February 2003 Archives

From my song Future Knocks:

No daddy ever
Taught me to play ball
No one to
Catch me when I fall

I learned about life
At the age of three
Had it all there
On my TV screen

Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers, passed away this morning. Thank you for being there for me and so many others.

NYDaily News: Sad day in neighborhood: Beloved Mister Rogers dies:

PITTSBURGH - Fred Rogers, who gently invited millions of children to be his neighbor as host of the public television show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" for more than 30 years, died of cancer early Thursday. He was 74.

....From 1968 to 2000, Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, produced the show at Pittsburgh public television station WQED. The final new episode, which was taped in December 2000, aired in August 2001, though PBS affiliates continued to air back episodes.

...Rogers composed his own songs for the show and began each episode in a set made to look like a comfortable living room, singing "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood," as he donned sneakers and a zip-up cardigan.

...His message remained a simple one throughout the years, telling his viewers to love themselves and others. On each show, he would take his audience on a magical trolley ride into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where his puppet creations would interact with each other and adults.

...Rogers taught children how to share, how to deal with anger and even how not to fear the bathtub by assuring them they'll never go down the drain.

..."We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility," he said in 1994. "It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.'

"Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes."

...The series remained popular through the years, including with children of baby boomers who watched the show growing up. Its ratings peaked in 1985-86 when approximately 8 percent of all U.S. households with televisions tuned in. By the 1999-2000 season, viewership had dropped to about 2.7 percent, or 3.6 million people.

One of Rogers' red sweaters hangs in the Smithsonian Institution.

..He studied early childhood development at the University of Pittsburgh's graduate school and consulted for decades with the late Dr. Margaret McFarland, an eminent child development expert at the university. The show examined the tribulations of childhood, including anger, fear, even a visit to the dentist.

At a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the show in 1993, Rogers said, "It's not the honors and not the titles and not the power that is of ultimate importance. It's what resides inside."

Off the set, Rogers was much like his television persona. He swam daily, read voraciously and listened to Beethoven. He once volunteered at a state prison in Pittsburgh and helped set up a playroom there for children visiting their parents.

...Rogers is survived by his wife, Joanne, a concert pianist; two sons and two grandsons.

Robyn shares her thoughts, as will I am sure, many, many others. Forgive me for not linking to them because I'm just not weblogging the rest of the day. MetaFilter has a thread going as well.

This is Just the Day. Have a good one.

CSMonitor: Pacific Coast as a boom-bust belt. Everything changes. For so long we've been told the opportunity is on the West Coast. No longer.

Steve, you will like this one... 46% of all duct tape is produced by the Manco Company - a $100,000 GOP campaign contributor. Irrelevant? You decide.

For you Wal-Mart haters, a look at the good and bad of the Wal-Mart empire in Fortune Magazine. via Dane Carlson.

Looks like Internet usage made a difference in Korean politics.

Speaking of net usage making a difference, learn How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly.

A bunch of WashingtonPost readers are pissed at the paper for revealing too much about operations in Iraq. It seems nothing can be kept a secret anymore. I'm all for investigative reporting, but why did they need to publish those details? They didn't help the reader to better understand the conflict. They didn't educate the reader as to the news. They didn't expose to the reader important facts that they needed to know.

Burningbird and Scripting News continue to have the best commentary on the Google+Blogger deal.

Mike looks more and more like a weblogger to me as he begins "phase three"...

According to Newton (yes THAT Newton) the end of the world is soon anyway. Party like it's 1999.

A must-see website: LostLabor.com. America used to be the workshop of the world. What are we now? (I think this is via dangerousmeta).

The Grammys had it's moments, but overall still sucked. For starters, the artists kept their mouths shut. How boring. And frightened looking. I swore you could see the uncertainty, "Should I speak, or will I get booed?" Even Springsteen played it safe.

Did you notice the expanding trend (started last year) of highlighting music that's back to basics? They are so desperate for it they practically threw awards at Norah Jones. You could see her and John Mayer's true surprise. Even Eminem played with musicians in the background - Philadelphia's kick ass hip-hop band The Roots. Damn I love that song. The tribute to Run-DMC at the end was a nice touch too.

