Radio Sweethearts

This week’s episode intro starts with the usual story highlights and ends with Bob saying “Stay tuned for all sorts of wrong stuff.” There’s potential for plenty of wrong – Brooke is off again this week, and Bob is using words like “fomenting”.

The first story is about people that think that President Obama wasn’t actually born in the U.S. and senior citizens that think that the government is planning to euthanize them. It’s a long segment and one that I feel like I’ve heard before.

But it’s followed rather brilliantly by a story about this thing called Dispute Finder. This is how it works – if you’re reading an article about a controversial topic, Dispute Finder will scan the text of the article and find another article on the same topic but from a different point of view. The whole idea is to make people more well-rounded consumers of information. That sounds awesome – especially if you listen to the way that the scientists that designed it have determined which information to show people to counter the info they’re already getting. Where do I sign up?

It’s right after this story that a quick spot promoting Sound of Young America airs on the podcast. Maybe I’ll never mature, but I still can’t stand this Jesse Thorn guy. Kai Ryssdal school of finger guns much?

The second half of the podcast is all about the internet and people doing things that should have been done a long time ago and things that shouldn’t be done at all.

In the things-that-should-have-been-done-ages-ago category, the U.S. patent office is now putting patent applications on the internet in hopes of speeding up the patent process. Woah, federal government – you’d better slow down before people get the idea that you’re catching up to technology.

In the oh-god-no category is a story on news content, paywalls and something called the Fair Syndication Consortium. I’m all for journalists being credited for their work and paid fairly for it, and I agree that bloggers shouldn’t copy and paste entire articles into their blogs.

I’m not OK with paywalls or trying to prevent linking online. Eyeballs equal revenue, people. If you put your content behind a paywall, you cap the number of eyeballs that are willing to look at your content and ads.

Also, despite Walter Cronkite being a bastion of truth and correctness, news organizations really botched his obituary. As Bob points out, that kind of says something, and that something is not good.

Bob still sounds disappointed when he mentions that the show was edited by Katya Rogers instead of Brooke. Dude, Katya is just as worthy of your swooning as Brooke is. On another disappointing note, the sons of Linton Weeks were killed in a car wreck. A foundation has been set up in their names, and our thoughts go out to the Weeks family during what has to be an incredibly difficult time.