Radio Pick: Engineering Search

TORONTO, ONTARIO - CBC producer Ira Basen has been written about in this feature before; pretty much everything he's been involved in has been gold from my perspective, so it's not surprising that he has again earned my weekly radio pick. His latest effort documents how Google became so dominant in search and the Internet in general, airing originally as a 30-minute documentary in the second hour of The Sunday Edition and appearing about 36 minutes into the podcast.

Listen to MP3 of The Sunday Edition "Engineering Search"

Radio: On Charlie Chan

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week offered a lot of candidates for the weekly radio pick, but in the end I have to give the nod to On Point. Very rarely does a talk show bring up a cultural topic on which I am somewhat ignorant, discuss it at length, bring up another cultural topic on which I am totally ignorant, and have callers offering great insights into the interplay between the two. On Point from WBUR and NPR this week managed to do that in a 46-minute show on the character of Charlie Chan which at the insistence of a rather obnoxious guest branched out to Guan Gong. This was public radio talk at its best.

Listen to MP3 of On Point "Sleuthing Out 'Charlie Chan'"

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There was a long list of runner-ups this week. Perhaps I'll divide them by category, with On Point earning the honor in the "talk show" category. In the "entertainment" category, the clear winner was the CBC's ReVision Quest episode "What's So Funny About Being Native?" which offered insight into the interplay of humor with the native condition as well as a lot of straight comedy material.

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In the category of "interviews," the clear winner was Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge and its episode Losing Religion. I don't often hear multiple authors with perspectives I haven't heard before on the same show, and the team from Madison pulled that off this week.

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In the category of "commentary," Ira Basen of the CBC blew me away with a scathing analysis of the Harper administration's political strategy, comparing it to Stephen Colbert on this week's episode of The House.

Radio Pick: News 2.0

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's radio pick is a special presentation from the CBC.

Ira Basen has long been one of my favorite CBC producers; pretty much everything he has touched, from "Quirks and Quarks" to "The Hidden City" to "Spin Cycles" has made for excellent radio. His latest effort is a two-part series on the reality and future of news in the Web 2.0 world which has been titled "News 2.0". The second fifty-four minute segment aired this week on the Sunday Edition and right from the first story explaining how a blogger ended up greatly affecting a stock price, the impact of technology on news is explained in a compelling manner.

Listen to MP3 of The Sunday Edition "News 2.0 Part Two"