Bruce seemed to be the glue that held everything together, even if I think he could have brought the house down, and send a message, by ripping thru "Born in the USA". The lyrics bear listening to in this day and age.

More then ever before, the category selections made no sense. Crackheads must do the category assigning. Bon Jovi for pop song? And what's up with nominating Pink for so little? Unlike other teen pop stars, she's growing up to be tougher and more honest lyrically, showing real growth, instead of simply showing more ass (although really, who am I to complain?).

Metal and punk, except for the Joe Strummer tribute, were non-existant. I guess that's as it should be.

Speaking of "back to basics", check out the Johnny Cash video of him doing Hurt. It will rip your heart out. "You can have it all... my empire of dirt."

You can't be in music for the money. According to the NY Daily News, your average rock star will earn $40k from a gold album.

BTW, the NYTimes has been running a series on influential musicians. This week they cover Chuck Berry.

As for me, I've had more then a few tuning and action issues with my new Strat which have been keeping me busy. Most of my creative time has been spent tweaking her the past few weeks. Now she plays the way I play - which is both messy and nuanced. I transition from picking softer then a feather to harder then a jackhammer - wherever the a song takes me - and that required some work to get the action just right. Otherwise I was stuck with buzzes or needing Superman's strength to bend strings.

One thing I now know is that it's best for you to do your own guitar set-ups. No one, except maybe people close to you, can satisfy your needs, especially on a guitar as personalized as a Strat.

In related news... if things go well, and I think they are, I might be able to go public with news of a new band. I don't want to jinx it. Suffice to say - practices have been kicking ass. Nothing serious - just having fun. And therapy.

First the good - Mike is considering to resume blogging. I have the very same feelings about Mike's efforts that Jonathon Delacour did. He's a great conversation starter and will get you thinking in terms you may be uncomfortable with. He's back on my on blogroll in anticipation of getting those controversial discussions started up again.

Wired asks Why did Google Want Blogger? while the BBC questions whether Google has grown too powerful. The NYTimes has the best summary I think.

Jeff Jarvis defends his take on "Mr. Duct Tape".. More and more it looks like a bad episode of South Park. Well... there are *no* bad episodes of South Park so take that as you may...

A thing that strikes me is how we've squandered the world's support after 9/11. Click the link or the image to the right and know people across the globe stood with us. The attack backfired as far as world opinion went. Now that united spirit has been fractured, maybe even lost. Whose fault is that? You decide.

Update 2/24/2003: The Washington Post decided on publishing a story on this today. How timely.

The anniversary of Daniel Pearl's horrific murder just passed by. Read his wife's impassioned plea to attack the real enemy. We must be intolerant to intolerance and fanatical against fanaticism. True evil lies within each.

At least 60 dead at a Great White show. I've gone to countless shows just like this. I've even played a club very similar to this. My prayers go out to them today.

What I'm about to say is for those people that listened to Great White and won't admit it. If you always didn't like them - then the following isn't for you...

If you think it's cool to question how so many could be at a Great White show these days because it's passe, you're an asshole.

For us music is more then a fad or a phase. For us music isn't something you grow out of - it's something that carries you thru. Good music is timeless. Good music is forever. If you find yourself "growing out of music" - consider why you listen to the music you do. Don't be a poseur.

If you want to question anything, question the pyro usage in such a small club.

Update: News coming out pretty much damns the band and/or it's management. Looks like they've been using the pyro without permission. Everyone is pointing fingers.

Now if you'd like to ask how could a band such as Great White can get so many to its shows without industry support - that's a good question! Networks of fans. Word of mouth. Many bands survive and some even thrive, on tour, without major label support, without radio airplay. And it's not limited to just metal bands. You can find examples in all genres. Where the industry doesn't provide, underground culture will.

Garret asked a couple days ago where this generation's protest songs were. I'm sure they are out there, but as this NYTimes story says, with the consolidation that's occured in the industry, chances are slim you are going to hear them. But they are being played, at shows the industry isn't supporting, being supported by fans, thru word of mouth.

