Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to the very last Cybersurf of 2005. I am Steven Lang with a rapid round-up of some the most significant IT stories of the past twelve months.

Let us start with the Podcast - The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected "podcast" as the Word of the Year for 2005. You still haven’t tuned in?

A Podcast, is defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player"

On Cybersurf we have spoken about podcasts quite a few times noting of course that it has mainly taken on in the US of A – but there is an excellent site about podcasting in South Africa which you can find at www.podcast.co.za – seems obvious enough – www.podcast.co.za

It is an excellent site that explains the basics to beginners and at the same time has topflight technical tips for the experts. There is a list of podcasts for South Africans – that includes Afrikaans weekly shows from Sidney, London and somewhere in the USA – Money web in English and Afrikaans, a Shona podcast and a weekly comedy podcast called Toast Fantastic.

Podcast dot co dot Za also gives you very good advice on how you can make your own podcasts

The transformation of Google is another of the most important stories of the year – in the beginning of 2005 it was merely the biggest search engine in the world – now it is still the biggest search engine – including South African versions in four languages – but it has successfully launched Google Maps; Google Earth, Google messaging and only last week a special version of google for your PDA.

It’s a good bet that in the next year we can expect a few head on confrontations between the two giants - Google and Microsoft - that appear to be intent on taking over everything on the Internet.

Still on the subject of search engines – earlier this month a new South African search engine was launched. I’m not sure about the pronunciation of jonga dot co dot za – that is J.O.N.G.A but I believe it is based entirely on open source software.

I tried it on a few local searches and it appeared to be quite good. Let’s give it another few weeks and we’ll really put it through its paces and compare it to some other South African search engines.

The last of our randomly selected big stories of the year concerns the recording industry’s massive campaign against pirated music. We have seen many adverts on television about how evil it is to steal music and how bad it is to make illegal copies of songs.

Now, while Cybersurf fully supports the sanctity of intellectual property rights and in no-way condones illegal downloading – it seems that sometimes authorities are unneccesarily harsh on this type of crime.

Currently there is a celebrated case in the US where almost the entire music recording industry has ganged up on Patricia Santangelo – a single mother of five – because illegally downloaded music was found on her computer.

The 43 year old has been described by a federal judge as "an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her email."

It appears that the industry – which has a site at www.riaa.com – has a huge call centre that tracks people who have made illegal downloads and then demands money from them.

Sounds a bit over the top to me.

But then I hope you don’t go over the top with your new year celebrations – thanks for listening and do join me again next year for more Cybersurf.

On the Net:

• Recording Industry Association of America: http://www.riaa.com
• Defense lawyers' blog on RIAA cases: http://www.recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
• Site focusing on peer-to-peer issues: http://p2pnet.net