Dave Winer comments on last night's Thursday meeting. It was totally packed.#

Packed house tonight. This is going to be something, a beta group for a new software product at a university that meets once a week. Even in the old days, in the 80s, I never had so much contact with users. Off to a great start. BTW, I'd love to read other people's accounts of tonight's meeting.

My notes are online in two versions: HTML and OPML.

I think Channel Z is amazing. I can't wait to use it or something like it for my blog. Simple tools and ideas combined intelligently can do anything.

AKMA talks about the da Vinci Code and different ideas in the Christian faith.#

I spoke first, and addressed the topics I'd been assigned: Was Jesus married? What about the Gnostic gospels? and When were women forced out of church leadership? I began by explaining that although we can't know for a certainty that Jesus wasn't married, there is no evidence to suggest that he was married, and plenty of evidence to suggest that he wasn't. On the evidence we have, there's just absolutely no basis for suggesting that Jesus might have been married.

If, however, he had been married, there's again no reason to suppose that his wife was Mary Magdalene. They appear in various settings together; none of our earliest or most reliable sources suggest that their relationship was any more intimate than that of a teacher and student. When Mary met the resurrected Jesus, she didn't run to him and cry, "Darling! You were right!" The one text — out of all sources for early Christianity — that even comes close to suggesting that they were intimate is the gnostic Gospel of Philip, in which Mary is identified as Jesus' koinwnos (here carried over into Coptic from Greek), "partner, companion" and in which they complain that Jesus kisses her on the mouth and loves her more than them. This second-century text is thus the closest we have to suggesting that Jesus was married, and — with its marked gnostic flavor — it's surely not more reliable than first-century traditions that show no awareness of a conjugal relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Faré writes about his one true love... computers.#

Whether they are in their teens or their thirties years old, I like to watch photos of their naked front and back; and when I can't touch them myself, I enjoy watching the action, or reading the best that was written about it.

[...] That said when they're old and used, don't throw them away. Please, donate them to a nearby museum. In Paris, I like to donate to Philippe's. I've seen quite a nice one in Lausanne, and I'm sure you'll find one near to you.

My! Computers. Can't live with them, can't live without them.

Peter Lindberg writes about Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.#

As for projects who want to do all their planning at the start, Kuhn's talk about what happens after the emergence of a new paradigm seem relevant. [...]

Later in this paragraph, Kuhn quotes Francis Bacon as saying: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. Projects that proceed using only paper products (diagrams, documents) can't be sure of the truth. They might feel certain of their assumptions being correct, but not until exposing the software to its users will they know for sure whether they were right. Talk and diagrams aren't effective in finding out if the customer and the development team are sharing the same vision.

[...]

Central in science are experiments. Empirical work. For software projects this means actually producing something and testing it on the users. It's the articulation of a hypothesis and the experiments to prove or reject it. All over the book, Kuhn says things such as how science is often about bringing nature and theory into closer and closer agreement. This is true for software projects as well; it's not only about giving the customer what he wants, but helping him to find out what he wants. This is not about giving him something and saying Here's what you want!It's about giving him something, and seeing how he reacts upon it. It gives him as well as you ideas of how to proceed.

Peter is great at making connections like this. And, what is rather curious is that Dave, Andrew, and I were talking about this last night; although not as articulately.

Matt Stoller has a new political vocabulary for 2004.#

Gore (1): verb To 'over-handle' a candidate and destroy the essence of his appeal with earth tones.

Gore (2): verb To be misconstrued and attacked for your opponents interpretation of what you meant or said

Fleisch: To lie with such contempt for you audience that both you and they know you are lying, and you don't care, and they don't expect you to.

Brittney writes a sad short fiction.#

You are flipping through stacks of pictures while he plays chess on the computer. There are photographs of his old band in the studio, his ugly bowtie and cumberbund combo from senior prom and him with that awful, grown-out haircut sitting on some rotting log.

The pictures stick together, tacky with time and dirt and tape. Fuzzy photos of him as a baby in a big, red wagon. Pictures of hollowed out grocery stores, black and white images of sculptures and lampshades.

He joins you on his bed, bending it with his weight, as you are nearing the end of the pile. He twists a lock of your hair, looking at them with you, and you love him so much you wish you could have loved him at eight and twelve and twenty-two.

What happens next? You know you want to know.

Mitch Ratcliffe writes about social networks and the new campaigning style.#

I was talking with Jon Lebkowsky and Britt Blaser last night and here's what I think the most promising feature of today's Dean-led activism: With the tools being built today and that will certainly be improved every election cycle to come, anyone can run for any office.

