10 Tips on Writing the Living Web

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Read them from Mark Bernsein’s article at A List Apart. via dive into mark.

They explain alot on the success of Dave Winer, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Shelley Powers actually. The exemplify all of the principals below. hmmmm… how do I standup to the ten tips?

  1. Write for a reason – lost that when I shut down PhillyFuture and PhillyStories.
  2. Write often – don’t do that.
  3. Write tight – Ok… got that down.
  4. Make good friends – Definately great friends 🙂
  5. Find good enemies – Who want’s to be my ‘enemy’? Anyone wanna pick a fight with me? Bring it on! Actually – the responsibility is on me to post on topics that people feel so passionate about they want to argue. I freakout at website to website arguing so I kinda avoid it. I much rather argue in private e-mail arguments. So I’m at a loss here.
  6. Let the story unfold – errrr… see 1. and 2.
  7. Stand up, speak out – ok. I do that.
  8. Be sexy – Well my longer pieces in my sidebar are personal, but generally I don’t post about my personal life here cause it’s personal. Ahh that was a fun sentence.
  9. Use your archives – Check.
  10. Relax! – Check.

I think it all starts on point 1. How do I reclaim that? Certainly not with my past failed experiments. When you write for a reason, you will want to post frequently, and you will care so much about the topic that your posts will find supporters and enemies on their own. You’re bound to use your personal history to embellish your posts as well. So it all starts there.

Geeks in government: A good idea?

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technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws irrelevant.

“They’re much better off doing what they do best, writing code,” says Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco. “That’s where their competitive advantage lies.”

Put another way, who made a bigger difference: Yet another letter-scribbling activist or Phil Zimmermann, who wrote the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software? How about Shawn Fanning, the man who created Napster? Or the veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the fundamental protocols of the Internet?

Read the rest in Declan McCullagh’s CNet article.

Ira Einhorn’s long, strange trip

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The man whom Philadelphia loves to hate greets me with a bear hug each time I make the trip to State Correctional Facility in Houtzdale, Pa., his home since his extradition from France last year to face a 25-year-old murder charge. After the months I’ve spent digesting the enormous literature devoted to him, it’s something of a surprise to find that the baby-boom Hannibal Lecter is a nervous person of 61, some 6 feet tall with a full head of white hair, trim in his orange prison-issue jumpsuit, attentive and anxious to please. But any doubt that this is Ira Einhorn, the famous ’60s icon and infamous international fugitive, is put to rest immediately by the pink scar still visible above his collar, a reminder of his last night in France, when he cut his throat in front of reporters. A chipped front tooth gives him his crooked smile, familiar from pictures. His eyes, which contain a nearly manic intensity in their shocking blue, are very hard to meet.

Read the rest in this Salon article.