Saw this on Bartleby.com and thought it was insightful enough to be worth passing along: “Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband-it creeps up insidiously … step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that it is gone.” — Baron […]

A little belated, perhaps, but just thought I’d run down a few of the things I was thankful for in 2002… Wilco, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot“. Album of the year, no matter how much fawning over Eminem the media does. Coldplay, “A Rush of Blood to the Head”. Was this a 2002 release? Or did it […]

To celebrate 2003, I’m posting something I wrote on this day three years ago, when we were all looking around and realizing that Y2K hadn’t melted everything down after all.

Tara Sue Grubb has a great bit on her blog about getting involved with a local group attempting to build connections in her community. She suggested that they put together a Web site that the community could work on collaboratively — a real collective Web presence. She was, of course, immediately shot down (seems to […]

Oh, boy… Dave Winer‘s at it again. Today he’s pontificating on the differences between two philosophies of how applications should communicate over the Internet. And, as he’s been doing a lot lately, he’s busied himself throwing a hand grenade into the discussion.

There’s an interesting article over at the NY Times today about Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). Always known for his command of rhetoric and his respect for the Senate as an institution, he has been deploying both qualities to stand in lonely opposition to the recently passed bill to create a “Department of Homeland Security” (God, […]

Over on her blog, Jen Klyse is telling an interesting story of her experiences with airline security blacklists — lists of people who, for reasons that aren’t disclosed, are automatically singled out for special scrutiny when they travel. Apparently she’s not on the “A list” of people who are actually denied boarding, since they do […]

Well, Tuesday’s election came and went and Tara Sue Grubb, the woman I wrote about awhile back who was running for Congress on a platform of Net freedom, picked up about 11% of the vote. Not bad for a third-party candidate running against an entrenched incumbent — especially one whose total campaign budget was $3500! […]

Are you an Angry Dem? Don’t worry, there’s lots of that going around these days 🙂

Sebastien Paquet has launched an effort to work on a problem I find particularly interesting: how to turn Weblogs into a platform to allow discussions and communities to form organically, by joining together blogs based on topics of common interest. His Wiki on RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming is the center of the discussion on the subject. Check it […]

If there’s anything that indicates how widespread blogging has become, this is it — check out The Homeless Guy, a blog by Kevin Michael Barbieux, insightful writer and — yes — homeless person. He blogs from PCs in the local library, hoping to foster “a greater awareness about the whole-ness of homeless people.” It’s definitely […]

So I’ve recently been asked to evaluate various content management systems (CMSes, for short), and after exhaustive analysis, I can sum up the marketplace in two words: They suck. No, seriously. All of them. They ALL SUCK. What is the matter here? Why can’t the collective intelligence of thousands of bright engineers come up with […]

Did you ever have one of those days when you felt like you could just take the world by the scruff of the neck and SWING, and you just KNEW you’d throw it farther and faster than anyone ever had before, but you weren’t allowed to do it? Man. I HATE that feeling. I feel […]

You know, whenever I get to thinking that the depths of human stupidity have been plumbed, someone always comes along to demonstrate just how much further we can go. This guy is a prime example. His big complaint seems to be that Google’s page-ranking algorithm, PageRank (clever naming there), isn’t “democratic” enough. He says this […]

You don’t need me to tell you that today is the first anniversary of the terrible attack upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unless you live in a cave, the memory of that day is probably etched indelibly in your mind; and you’ve probably been casting a wary eye at the calendar ever […]

Well, the anniversary of the Sep. 11 attacks is drawing near, and there’s bad mojo coming out of Afghanistan once again. I’m not a defeatist — I think our incursion into Afghanistan threw al-Qaeda’s plans into disarray, which has to be counted a success — but recent events have me wondering if maybe we’re not […]

Two hundred and twenty-six years ago today, a group of men from all over the British colonies in North America took a terrific risk. They gathered in Philadelphia to put their names to a document which was to be sent to the most powerful man in the world — King George III, on his throne […]

Wired News is reporting that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a July lower court ruling that Napster’s free online file-trading service has to go offline. Not news in practical terms, since Napster has shifted its focus to for-pay services, leaving the free file-swapping market to others, but it is one more […]

Dave Winer’s Scripting News is one of the most consistently interesting and useful sites on the Web. (Heck, I link to it from my home page!) His highly clueful observations, even when they seem a little off-the-wall, are almost always on the mark in one important way or another. So what’s up with his boneheaded […]