Let me urge the Dem webloggers on my blogroll to link to one another more often.

Oliver Willis, Eschaton, Rittenhouse, rc3.org, dangerousmeta, BillSaysThis, Jonathon Delacour, Burningbird, PageCount.

Actually - the last three already do. They cross-blog like crazy. But my associates at the top sometimes miss each other's good works. Republicans seem more likely to link to one another. Is there proof of that somewhere? I'm just making a personal (unfounded) observation without analyzing any data. Nevertheless...

And if you are reading my site scratching your head about the sites above... well.. visit them! Not your average ordinary bears.

Acting and not acting. How, why, and when? Jonathon Delacour's post, Consequences will get you thinking about Iraq, by sharing the viewpoint of a survivor of war-torn Japan.

Two postive articles by Nicholas Petreley on client-side Java:

LinuxWorld: Vive Java et Blackdown!
LinuxWorld: Jedit, Jext & J: Java-based editors compared.

Over at ThisIsCool is a build of GCC that will compile to executables Java client-side apps with SWT.

This will be a snow storm to remember. Wow!

Cringely explains how bad it is for Sun and what it needs to do to survive.

There is nothing conspiratorial about a company trying to make a buck while providing a service. That's the way it's supposed to work. Praise Google for having some vision. Just like Yahoo! before it. That was the point I was trying to make in my previous post that may have gotten lost. The Blogger team deserves this day and has helped to establish a new medium.

For a similar view, check out Google don't blink at Scripting News and his overall thoughts on the deal.

Search Engine Watch: Google Buys Blogging Company - But Why?.

Threads: Blogroots and Metafilter.

Boing Boing: Gbloogle: what it all (may) mean.

On oldie but goodie: Jakob Nielsen: Why Yahoo is Good (But May Get Worse). Read it and compare to present day Google. 1998!

Another oldie: Louis B. Rosenfeld: The Untimely Death of Yahoo. 1995!

And another!: Traffick.com: Why Yahoo Is No Longer Good. Just last year.

And back to the issue at hand... NYTimes: Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs. Whadda stupid title for this story! Google hasn't "tied" itself to weblogs anymore then it tied itself to newsgroups upon purchasing DejaNews.

Congrats to Dan on the NYTimes mention and scooping just about everybody!

Yahoo!, how we loved you so?

You had a directory whose quality was unquestionable.

You had pages that were quicker then quick, light and fast.

You had the greatest geek mindshare, bar none.

When people asked - how do I find [this] on the web? We confidently answered, "Yahoo!".

Then you decided to grow your business. AltaVista came and kicked your ass.

AltaVista, how we loved you so?

You had search results that were more accurate then your competitors.

You had pages that were quicker then quick, light and fast.

You took over the greatest geek mindshare, bar none.

When people asked - how do I find [this] on the web? We confidently answered, "AltaVista".

Then you decided to grow your business. Google came and kicked your ass.

Google, by purchasing Pyra Labs (Blogger if you live in a cave) is now trodding down a predictable path. Will it make the same mistakes?

People forget how much power Yahoo! had over the web in it's early days. As Google decides to grow it's business - I'm going on the lookout for who is going to dethrone it. Look for it to happen in one to three years. Like to make a bet?

Isn't this good for weblogging you ask? Initially, yes. Congrats to he Pyra folk who have been providing a valuable service to so many webloggers and readers. The service will definately be strengthened with Google's resources behind it. I fear that eventually however, when companies control both the pipe (in this case the search engine) and what goes thru it (weblogs are found more by search engines then by other weblogs, contrary to belief) - it is only good for one entity - the company itself.

Usenet newsgroups are just growing by leaps and bounds aren't they? Shelley is on target to remind us of Google buying Deja News.

Do people forget how great Geocities once was? eGroups? What makes Google so different from early Yahoo!?! Nothing! The same spirit that drove Yahoo! back in the day drives Google now. Yahoo! kicked ass. The geeks rallied behind it. Now it is a successful business. Good for Yahoo!. The pioneers however, moved on and promoted the upstart. Google has been kicking ass. The geeks have been rallying behind it. Soon it will be a large, successful business. And soon, a new generation of geeks will move on - eventually taking the web with them - to the new upstart.

