Thursday, December 5, 2002

A happy beginning

You'll remember how, on November 12, I pointed to the Immodest Proposal, by our little school and its friends, to buy St. Anthony's Seminary, a landmark in the middle of Santa Barbara. (Here's a slide show of the place, all shot on my Sony PC-110 1-megapixel video camera.)

So here's the good news: we actually came up with the money, Or promises of it, with the help of some big guys. It was enough to get a competitive bid together (the only other contenders are a billionaire family with no local constituency and fairly bad PR). It's an amazing story, considering, and very well told by local papers that have sadly scrolled their "content" away to unlinkable archives and other forms of oblivion — although the current Angry Poodle Barbeque by Nick Welsh takes a fun angle on the thing. Read that one before it scrolls away too.

Anyway, the deal requires that we come up with one small slice of the bid pie: a mere few $ million. Soon.

If you have any leads, or a few large bills you can fish out of the cracks in your couch, let me know.

Listen up

I'm on CNET Radio/910am in the Bay Area right now (10-11am Pacific time). Also XM Satellite radio and the station's own site.

My co-guest is James Gray, co-author of Linux in the Workplace and a colleague at Linux Journal.

Redeconstruction

RageBoy discovers a piece of Cluetrain prehistory. Good stuff.

And Mitch Ratcliffe deconstructs yesterday's deconstruction mess. He says some quotable stuff I might use in the final (for print) version of what I wrote here.

Three French blogs, two turtle doves...

Found this, this and this in my current cosmos.

Lowering the threshold of mulltiplied genius

George Siemens on The Art of Blogging:

But what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It's somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It's genuinely new. And it harnesses the web's real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It's a new medium finally finding a unique voice.

Gas from the past

Just got an email asking to quote something I wrote in 1996. I'd all but forgotten about the piece. Not even sure who I wrote it for.