Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Milk rot

Says here that RagingCow's blog has been dead for ten months.

wtF?

As the blogosphere lights up about Joe Trippi's resignation (or whatever it was, really), I'm waiting for Howard, Roy and Joe to blog about the matter personally.

Tell us what happened, guys. "Statements" won't cut it. Think about what they don't say. That's what we're all hearing right now.

[Later...] Dave takes me for a ride on the Cluetrain to what Jim Moore wrote today about how the Dean Campaign needs to do "organizational learning."

The justice against terrorism

Was just pointed by a reader to the sentence handed down a year ago against Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber."

Here's the paragraph that stands out for me:

There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court, where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice, you are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. So war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow. But you are not that big. You're no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.

Reminds me that my main problem with the "war against terrorism" (with its jailing of "enemy combatants" who are denied rights guaranteed by the constitution) is that it's a "war" in only the broadest and most metaphorical sense. The army didn't capture Mr. Reid. Citizens did, inside the commercial aircraft where he was attempting to commit mass murder.

You don't need a war to "bring justice" to guys like Reid. You need a civilization, and a tough but civilized response to a "species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders."

Lessig is more

Larry Lessig has an exercize for Declan. And everybody else looking for understanding, rather than playing gotcha.

Xcept maybe you

I think I'm the last person to hear about Naked Loft Party.

Unrelated bonus Link: Mary's Does your porn come from sex slaves?

Aphorism of the day

The more you make your stuff like heroin, the better off you are. — David Sifry

Who, by the way, would like your help describing his own brew, Technorati:

Is it a search engine for blogs? A conversation engine? Or something else again?

Same with "cosmos." Is there a more self-explanatory word for what Technorati finds? Or a better way to say exactly what "cosmos" means?

Brad DeLong calls it a surprisingly complete implementation of the vision set out by Ted Nelson. Technorati is a transclusion engine plus a set of functionals updated in real time on the graph of links that is the web. It makes the web into a real-time two-way conversation, valuable in that you can tell who is linking to you, and valuable in that it also gives you a set of crude overview indications of how the pattern of links that is the web is growing and changing.

In the current Wired, "Blogfather" (yes, they call him that) Glenn Reynolds says

Technorati is my favorite weblog too. It lets you enter a URL and see all the blogs linking to itl I can check out who's linking to my blog — discoveirng praise or outright savaging from strangers. it's like the 17th-century coffeehouse in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver without the threat of a duel.

It was those kinds of coffeehouses that Kevin referred to when we were talking about "lost cultural spaces" earlier today.

Good head

The Head Lemur on virus wrangling:

These folks really need to get lives, laid or drunk.

Switchbard

Om knows phones. Naturally, he'd be the guy to remind us today that the telephone switchboard is 124 years old.

Pop goes the telly

Had a delightful conversation this morning with Kevin Marks about "lost cultural spaces." I suggested that we were now completing The Enlightenment (described by Paul Brians as a "celebration of human capacity") that was rudely interrupted by the "Industrial bubble." Kevin instead blamed the "mass media bubble." That instantly made much more sense to me.

For an excellent explanation, read Jeff Jarvis and his sources here. Also John Podhoretz' The Media Lose, in today's New York Post:

The press has been wrong about everything. Everything. Keep that in mind for the rest of the year. You can be sure that the political media won't remind you of it.

Also dig the rest of the Jeff Jarvis post that sources it.

In that post he re-says this:

The remote control and cable killed mass media like a volcanic eruption; the Internet is the forest that grows in the ashes.

In Defending the Cave Man, Rob Becker says that, because he can no longer carry a spear, Modern Man (unlike Modern Woman) carries a remote control: Men use it to "hunt channels"; women to "gather information." She wants to take in as many stations as she can; he wants to kill them all... Get THAT off my TV... Get THAT off my TV...

Anyway, this all kinda reminds me of the old Mother Jones slogan:

You trust your mother. But you cut the cards.

Thanks to the Head Lemur for that last link.

Living ends

Last night I noticed for the first time the similarities between major media's coverage of New Hampshire and its coverage of Mars. I didn't see the resemblance until I got back home and fired up a news aggregator. Coverage from the individual channels was much more alive than the live coverage from the TV and radio crews.

The People aren't hacking the old system so much as they're creating a new one. Interesting.