Read about it in the Washington Post. I still don't know what to think. Saddam must go, but does all out war need to be the answer? This fellow says we're losing the propaganda war in a big way.

Update: It was one of the largest peace demonstrations in Philadelphia history. Protestors and anti-protestors, peaceful activism. What an amazing global event.

"God bless us all... . Be safe, stay connected and we will win." Only by coming together can change happen. That runs against what many believe. Yesterday - people came together on both sides of the fence to be heard.

Both the US and UK are toning down their stands on Iraq in response. The protestors made a difference. That and the inspector's report of course.

Can a person with the more nuanced views of Jonathon Delacour, like myself, be heard in the din? I believe Saddam has got to go. Unlike so many protestors, I recognize this is about more then oil. Far more. But I have issues with how, when, and what happens afterwards. I get pissed when people oversimplify the threats and causes. I get mad at the creeping anti-semitism (oh it's there alright, read about it at Yourish.com), and the anti-Americanism. I'm proud of this country. I'm blessed to live here. I'm frustrated and confused at hearing new Bin Laden tapes being released. Why isn't he dead? Why isn't his organization wiped from the face of the earth? Why?!?! I tend to think people with Jonathon's beliefs are in the majority - worldwide. They are amoungst many I know. Other webloggers who doesn't shy from posting complex views are Oliver Willis and Dave Winer. Gotta participate in one of these protests to find out.

BTW, contrary to popular belief, Clinton was good for our armed forces. Thank you, yet again, President Clinton. We miss you.

Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person?

NYTimes: Unspeakable Conversations. via dangerousmeta. A discussion on Eugenics. No really. And is a professor at Princeton? The esteem I held for the university is gone. Gone. Gone!

What if the 90s were a replay of the roaring twenties? Then this conversation - one that truely would have been unspeakable after WWII, is taking place right on time. An article in Wired almost predicted the reappearance of discussions such as this.

Man oh man. The further away we go from WWII the more we are willing to forget it's lessons.

Vincent James, in his 30s, a man who left a good job as a software engineer at Boeing, a man with four children, has thrown his career and paycheck to the wind. He is determined to make a living writing and singing love songs. His heart is filled with them. He believes the world needs them. To draw attention to himself, to show his resolve, he vowed to perform 100 times between New Year's Day and Valentine's Day.

Read the rest in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

"Flowers are nice. Candy is, too. But nothing makes a heart melt like words and a simple tune." Yep. Read the rest in the CSMonitor.

For something light hearted today, check out Peter David's weblog and his review of the latest Buffy and Angel. It's great to see a sci-fi writer doing a weblog. It's been done before, but this guy is actually posting some interesting things. Check out his comments threads! I may try a book of his.

And hey - you'd be completely justified in hating this day. We should always let our loved ones know we love them, not just on designated holidays! I have flashbacks to sixth grade almost every Valentine's day. It was the year I was at my geekiest. It was one of the longest days in my, then, very short life. Seeing the cards the other kids were getting and feeling down because my couple just didn't stack up. Pathetic ehh? I learned soon after that you should never judge your life by how well you think others may have it. The grass ain't greener no matter what your heart maybe saying. This year I'm blessed, so it's easy for me to have clarity of thought. But I don't forget where I came from, and I recognize how blessed I am everyday. You hate Valentine's? Good for you! I can't blame ya one little bit. Grrrr arg.

"Senator Robert Byrd gave a floor speech yesterday that's one for the history books." That's what Rafe had to say about Senator Robert Byrd's floor speech. Read it. You will agree. The Senate seems asleep at the wheel.

Well at least Congress caught the Administration's screw-up forgetting to give Afghanistan Aid. via Oliver Willis. Just a little oversight right? Pftt.