The focus on electing a president is a distraction from the normal operation of a democracy. When you aren't living in a tyranny, yes, changing the regime in Washington becomes more consuming, but when you've got a normally functioning democracy, the president doesn't matter as much on a day-to-day basis as the actions of millions of local and state elected officials who make the decisions that affect us palpably.

Camilo wonders why blogs are not as popular as they could be and offers one explanation.#

a) We live in a consumer society, where activities and expressions have to be socially accepted before we could try them. If we are close to that, though.

b) We are slaves of the user interface, meaning that few would dare to invest the time and energy to learn how to publish and do this interweb thingy.

c) We have grown accustomed to receiving content, not producing it. It certainly goes against the most traditional hierarchies, and places the responsibility for what is said in the shoulders of the blogger.

d) Blogging has to be considered "cool", has to achieve mainstream status before it is even considered a "normal" activity: Just as skydiving, it is not for everyone, but it can be done.

e) It competes with traditional media, and in most of the cases, it lacks any glitz: it is very hard to come up with some kind of extreme blogging, one that will cause people's heads to turn.

Blogging is by definition a study on networking, expansion of roots and dialogue to incude all those that may have a similar voice, a differing opinion, or a compelling message.

Steve McConnell writes about "Cargo Cult Software Engineering." He describe two effective software project organizations and then their "organizational imposters":#

The process-imposter organization bases its practices on a slavish devotion to process for process's sake. These organizations look at process-oriented organizations such as NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory and IBM's former Federal Systems Division. They observe that those organizations generate lots of documents and hold frequent meetings. They conclude that if they generate an equivalent number of documents and hold a comparable number of meetings they will be similarly successful. If they generate more documentation and hold more meetings, they will be even more successful! But they don't understand that the documentation and the meetings are not responsible for the success; they are the side effects of a few specific effective processes. We call these organizations bureaucratic because they put the form of software processes above the substance. Their misuse of process is demotivating, which hurts productivity. And they're not very enjoyable to work for.

The commitment-imposter organization focuses primarily on motivating people to work long hours. These organizations look at successful companies like Microsoft; observe that they generate very little documentation; offer stock options to their employees; and then require them to work mountains of overtime. They conclude that if they, too, minimize documentation, offer stock options, and require extensive overtime, they will be successful. The less documentation and the more overtime, the better! But these organizations miss the fact that Microsoft and other successful commitment-oriented companies don't require overtime. They hire people who love to create software. They team these people with other people who love to create software just as much as they do. They provide lavish organizational support and rewards for creating software. And then they turn them loose. The natural outcome is that software developers and managers choose to work long hours voluntarily. Imposter organizations confuse the effect (long hours) with the cause (high motivation). We call the imposter organizations sweatshops because they emphasize working hard rather than working smart, and they tend to be chaotic and ineffective. They're not very enjoyable to work for either.

The Longest Now write about energy dissipation in projects.#

It's funny how easy it is for a bundle of directed, productive energy to dissipate. Three different groups I am involved with, and two whose progress I have been following quite avidly, have dissipated dramatically from a nervous "we must do something this very month. what should it be?" to a confident "yes, let's make sure everyone is on the same page, meet a few more times, and figure out what we can accomplish by the end of winter". I am particularly intrigued by the uniform way the "this month" deadline decayed, in every case, into no deadline at all.

A key part of these dissipations was the process of meeting in the first place; in many cases, exchanges of written ideas and communication seemed to move things forward, whereas meetings brought everything to a standstill in their aftermath ("whew! we made it through that. now we can get back to all those other things we have to worry about...?"). In at least two instances, people who had cared greatly about certain points and brought them up before, felt that anything mentioned before the meeting (including their own points) had now been discussed, dealt with, and boiled down into the handful of 'action items' each of which it was now vaguely someone's responsibility to act upon... even when their pet peeves/ideas had been quietly elided in the heat of the moment. So how is it that, in the coming days, they didn't realize this and mention these points again?

Real Live Preacher announces a book on the horizon.#

Jason Marshall writes about intelligent optimization through the kindergarten skill of counting.#

Many times, it is not how expensive the method is, but how often it is called which makes it slow. When a method has relatively few call sites, or those call sites are very close together, the developer can easily pick out such patterns, once the profiler tells them there's a potential problem. If a slow method is called at the top of a block of code, and again halfway through, that's a fairly obvious problem. But once you've eliminated some of these extra calls, and perhaps optimized the method itself, your work may not be done, even if you've run out of good ideas.

