain, I am sure they would not object if somebody offered to improve its value further.

Mark Phillips has taken Tarzan of the Apes book that is now available in public domain and rewritten parts of it to teach grammar as part of the story. The resulting self-published book Tarzan and Jane’s Guide to Grammar (or Amazon link) has been selling quite well in schools for a year or so. The book’s idea is similar to the one of The Twisted Doors, but is targetted at English readers wishing to increase their vocabulary rather than at learners of a foreign language. It also feels to me like a precursor to my 3rd idea from the earlier article on How e-books could revolutionize language-learning.

About a month ago (from what I can tell), Mark decided to push the book to the general public more aggressively. He set up the website and sent some copies out as promotion. I heard of it in one of the Grammar Girl‘ podcasts.

He did not contact me (this is not a sponsored post), but I liked the idea of the book since – as I mentioned at the start – it connects to multiple of my interests. I hope his work will become more known and spur other people to experiment with using public domain material in innovative ways. Especially, if they are innovative language-learning ways.

• On the commercial speech recognition front, Nexidia is currently in beta with phonemes-mapping audio search. But don’t go to the company’s site. Instead, read the explanation and collection of links is in the ResourceShelf’s article.
• If, instead of waiting for commercial offerings, you would like to contribute to the open source one, VoxForge always needs more transcribed audio recordings to improve their Command and Control acoustic models.
• Switching from speech recognition to the speech synthesis, E-health-insider has a fascinating podcast from the field (Somalia), with practical example of how even an imperfect technology can bring tangible benefits to people in need.
• Text generation might also soon become a more interesting topic. Indiana university recently launched The Synthetic Worlds Initiative and – as part of it – very recently started ARDEN project that will try to produce a synthetic 3D world in the universe of William Shakespeare. They are not planning to have bots in there, but can they resist it, given that a virtual world interface and availability of full texts of Shakespeare’s works make it ideal playground for advanced A.L.I.C.E competitions.
• If you like text classifications tasks and/or machine learning, there is an Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge Challenge & Workshop. Dataset Nova is the one for text classification, there are others for different machine learning tasks. There might even be a small prize.
• For those who only get out of bed for big(ger) prizes, there is the Second Annual CyC prize. The prize is $2,500, but to get it you must publish an academic paper that has something to do with CyC’s knowledge base of assertions about the everyday world. This may or may not be a hard task; you can judge it for yourself by checking out the winners of the last year’s prize. The deadline is February 21st, 2007 and some people may have had an early start since the competition has been running since February this year.
• Named Entities and Semantic Web come together in the demo put together by InFact that parsed and cross-linked public domain books in a web of names, places and relations. Just don’t try to manually change the urls; the implementation itself is a bit brittle (company was notified). Speaking on a more abstract level, this demo also shows benefits of actually having unrestricted full-text access to books. I feel that public domain books are just waiting to be remixed and experimented with beyond what we see now.
• Finally, those who missed AOL’s attempt to beat Google’s release of n-gram models, by releasing and then withdrawing 20 million web queries that included private data can still get access to that data from multiple websites, including one with a semi-useful search interface. One wonders if AOL’s executive responsible for the release decision likes the proverbs, specifically the one that goes “A word spoken is past recalling”.

I have a couple of problems with that approach.

First one is that even if the immersion method was sufficient, it would have to be as immersive as what a child gets – 24 hours a day minus sleep. One hour a day is not sufficient in my opinion. And if you are studying foreign language in an immersive environment, Roseta Stone is just a way to concentrate your mind more than anything. And with its price tag, a very expensive way to concentrate the mind.

The other reason is that when people say immersive environment, they usually mean no grammar rules. Just listening and talking, reading and writing. That’s what children do, right?

Wrong! At least it is wrong for the Russian language. School in USSR used to have a class called Russian Language which run for several school years. It was not about the Russian literature, that was a second, separate class. Russian Language class was about learning the orthography and grammar of our own mother tongue and – trust me! – it was hard.

Declensions were hell. Russian language has six of them and we had to have mnemonics to just remember their order (I still remember «Иван Родил Девчонку, Велел Тащить Пелёнку») The rules for when to write soft and hard sign letters were a story of their own. And dictations! That is when you think that the teacher’s whole purpose in life is to make you want to cry. When every misspelling and a missing coma would drop your grade! And then (the next year) you get rephrasing exercises where you listen to a story three times and have to write it out in your own words afterwards. And you are marked for style as well as orthography.