"Each one of us for one reason or another dreams of America, and America is everywhere." That's Italian commentator Alain Elkann in this NYTimes piece on how some European commentators see the growing rift between us. via dangerousmeta.com

Disable your cookies. Get a personal proxy (well I gotta do that one!). Google may win the Big Brother of the year award. A must read. via Scripting News. Gotta point you to Phoenix, the browser I use when I'm off the clock. Simple to use cookie management.

If you're poor, the GOP wants to tell you it loves you with it's compassionate conservative embrace.

Local and certainly not connected - viruses run rampant at schools. A stomach virus is shutting schools down.

What will happen at the UN today?

Finally some good news, from ABC: Terror Alert Partly Based on Fabricated Information.

Comic books. Store houses of wisdom they are. I'll be seeing Daredevil over the weekend. A quote to heart right now:

"The measure of a man is not in how he gets knocked to the mat, it is in how he gets up."

InternalMemos.com: A Clear Channel radio station prepares to for war.

CityJournal: How I Joined Teach for America ?and Got Sued for $20 Million. Man oh man.

PolicyReview: From Sarajevo to September 11. "...the world could rejoice in 60 years of extraordinary peace and progress. The first great age of globalization had made the world seem an infinitely smaller place. So great were the twin powers of technology and ideology intellectuals prophesied the end of all wars. Yet on that summer?s day, one act of terrorism in Sarajevo ? the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian fanatic called Gavrilo Princip ? set off a sickening train of events. The world plunged into the most horrific war in history, and even after the killing had stopped, countries everywhere renounced their previous openness, fortifying their borders to limit the movement of goods, people, and even ideas." A few edits there... but you get the point.

The Moscow Times (yes you read that right) Most Righteous War of All: A supportive (yes supportive) essay from Russia. You can almost here the snicker at the thought of how France and Germany are acting. via dangerousmeta.

Sen. McCain Address to 39th Annual Wehrkunde Conference. There are leaders out there! A Republican I would vote for. In a split second. via dangerousmeta.

BBC: Japan warns N. Korea.

Legal Affairs: Dante and the Death Penalty. A must read. Thought provoking.

An interesting InfoWorld story on project management. Quotes:

..."The act of constructing software is, in fact, not an engineering process," Cooper said. "Engineering to me is problem-solving, which is very different from solution implementations, which is what programmers [do]." Title inflation is endemic to the industry, he said. "Web designers are called programmers, programmers are called engineers, and engineers are called architects, and architects don't seem to ever get called," Cooper exclaimed.

...Software, said Cooper, is dominated by people who like to create things as opposed to those who like to serve other people.

via Dane Carlson.

Speaking of serving a need, MeanDean blogs about e-Sword free bible study software. Looks interesting.

Over at InternalMemos.com: The Java Problem: A nasty memo by a Sun employee ripping Java hard. Even if it's fake, it makes some great points.

If you ever wanted to get started developing your own games: How do I make games?, an essay by Geoff Howland, sounds like just the path to follow.

Both of these via flutterby.

Update: The Sun memo was real!

Read about the pre-emptive response growing at Wired News. Websites can make a difference... at least to those that read them. Will this get shared in media off the web I wonder?

In other related news... BBC News has posted the entire text of the latest so-called Bin Laden message.

The WashingtonPost, among others, attempts to scare the shit out of us.

While we are being told, how this time, to prepare for the worst.

I bet the Pres isn't so happy now he kept Greenspan on considering what he had to say about the tax plan. Then again, a whole slew of economists agree with with him.

And thanks to kowgirl who shared a BusinessWeek link that confirms your worst fears about your career in information systems. That is, of course, if you live in the US. Hint.. your job is going the way of the factory jobs that went before them.

Of course, it could be worst. You could be held hostage by ferocious rabbits. Seriously!

I missed it on TV, but thanks to Oliver Willis not the site: Frontline explores the child welfare system.

... "People are treating the Web like a library and going to the card catalog rather than searching through all the books,"

..."After a while you get tired of flipping through the channels and just turn to the programs you like," he said.

Read the rest over at Yahoo!.

Semi-related: Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Dave Winer's and Shelley Powers's. responses. Shelley's post is home to a great conversation and I highly recommend it. Jason Kottke adds some good linkage as well.