[...]

Before you start working on "clever" ways to make the method faster, indeed, before you even let that little idea cross your mind, you should concern yourself with why your code keeps asking the same question over and over again. In all likelihood, your code has a data flow problem, one that probably qualifies as a full-blown Bad Code Smell. What you have here is not only an opportunity to make your code faster, but a chance to make it better as well.

Kevin Marks links to Chris Phoenix who writes about three systems of ethics.#

The three systems of ethics he describes are: Commercial, for companies; Guardian, for governments and public bodies; and the new, Information, idealized by the Open Source movement and "Hacker" ethic. Each is different and useful for a different purpose. And success only comes with proper application of all three.

A corollary of this is that an organization should not be expected to solve all problems. We should not expect a government to give non-citizens the same privileges as citizens. A corporation should not be expected to do business with people who have no money. Information creators should not be expected to decide whether or how to restrict their work or the information they produce. This is probably unwelcome news; it is strongly tempting to make any powerful organization responsible for anything it touches. However, to attempt to do this would create unhealthy, inefficient, or even tragic situations: a state forced to violate its own security; a corporation forced to waste money; a creator prevented from creating. To force an organization to adopt alien ethics is to force it to act unethically. Unfortunately, this means that many organizations will create problems that they not equipped to solve, and almost all organizations will confront problems that they cannot address.

Since any single organization can only deal with a fraction of the world's problems, the solution is to have organizations of each type working together, keeping each other in check, and letting the solution to the problems emerge from their interaction. Governments and commercial entities have had many centuries to learn how to work together. Information ethics are somewhat newer, since they only became widespread with the availability of cheap computers and the Internet. Computers have created a potential for unlimited copying.

Morendil writes about The Library of Babel and it's computer science meaning.#

In abstract, the Library is simply the combinatorial space of all combinations of length P from a set of N possible symbols. Borges' genius is to have given concrete values to P and N, and to have superimposed a concrete spatial vision over the mind-numbing vastness of the resulting number (10 to the 1,823,342).

The Library encompasses every conceivable text, meaningful or not. The number of books which contain some meaningful text in some language is still unbelievably large, as is the smaller number of books consisting solely of meaningful text in one given language. For any given book, there is a still freakishly, unimaginably large number of books which differ from it slightly enough (a comma, a few letters) as to make no noticeable difference. For any idea, there exist a stupendous number of books expressing that idea - and as many expressing its exact opposite.

This is the metaphor appropriate for understanding what software development consists of. All conceivable programs exist somewhere in the Library of Babel, or a version of it slightly modified to allow for the ASCII encodings we favor over Borges' original alphabet. Nearly all of them are meaningless jumbles of characters, but an astronomical number are programs which would compile if given to some compiler. For any given set of requirements, there is a freakishly, unimaginably large number of programs which implement these requirements.

Copyfight links to The Anarchist in the Library. The author, Siva Vaidhyanthan comments:#

The book was supposed to be a quick study of the ways peer-to-peer was altering the music and film industries, and how their reactions have corrupted our information ecosystems. Well, not only didothers do that job better than I could, but I became interested in much bigger issues relating to cultural democracy and the relationship between our information systems and politics.

Michael Feldman writes about gay marriage from a physical anthropologist's perspective.#

Along with Birth and Death, Marriage is one of the Big Three landmarks of our passage through this plane, and as such has been enshrined in custom, myth and ceremony since before the curtain came up on the recorded stage of history.

[...]

Biologically (and in terms of Physical Anthropology, of which the Dowbrigade was a practitioner for a time) the Big Three are more properly thought of as Birth, Fucking and Death. Anthropologically speaking, the institution of marriage serves to sanction certain reproductive practices and to prohibit others. The fascinating thing is that any geographically or historically varied survey will produce a wild and varied collection of sexual and marriage practices which were considered "normal" by some group of humans.

In our own historical and cultural tradition the institution of marriage has been used mainly to allow older socially powerful males to restrict sexual access to younger fertile females. This can be frustrating to younger sexually aggressive males, and the resultant sexual tension is the motor of most of our politics, entertainment and financial mismanagement.

Jonathon Delacour wonders about which design looks better. I like "Border on Sidebar Only," you?#

Alexander Payne is moving on.#

I found out tonight that she's long since moved on. Things I suspected and knew. She was halfway there when I was still in denial, and now she's settled in with someone new while I'm crumbling in on myself as I do every winter.

