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A new podcast exploring the never-before-seen sides of the digital world and the people behind the most popular internet communities is set to release today, produced by Crowd Network. The first series will focus on Wikedpedia with future series set for Reddit and Cryptocurrency.
dot com, hosted by broadcaster and podcaster Katie Puckrik, delves into the weird and wonderful World Wide Web. It explores the people behind the world’s biggest websites, revealing the faces of the internet in a bid to give us hope for its future.
The first series, set to launch on October 19th, untangles the internet’s biggest encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year. The fifth-most-visited website in the world, Wikipedia is an entirely user-generated and community-driven archive of more than 50 million articles in more than 300 languages – everything from the history of the universe to the list of people that died on the toilet.
Over the course of the six-episode series, Katie talks to volunteers from around the world who welcome her into the ‘movement’, including the site’s founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the computer scientists who were there at the start of the World Wide Web and people on the ground about censorship of Wikipedia in countries like China and Turkey.
Katie Puckrik, host of dot com, said: “It’s easy to feel like the internet is a faceless wilderness, so we wanted to zero in on the actual people behind it. And an exploration of Wikipedia is the perfect way to do this, as it’s entirely people-powered. It’s been fascinating to burrow down into the histories and controversies surrounding a website that most of us take for granted, but use every day. Delving into the matrix of Wikipedia reveals the molecules that make up the monolith: the tireless volunteers behind the millions of constantly-edited pages.