First!

The first post is always so awkward!  People typically get a hard time for jumping in a comment thread and shouting "First!" but there's something to it!  It's hard to fill that vacuum.  It's a lot of pressure.

Johnny and I are doing a podcast.  My name is Ryan.  We read Wikipedia for an hour each, starting with the same article, and we discuss it together, while drinking beer.

The first topic was Prohibition, which was chosen by Johnny when I first presented the idea for the podcast to him.  After we record each episode, we choose the topic for the next episode, so technically, every article we read is connected directly to something we read previously, even across multiple episodes.  We're still getting the recording process down, but the important thing is that it's a super good time, and a good excuse to hang out and drink beer with a good buddy.

Additionally, I think we're pretty interested in the mechanics of our traversal through Wikipedia.  I've written a Firefox plugin called "Citation Needed" which can record detailed data on wikipedia reading habits, and render the results to a format that I can post-process to produce graphs.  Each episode, I will post our individual reading graphs, as well as a specially colorized joint graph detailing what we read, and how we read it.

Generally, I think the graphs are pretty interesting.  Starting from the same place, Johnny and I tend to follow fairly different paths, and when there is overlap, it's often unexpected, or brought about in an interesting way.  I'll talk more about the graphs and how they work in a post dedicated to that topic.

In any case, welcome to our podcast blog!  Look for more information here soon!