And I am telling myself it is good. It is positive and correct. It is the now-truth that shall set me free if I can ever get out of myself, which I'm working on (elaborate straight razor tunneling implement crafted from parts slipped by the warden). I'll take Miss K's advice and not fly too free before I sort myself out. Nobody needs more bullshit. Seriously people: I've been out on the streets, and the folks out there are laden with bullshit. Some poor lass doesn't need my bullshit.

We don't need 'em!

The Yeti writes about why Tolerance Is Not A Virtue.#

I just don't understand people who think that tolerance is normal. Somehow, someway, tolerance is supposed to be this magical tonic that all good people instinctively use to solve the world's problems.

Tolerance is a luxury of a civilized society that has the power to brutalize anyone the society chooses to tolerate. Its very nature is that of the powerful "tolerating" the weak. It is not natural - as should be obvious in any society where there is not a clear cut power structure, whether indigenous tribes of New Guinea or Arab Muslims.

If you do not fear a group of people, you can tolerate their differences. If you fear they are stronger, or will lower your standard of living, then you fight them and oppress them until they are weak or dead.

Tolerance is not a virtue. It is a symptom of economic domination.

I'm not sure The Yeti isn't implying this so I'll add it on. I think that tolerance is not a good thing for a different reason: If I "tolerate" homosexuals in my community then what I am really doing is saying, "I Hate You and would persecute you if I could, but because I 'tolerate' you I will contain my rage and not do anything about it." It is a way of allowing hatred to fester rather than dealing with it head on. "The sin is in the thought, not the act."

Richard links to funny core.#

Matt Webb comments on a William Mitchell talk.#

It's always good to hear someone with such a coherent worldview -- you get the impression that you could say anything to him and he'd have a good opinion about it. On the subject of those structuring principles, they reminded me a lot of cybernetics (there was a lot of talk of 'control systems'), but specifically the 1970s cybernetics: biological systems, dynamic processes. It was the vocabulary I think.

Mitchell's basic argument was that there's a constant process of fragmentation (a village watering hole is fragmented by waterpipes and bottles) and recombination (bathing, fragmented, recombines in the domestic space into bathrooms) (very D&G) -- this process is happening again with wireless technology: as technology gets smaller it'll stop influencing architecture and become invisible. At that point cities, buildings, can stop being built around machines and instead be built for basic human needs.

A couple of things that really got me: Cyberspace bleeding into the physical world (complementing the physical world bleeding into cyberspace), the undermining of physical distance (which is why distance has been redefined), and the new ethics that come out of this. The new ethics fascinates me, and I'm disappointed Mitchell didn't talk more about this.

Kim Burchett comments on a set of lectures from Shriram Krishnamurthi about Programming Languages.#

I haven't gotten too much out of the "Semantics and Types" section yet, because I'm already familiar with the material. However, Shriram has sprinkled the text with occasional remarks that go beyond the details of the material to give the reader a refreshing wide-angle view of the subject in context. It's these remarks that keep me reading. For example:

In languages like Java, programmers think they have the benefit of a type system, but in fact many common programming patterns force programmers to employ casts instead. Casts intentionally subvert the type system, leaving most of the validity checking for execution time. This indicates that Java's evolution is far from complete. In contrast, most of the type problems of Java are not manifest in a language like ML, but its type system still holds a few (subtler) lurking problems. In short, there is much to do before we can consider type system design a solved problem.

Eric W. Weisstein describes the generalized determinant - the wedge product.#

Julia Grey instructs us dumb boys on how to make our relationships happier.#

I preferred what was known as "technical" acting, which concentrated solely on creating a believable outward appearance of emotion rather than generating the emotion and then expressing it for the audience to see. The fascinating thing about technical acting, though, was that just pretending to feel something would often cause some inklings of that emotion to emerge within you.

It was my first experience with the phenomenon of "acting as if," which in the psychological world has gained currency as a way of helping people resolve longstanding interpersonal impasses. It works like this: No matter how you actually feel, act as if you feel differently. The other person will then react to you differently than they have before, and you will be able to react differently to them, and as a result there is a good chance that you will actually be able to break new ground in the relationship.

With that idea in mind, here are a couple of "techniques" you can try to get your relationship with your wife back on track.

