I am far from alone in avid listening to podcasts. While I read tons on the web, I find it so rewarding to learn from experts in their own voices, in audio. The best listening is where something I hear in the middle, just registeres a small seed of interest that I find I have to start digging into later.
In the last weeks, months, I’ve read more mentions in Social Media, and quotes from other tech writers/thinkers, I respect of Molly White – her web site summarizes her work enough. But she established a reputation by very analytic digging and writing into crypto currency and web 3 “stuff” (of what I have mostly a general awareness/interest) and more lately on the “state of the web”.
This I just tuned into a Dot Social podcast episode where host Mike McCue recorded a conversation with Molly White at the recent SXSW conference.
There was a lot to listen to, but there was segment where Molly responded to a question about how she got to her level of writing.
So for me, I own what I write, even though, you know, I own what I’ve been writing on Wikipedia for 20 years, even though I’ve been publishing that under a free license where anyone can take it. A lot of the stuff that I write is freely licensed, and anyone can copy it, they can republish it, they can put it in a book and sell it. For all I care. I still have control over that in the sense that this is mine. It is attributed to me. I take ownership of it in that sense, and republishing it, syndicating
She credits much to the idea and process of writing and being a Wikimedian, see her profile and impressive stats there as a user name as GorillaWarfare.
And it makes sense as the name of her newsletter (often leaving out the brackets) is [citation needed] which right there is a direct Wikipedia reference that just went past my brain before-- from that definition, and makes the meaning of her work that much more clear:
The tag “[citation needed]” is added by Wikipedia editors to unsourced statements in articles requesting citations to be added. The phrase is reflective of the policies of verifiability and original research on Wikipedia and has become a general Internet meme.
Molly mentioned in the podcast about her belief that everyone should take on some Wikipedia editing, and she referred to one of her YouTube videos called “Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes”
This was truly a refreshing genuine and non cookbook approach to helping people get onto editing. And she mentioned that she started editing at age 13 – “if a thirteen year old kid can do this, you can to” as well as her call to not worry about being wrong-- “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
And right along with her I was clicking through random articles to find something worth editing… I got stuck on an article of a small village in Burkina Faso, that needed a better reference and data for its population (I failed to dig deep enough, will have to come back).
I was also impressed at her demonstration of using an old library book to find a topic and from there seeing what might be added to its sparse Wikipedia article.
To me it was a gem of a find, and came just out of listening to conversations in podcast form.
Do you have any times when listening to a podcast tickles your curiosity into something?
