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August 27, 2003

The private Private Lynch
: Private Lynch has an honorable discharge, so she's now free to tell/sell her story.

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We've only just begun...
: I got to see Ev Williams today, for the first time in way too long. (See his moblog photo here. Scroll up and you'll see an odd picture of a mean injury on Ev's photogenic face. Judging by the way I look in my picture, as if I'm about to lunge across the table at him in some heated moment of RSS argument, it may appear as if this is an action sequence. But he arrived with the scar. I didn't do it. Sporting injury, just for the record.)
We had fun (or at least I did) talking about so much that is left to be done with weblogs, tons of new functionality, lots of important uses, many new dimensions of data.
So add this thought to my post below in which I tweak my friend Jimmy Gutterman for tweaking bloggers: We are still at the dawn of this weblog thing. There is much more to be done before weblogging in its many forms -- community, content, advertising, organizing -- can begin to reach its potential.

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Out
: I know that the Barney's Warehouse Sale has been out (as opposed to in) for years now. But I still go. That's where I get my suits (protective coloration at Conde Nast, as a colleague says). I'll confess that but for the grace of a half-hour, I would have been stuck there when the lights went out a week ago (boy, would that have been embarrassing).
Anyway, as the sale sputters to its close this weekend, I must sadly report that it ain't what it used to be.
They closed off whole hunks of the floor at the 17th Street warehouse; they are simply selling less.
The suits included hardly any designer labels; it's just Barney's private-label stuff (which is nice, but it's no Boss and certainly no Aramani).
The crowd was clearly thin; today they shut down the downstairs checkouts.
What am I going to do? Pay retail?

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Cold crime
: Who'd have thought that there was crime in Antarctica?
A boat was nabbed for poaching endangered Chilean Seabass -- which is the ingredient for Nobu's signature dish.
What will New Yorkers do?

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Poor us
: Joi Ito says it appears that America's infrastructure is falling apart. Can we argue?

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Hyperlocal
: My experiment with hyperlocal blogging continues, in fits and starts. I attended -- no, covered -- my town meeting last night.

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Remake
: Howard Dean is trying to deftly remold his war posture and it's getting noticed. Glenn Reynolds quotes Dean: "We have no choice. It's a matter of national security. If we leave and we don't get a democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States. . . . bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition." And then he says:

Howard Dean is right. And he's the leading Democratic candidate at the moment. And that's bad news for the terrorists, whose only hope is that we'll fool ourselves into thinking otherwise, and give up before the job is done.

And Michael J Totten points to this Washington Post story on the topic.

The challenge for Dean now is to transition from champion of the antiwar, anti-Bush left to electable Democrat without losing his steam and solid liberal base, according to Democratic strategists.

That will be a challenge, since he's already alienated me and a whole lot of other Democrats. And making the right noises isn't enough. He needs to be genuine. I'll see right through him if he is not.

This transition is no easy task for the most outspoken critic of the Iraqi war...

No kidding.

I think what you're seeing, from Totten at least, is simply the disaffection that comes from looking at the present Democratic field. Realistic Democrats, like us, are starting to ask ourselves whether we could go for Dean... and there's no good answer, yet.

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Dander up
: Jimmy Gutterman is trying to steal a trick from Andrew Orlowski -- that is, baiting bloggers as a pathetic ploy for attention -- with a piece at Business 2.0 that poo-poos blogs.

Several years into the phenomenon, even with solid tools like Blogger available, the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There's only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool.

Come on, Jimmy. It's just a publishing tool. It's just content. And, yes, I can name others making money -- and other big companies using weblogs (start here). Maybe you're just reading the wrong weblogs; you're concentrating in your piece just on the founding bloggers when the field has exploded in every direction. Or you can't get the hang of writing one. But you sound just like an old radio guy who thought this television thang would never pay off. [via I Want Media]

: Jimmy says weblogs have been around for six years, and so he judges their popularity on that time scale. Well, Filo T. Pharnsworth came up with TV a long time before it became popular. I'm not ready to start the clock on weblogs yet. September 11 brought on more writers. The war brought on more readers. AOL et al will bring in the masses. It's still just the beginning.

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Just what we've been waiting for
: Glenn Reynolds, law professor, on the 10 Commandments.

As George Washington noted, "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
I'm willing to ignore, as de minimis, things like "In God We Trust." But there's nothing de minimis about what Roy Moore was attempting. He wanted to make a statement, to the effect that George Washington was wrong, and that the United States is a Christian nation. He wanted, in other words, to establish Christianity as the officially sanctioned religion. And that's not, er, kosher. It's quite obvious that Moore has more in mind than merely making a cultural/historical statement about the role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in law. And to suggest otherwise is either to be completely clueless or to, er, bear false witness.

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