Media Hacks is always interesting and, depending on who is on that particular episode, colorful. Episode number 14, while striving to live up to its title of “Foul Mouthed Hacks,” touches on some thought provoking issues in the social realm. They began but unapologetically defending their choice of words on the show citing personal authenticity and a “we do this show for us” attitude. They then spring into the dreaded double-v (viral video) topic. While the typical response of companies who find one of their copyrighted  works online is to issue a cease and desist order and pull the video offline (often creating the Streisand effect), one group got smart and took out an ad on one such video that linked to the songs place in the iTunes store and managed to monetize on the free publicity of this freakishly popular video. They also went through some very dangerous territory in discussing the long awkward silence that followed after the briefly popular “United Breaks Guitars” song and what it means for companies who have been told that they have to listen to the customer.

The kids over at Media Hacks rarely disappoint, and this episode was no exception. Their willingness to discuss difficult problems in a raw and unfiltered manner always leads to a scintillating series of Eureka moments (at least for me). These guys are great at providing a fresh approach to topics that are often approached with stale reiteration of the accepted opinions.

Looking at Jason Falls’ Blog post about Social Media Wearing out  It’s Welcome, you’ll get a sense for the impending doom of the term “Media” falling away from its current friend “Social”. This has been afoot sometime and many of us suspected we’d get to this point. Not necessarily because of a bad definition, but more from the vagueness of it all.  Social media/networking being one example. Also once you consider the history of online “social” networks you’ll see it’s been around a good long time (even before the Web).

When we established the “Social Media Expedition” we also secured “Social Expedition” as we knew at some point the “Media” would be going away.  The seasoned will refer to it as “social” “___ technologies”, “_____ web”, etc…  I read the blog post while making tracks on the elliptical machine. Thinking about it more, I’m coming to the conclusion that Social whatever is really a philosophy that, by default, maintains a high regard for the people you serve (internal and external).

One of favorite quotes from the post was “Broadcast Age”. love it!   

60 on top of this. I can't explain qhat a difference this makes in spirit. 

For yesterday's "Podcast Workout Session", I listened to Episode #145 of Hanselminutes by Scott Hanselman, with guest Bob Martin. I started listening to Hanselminutes a few weeks ago, so now I'm listening to the podcasts backwards in order to catch up (only 139 shows to go!).

The show is the first of three with Bob Martin discussing SOLID principles (see below), which are a set of guidelines for developing maintainable software. One of the portions of the discussion really resonated with me, in that it's a problem I've struggled with about Object Oriented Design (OO) in the past. One of the benefits of OO is that it allows related objects to be used interchangeably, without having to write new code. Scott uses the example of the relationship between a Square and a Rectangle. In the physical world, there is a very clear relationship between a Square and a Rectangle; on the surface, they have the same defining characteristic: 4 sides, 4 right angles. But when you try to model these two seemingly-related objects in code, the relationship breaks down. A Rectangle can have differing height and width characteristics, but the Square's sides are all equal; this is enough to make the relationship between the two objects in code very problematic when trying to use Square and Rectangle interchangeably. In the past, I've gone to great lengths to make similar relationships work in code, and eventually discovered that the relationship simply wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) work. It's comforting to know that programmers better than I have had these problems.

The show in one sentence: "It is completely possible for a relationship between objects to make perfect sense in English and to make no sense at all in software."

For the morbidly curious:

S - Single Responsibility Principle

O - Open Closed Principle

L - Liskov Substitution Principle

I - Interface Segregation Principle

D - Dependency Inversion Principle

(via Justin)