Birds of a feather flock virtually together, that's what I always say :)

In the end, I think Mark Pilgrim says it best, "All the friendships I?ve developed in the past 2 years?starting long before I was in the Technorati Top 10?grew out of connections I made through writing this weblog and reading others. This month I?ll get 1 million hits on my weblog, and have lunch with 10 friends I met through my weblog. Guess which I care about more."

Well damn straight.

Chloe in a related BlogRoots thread says,

"What I wonder is why this is being treated as "news"...I've noticed this pattern in society from the time I started pre-school."

Yep, she's absolutely right. This isn't news. It's the same old news. In fact - I wrote a piece, some may recall, a long, long, long time ago, about the power of the link and how some weblogs actually wield more "power" then others. This is old news. If I posted about it - it must be old news!

Information technology usually doesn't change what we do - just how we do it.

A question though - without idealists like Shelley and Dave (even if they are in the top 20) - would we end up with, instead of an 80/20 "power" (we need a better word) distribution, a 95/5? Think about it. And the play goes on...

Update: They are having a good debate at Slashdot on the Clay Shirky piece.

I remember feeling those those portrayed in this NYTimes article. I remember it all too well. Quote:

...Nationwide, according to a new study by a team from Northeastern University in Boston, the figure is a staggering 5.5 million and growing.

This army of undereducated, jobless young people, disconnected in most instances from society's mainstream, is restless and unhappy, and poses a severe long-term threat to the nation's well-being on many fronts.

...It's an article of faith among politicians and members of the media that the recession we continue to experience is a mild one. But it has hit broad sections of the nation's young people with a ferocity that has left many of them stunned.

...joblessness among out-of-school youths between 16 and 24 had surged by 12 percent since the year 2000. Washington's mindless response to this burgeoning crisis has been to slash ? and in some cases eliminate ? the few struggling programs aimed at bolstering youth employment and training.

Education and career decisions made during the late teens and early 20's are crucial to the lifetime employment and earnings prospects of an individual. Those who do not do well during this period seldom catch up to the rest of the population.

...Whether boys or girls, men or women, those who were interviewed seemed for the most part already defeated. They did not talk about finding the perfect job. They did not talk about being in love and eventually marrying and raising a family. They did not express a desire to someday own their own home.

There was, to tell the truth, a remarkable absence of positive comments and emotions of any kind. There was a widespread sense of frustration, and some anger. But mostly there was just sadness.

There are some good signs however.

Two stories to make sense of our reaction to Columbia:

Inquirer: John Grogan: 9/11 altered our view of tragedy

Inquirer: Shuttle disaster leaves some teens unmoved

A MetaFilter thread asks will there be songs written about Columbia?

What does how we use Google say about us?

Speaking of big shifts going on...

"The demographic trends do not favor one-size-fits-all news products," said Peter Francese, founder of American Demographics magazine, which tracks population changes. "There isn't one community to serve. It's gone. ... It's now a matter of serving niches rather than trying to be all things to all people," he said.

Read the rest in Why Won't Johnny Read?.

Mark shares that OLGA.net is being threatened by legal action (yet again). They've dodged many bullets in the past, but in this legal environment, this could be the end.

You've probably improved your guitar playing by using tablature from OLGA. Make a donation to help support their legality.

Speaking of Rock and activism: Salon has a story on Audioslave's Tom Morello and System of a Down's Serj Tankian and their thoughts about what's going on.

Update: Mark corrects a couple of my misunderstandings in this postings comments. Nevertheless, it's still a good idea to donate to assist Olga.

I didn't de-link anybody :) I moved my blogroll to it's own page. This will give me a little more space to try a few neat automated services if I get the urge. The first thing I'm going to do is link to each of your RSS feeds.

I've heard about them on NPR before but never investigated. BigChampagne is a very interesting service.

Hey it's not me, it's John Perry Barlow saying that in a recent interview. He precedes this by saying, "There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political institutions -- whether it's the administration or Congress or large corporations -- only respond to other institutions. I don't care how many individuals you have marching in the streets, they're not going to pay attention until there's a leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I represent the organization of those individuals and we're going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the hell out of office. Then they pay attention. But not until. And so right at the moment it would strike me that the Internet is counterproductive to peace."