Carl Zimmer writes about the orange glow of Caribbean Beetles.#

The authors of the PNAS were attracted to the glow of one beetle in particular: a species that lives on Jamaica, Pyrophorus. plagiophthalmus. This species is peculiar, because its males can glow in a wide range of colors, from green to orange. Why so many colors? It's all too easy to say, "Well, natural selection made it that way," and leave matters at that. In fact, it's possible that natural selection had no immediate role at all. Maybe Jamaica was colonized by a handful of beetles that just so happened to have some rare mutants in their midst, and they all proceeded to breed like crazy. Or perhaps it's the females that have been evolving, and the genes they use for their own light organs also produce light in the males.

[...]

The scientists found that the colors of the male beetles don't depend on genes shared with the females. Instead, they are the product of three different versions of the same gene (alleles). The alleles produce green, yellow, and orange light, and since each beetle can carry two copies of the gene, they can make various colors. The scientists then reconstructed the evolutionary history of the gene, by comparing the alleles to genes from beetles on neighboring islands. It turns out that the green allele is the oldest. It's likely that the first colonists of Jamaica all glowed green. Then, with a few changes to the gene's sequence, a new version emerged that produced yellow light. And then most recently, an orange gene emerged. In other words, the glow has steadily been shifting down through the spectrum towards the red end.

Mark Bernstein writes his thoughts about EdBlogger and why weblogs are important for schools.#

Writing artificial exercises to satisfy a teacher is, at best, an invented and artificial task. Who benefits? Students see this, they know it.

Writing a weblog is public, it's serious, it means something -- and it continues to mean something even if your teacher is a fool or a knave. Dan Bricklin had the key insight here, back when everyone thought Web writing was about getting a big audience: even if only your mother reads your weblog, it's a great thing. We do all sorts of things that are just for our family -- notes, favors, phone calls -- things most people probably don't care about. These are valuable and precious.

Writing for your friends and family is great. Writing for your teacher, so you can get a good grade, is misery.

Reading is important too... sniff

Kevin Burton wonders why people read his blog. I read it for politics from an alternative perspective and for the interesting tech things he has to say. I love reading people writing about what they care about - no matter what the topic is - because you can feel the excitement flow through their words.#

Cory Doctorow links to an article about Why thing guys always seem to win eating contests.#

The strange thing about competitive eating, though, is that the world's undisputed gluttony champion is a flyweight. Takeru Kobayashi hails from Japan and weighs 145 pounds, empty. Earlier this year he won the annual Fourth of July hot-dog-eating competition in Coney Island, New York, by scarfing down 44 hot dogs -- with buns -- in 12 minutes, averaging one every 16.4 seconds. Tragically, he fell short of his record of 50 1/2 set last year. Second place went to the 408-pound Edward Jarvis, who downed 30 1/2 hot dogs in the same amount of time. William "The Refrigerator" Perry, formerly of the Chicago Bears, managed only five.

So how does a man roughly a third the size of Jarvis outeat him by half? Answer, at least in part: The size of the stomach at rest is inconsequential. All that matters is the stomach's ability to expand, to adapt itself to the amount of food being shoved down the esophagus. And as in any other competitive sport, stomach-stretching skills require training.

Jessica wonders about losing control of your words on your blog.#

SJ writes in response to me typing that I'd rather post a particular comment on my blog rather than his: "Don't forget that as soon as you publish something, you've already lost control over what you've typed... Many philosophers have spent the last part of their lives trying to regain control over their philosophies."

Do I really lose control over what I've written on a blog?

In some ways, I do because I have no control over who reads this blog or who links to it and where that info goes. Some bloggers, like Je', repost my words on their blogs. And posts get aggregated, too, and who knows where they go from there.

I wonder about this as well. The monitoring of our words and their permanent record somewhere we can't control serve as a control on us. If I want to I can go edit an old post, but if someone has copied it then my words are out there. Is this good for accountability or is it bad for for self-determination? I wonder.

If I've quoted someone and they would prefer me not to, I have no problem editting old posts for them though.

Jorrit Wiersma writes about his daughter visibly "growing up,"#

It seems that Silke has taken the opportunity of her second birthday (friday a week ago) to suddenly grow up a bit more. I doubt she really understands the concept of birthdays (beyond the obvious gift getting) but she has changed conspicuously. She has suddenly started eating her dinner by herself even though a week ago she didn't show any interest in picking up her spoon herself and the fact that she eats her dinner is remarkable by itself. She tries to be much more self-supporting in general. Also, she talks more and even tries to tell us what's wrong when she's upset, although we can't really understand what she is saying when she is bawling away.

