Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web

Joel and Jeff discuss the Stack Overflow team's expedition to NYC, the seven crucial mistakes we made during development, and how to bridge the skill spectrum between beginning and expert software developers.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with the author of "Crowdsourcing," Jeff Howe, who explains the concept of sourcing work or requests out to a crowd on the internet.

Joel and Jeff cover the launch of Stack Overflow, and have an extended discussion with Josh Millard of MetaFilter on how to design social software on the web.

Joel and Jeff discuss Rock Band 2, the "big universe of dumb programmers", and the general anthropology of developing social software.

Google's new browser Chrome is one of the topics of discussion with Phil, Scott, and Ben. In addition to its terms of service, that talk about its background, including Google's comic that introduced the new software. They also discuss Perl, Apache modules, and Ajax programming.

Government corruption affects all aspects of society. At the 2008 O'Reilly ETech Conference, Lawrence Lessig discusses government corruption, especially in the United States Congress. What does government get right, wrong, and where does dependence compromise effective government? Also, Lessig announces a new project designed to signal congress' support for reform, called Change Congress.

Joel and Jeff discuss deadlocks, logging philosophy, the value and risks of taking dependencies on your project, and why you want to work with people who don't always do what you ask them to. Really!

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." That is the goal of Wikipedia's creator, Jimmy Wales. He has set his sights on Google and the other corporate Search Engines with his new project "Wikia," a personal search engine-builder.

Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.

For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.