Wow! Great quote!

John Perry Barlow, if you are not familiar with him, is co-founder of the Internet-legendary Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former songwriter for the Grateful Dead.

The interviewer says he's shocked that Barlow would say this. He should read David Shenk's 1998 classic, "Data Smog". Time to read Bowling Alone. I've been putting it off for a little too long.

Update: Some Slashdotters take it personal while at MetaFilter they argue themselves into a circle.

Will there be a mass movement to utilize tools like MoveOn.org or will the prevailing me-too trend continue where individuals refuse to come together and decide to create their own competing efforts? Everyone shouting the same things - but seperate from each other. Barlow says there needs to be a leader to represent an institution. What I think he fails to see is that we've been taught not to trust leaders, even from amoungst us. Leaders fail and leaders fall. So do institutions. So we go our own way and trust in only ourselves. You can't attribute that to the Internet. It's the way our generation thinks. Decentralized. Individualized. The Internet is an expression of that. A multitude of choice and the freedom to us it.

The demographic trends do not favor one-size-fits-all news products," said Peter Francese, founder of American Demographics magazine, which tracks population changes. "There isn't one community to serve. It's gone. ... It's now a matter of serving niches rather than trying to be all things to all people," he said.

That's from an article about 18-34 year olds rejecting traditional media and switching to the Internet for their news. The same trend has taken place in TV and Music. More choices. Smaller audiences. Less and less shared experience and information. It's all out there - but it's up to you to find it or the martketers to find you and lead you to it.

No, this is not the Challenger. We've grown too coarse, too cynical, and too jaded. The NYTimes says, the nation's instinctive reaction was to ask, "What's next?". Talking to friends and family leads me to believe the NYTimes got it right. Many discussions were attempts at avoiding the subject. Our skin just got thicker. Our wagons circled tighter. Most parents I know didn't allow their children to watch TV and they didn't hear the President's attempt to comfort the nation. In fact, one said outright, "I just don't want it on TV. What else is there to talk about? Get it off the news".

I'm going to take a moment not to think about tomorrow, but to say a prayer for those who just lost a loved one and ask for the strength to not further recoil into my own skin.

Garret says, in my favorite weblogger essay yesterday, "there are a lot of ways to die, some 'good,' some 'bad.' these astronauts lost their lives in action, doing something they loved. in the midst of our horror at their fates, their sacrifice deserves respect, and honour." Indeed, "space travellers are a special breed; and they come from all nations".

And that is where Man's destiny hides. Across the boundries. Not hiding in caves from the coming storm. In a day where personal trust is at an all time low, a generational trend that started 30 years ago, it's a fight that always deserves to be waged.

Links:
Scripting News - Terrific linkage at a time of sorrow. Many of the links below are pulled from here. I couldn't find the will to post yesterday.

Similarly, Metafilter was very active yesterday in it's discussion threads.

MP3 (right click and download): Julia Ecklar singing "The Phoenix" via Code the Web Socket. A touching and powerful folk tune that fits the moment.

Don't miss reading Meryl's "Requiem for Columbia" and Shelley's "What the Shuttles have given us". You'll get some indicators as to why I feel the way I do from what some have posted in Shelley's comments.

In the 80s: I Remember the Challenger. Hundreds of personal recollections of that terrible day.

Go at Throttle-Up, "It would never occur to a baby-boomer that anything associated with the shuttle could have historical significance. Having lived through the heady excitement of real history-makers like Mercury and Apollo, boomers see the shuttle as an afterthought, an unglamorous eighteen-wheeler hauling satellites to and from orbit."

Poynter Online - a huge collection of related links.

Just as after the Challenger accident, a chorus rises for the Shuttle program to end.

From 1980, Washington Monthly, Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty.

The Corner thinks out loud about perfectly normal people starting to think about "Signs" and links to a 1998 Peggy Noonan article.

Finally, the obligatory, they were warned story. It's always the same isn't it?