23 June 2008

 

Sayonara, "Search Engine"

A couple of months ago I noted that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has two technology-focused radio shows, "Spark" and "Search Engine," and that I couldn't always figure out how they were supposed to differ. (In the comments, Darren Barefoot noted that one way to tell is that "'Search Engine' almost always comes with a sense of righteous indignation, which gets a bit old after a while.")

It looks like CBC also wondered why they had both shows, and has now dissolved "Search Engine" as a radio show by having host Jesse Brown report on technology for other CBC Radio programs. This despite "Search Engine" being one of the network's most-downloaded podcasts. So there will still be a compilation podcast, and the blog will continue too.

That's not a bad solution. Of the two shows, I prefer Nora Young's lifestyle-focused "Spark" over Brown's more politically obsessed "Search Engine" anyway, and "Spark" is coming back in much the same form as before. "Search Engine" will be quite different, since Brown will be working on his own without a team of correspondents, producers, and researchers. We'll see how that goes.

It's worth listening to the last regular show of "Search Engine," however. In it, Brown interviews Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice about the lousy new Canadian copyright legislation currently before the House of Commons. Prentice doesn't come across well—but in this case, I think the righteous indignation is appropriate.

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Comments:

Derek -

Two comments completely unrelated to this post:

1. I left a comment on this post: https://www.penmachine.com/2008/05/nyt-dr-seuss-and-fonz a long time ago and noticed I must have screwed up somehow because it's not there. I was saying that my favourite Seussism is his sentence, "The tough coughed as he ploughed the dough." It illustrates 4 different sounds the letters o-u-g-h can make. It's fun to say the sentence as if English made sense and the same letter combinations always made the same sound: The tuff cuffed as he pluffed the duff; The toe code as he plode the doe; etc. I actually added a 5th sound with my version: The tough coughed as he ploughed through the dough.

2. What was your NTN 6-char palyer name? I was HIHOAG...

As I was just trying to submit this, I ran into problems again, this time with my OpenID, so here's the anonymous version.

Stephen
barmarbybroox.wordpress.com
 
I don't recall if I even used a consistent NTN name.

Not sure what happened to your old comment -- I don't have moderation on, so it might have been mysteriously spam filtered for some reason.
 
P.S. I just added your comment to the original post, posing as you. Ah, the power of owning (pwning?) the blog. Moua-ha-ha-ha!
 
I thought it was spelled mwah.