And, I am sorry to say, we made fun of Georgians and Armenians, because – trying to learn their own complex languages – they never sounded quite right speaking Russian, even though they were also part of USSR. We learned how to say things correctly, because we had anecdotes being told and retold on exactly how they got it wrong.

I always admire people who decide to learn Russian and persevere with its alphabet, its grammar and its pronunciation. But those who think that ‘learning like children’ approach means learning through absorption and with no grammar study, I don’t have much time for. It did not work for us, when we were children. I don’t see how it will work for you, however much you will pay for the software with the fancy claims on its cover.

I like free music. I have enough music in the personal collection not to buy new tracks for a while (especially not from RIAA members), but I will listen to free songs to see if something really special will catch my attention.

I have tried Pandora and liked it, but obviously those songs are not for download and cannot be repeated easily (if one cares to stay legal anyway). I have tried iTunes’ free single of the week and was very disappointed.

Amie St makes it easy to discover good songs in the genres I like and will certainly keep me coming back for more.

One feature I wish they had is an ability to subscribe to a channel (artist, genre, price-range) and have it downloadable as a podcast of samples. Price range as a parameter might be useful for somebody ready to buy good songs, so they could mark them at 50-60 cents range and get a good deal, yet filtered by crowd’s rating. The delivery could be either individual 30/45 seconds files or one big file with chapter marks to skip easily and with embeded info/album art. That way I could listen to the songs on the move and buy/download them later. This obviously also increases user’s stickiness to the site, as the user interacts with the site even when not on the computer.

Or maybe they just need to open an API and somebody else will do that for them.

(Update: Another good review of the service is at: CoolBusinessIdeas.com)

This is the next step after the redesign of the society magazine to move forward in times, while preserving the original goals of the Society.

It is good to see the society recognising that internet is worth putting time and effort into, especially with members and branches all over the world.

Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a disadvantage, whether that format is an open standard (like OpenReader) or a proprietary one (like Sony’s BBeB). He advocates using web browsers as ebook readers.

David’s point (and he invokes me in there) is that HTML format is not sufficient for all e-books, mostly due to the layout and browser changes issues. So, if HTML is not sufficient, we have to chose a new format. Thefore, it is better if the format is an open standard that can be implemented and maintained by multiple parties.

I am with David here and mostly for the reasons he pointed out. For my interests (language learning e-books), HTML is not a good enough format. Sure, I could hack HTML into submission for some of my goals, but it will require so much javascript, that it will not work in anything but a full-blown browser. I invite Bill to replicate the functionality of the Pocket e-Sword. so that it works well in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Maybe that’s why Pepper Pad is integrating FBRReader despite already having a built in Firefox web browser.

So, where does Esperanto comes into it? Well, here is Bill’s quote (emphasis is mine):

Trying to standardize on a common “ebook format”, be it some IDPF creation, some OASIS masterpiece, or even the so-called OpenReader, would only be an attempt to force them all to publish in Esperanto, instead of their house languages. They still wouldn’t have customers.

Publishing in Esperanto does not bring customers? Really! I wonder where Bill gets that data. I don’t know how many (human)  languages he speak, but the only reasonable way I could interpret that statement was as “publishing English material in Esperanto would not bring any more English customers”. That could be a a point, where he would be mostly correct. Of course, the market for Esperanto is not English, it is global.

As an example, I want to take the book/movie Night Watch by my favourite author Sergey Lukyanenko. The book started in Russian, was made into the Russian movie with english subtitles, impacted American market and finally was translated (quite well) into English. What about Chinese or Egyptians? Would they be interested in this book? Maybe, but there is no easy way to find out because translation or even subtitling is very expensive.

Except that there is a way. Night Watch has just been translated into Esperanto (announcement in russian). There is even an excerpt available (unfortunately in PDF). Now, the book is accessible to people in China, Egypt or Germany, as long as they can read Esperanto. And if there is enough interest from those people, the book can be translated into their native languages as well to reach to the rest of the audience. The push model of finding the markets suddenly becomes a pull model of market finding you. This is not a new idea, it is already used by newspapers and even Vatican. It is called establishing a beachhead, I believe.
And that’s exactly the strength of open standards. They can expand the audience beyond original planned targets and bring new markets to your solution, adapting the solution to the market needs in the process.

Closed standards control the markets they know about, open standards create new, unplanned markets. I am currently in the market segment, Sony does not want to think about. Do I wait another 5 years for Sony to catch up or do I look for open standard and open source alternatives? There should be no need to guess.