My niece seems to be a lot like this. When people tell her that she's a "big girl" or that she's getting older she seems to respond by trying very hard to do things herself and show them that they are right. It's very interesting. I sometimes forget that infants are people too and they have the same range as complex thoughts as the rest of us but just can't articulate them as well. Life is pretty odd, but pretty great huh?

Moxie has always been a teacher of the ways of the world.#

My cousin Stacy was about 10 and I was 9 and it was the night before my Aunt's wedding. [...] Long after my Aunt was asleep my cousin and I were awake and whispering.

"We shouldn't be sharing a bed," Stacy informed me.

"Why?"

"Sister Margaret taught us about adultery last week."

"What's that?"

"Well, Aunt Robin is about to be married and I've got a boyfriend now."

"So?"

"So, when you are committed to someone you can't sleep with other people," she explained.

I laughed and Stacy got angry.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Sleeping in the same bed isn't the same thing as sex," I told her matter of factly.

Tony Pierce de-bullshits the Michael Jackson case.#

pardon me from distancing myself from the hysterical, but nobody should be sent to jail for something as unforgivable as sexual abuse of a child solely on an accusation.

smile when you have some evidence, gentlemen, and give a man time to take his escalade to his jet before you lift high the mugshot to the slobbering press as if it was the ear of the most mighty bull.

what is the rush?

michael jackson didnt do anything to you.

and as unbelievable as you might think that it could be, but he might not have done anything to anyone else either.

[...]

innocent until proven guilty might just be the core of what makes america the greatest country in the world which would make you rotten to the core if you deny a man that right.

freaky as the fucker may be.

Anton van Straaten writes about specialized languages on ll1-discuss.#

Peter J. Wasilko wrote:

Assuming that the underlying ideas of CS are of the same order of complexity as those in law, a plain English movement in CS curriculum design might be worth exploring.

I don't know about law, but the "problem" with both CS and Math is that by their nature, they deal with multi-level abstractions. These are often difficult to describe coherently in "plain English".

For example, functions are abstractions of expressions. Types are abstractions of sets of values. Parameterized types are abstractions of sets of types. A type signature is an abstraction of sets of values which happen to be functions, or even sets of functions.

So the type signature of a function with parameterized types is (deep breath) an abstraction of an abstraction of an expression in which any of the inputs or outputs may be abstractions of abstractions of values. And keep in mind that "values" can mean functions...

Christopher Lydon posts an interview with Joe Trippi from the Dean Campaign.#

I had wondered if Trippi, with a Dean nomination plausibly in sight, would be turning his thinking now to the very different business of a general campaign against George Bush. The answer was that my question was wrong. Trippi's thinking beganwith next fall's campaign and worked backwards. The question was how to find 2-million workers and raise $200-million in small contributions against an incumbent Republican with unlimited cash. An entirely out-of-control, viral Internet contagion was the only means of building those numbers by November, 2004. The Dean campaign we have seen so far (with half a million recruits and about $30-million in income) is a preview of Trippi's strategy, not a culmination.

Inescapably there will be a fall campaign of Dean TV spots, Trippi said, a sort of barking contest with Karl Rove. But Trippi's heart will not be in it. Television is "an abysmal way to communicate," he said. The Internet campaign "gets back to something we had before television, back to neighbors knocking on doors." If Trippi is right, the critical conversations among voters about the candidates will be "at the bar and the water cooler," prompted by bloggers, not ad men.

I think it is very curious that during the first part of the first part of the interview almost every other sentence out of Joe Trippi's mouth refers to how much money they're making from all the people. I thought the future of political campaigns and political discourse is in starting to actually talk about issues, not finding more ways to wring money from the populace's hands.

Joe Trippi continued this trend in the final segment. When he's talking about power back in the hands of people he seems to make that notion completely synonymous with giving money. Maybe that's the case now - but is that the way it should always be? "Are we going to be the Status Quo Party?" Apparently.

Dave Winer's ideas have influenced me to think that the Dean campaign is doing nothing new or interesting if they are using the Internet as a new tool to get more TV ads. The money should go back into a real political discourse, not into infecting the Internet with the old disease.

In the spirit of complaining about things not being perfect. Joe Trippi mentions that the ideas from the bloggers about how to run the campaign are often taken and that there are 50 or so thousand people behind him, working hard and making people like him look good. One example is when Howard Dean was thrown a red bat before he went on stage at a fund raiser, as suggested by an blog comment.

So what is my complaint? Joe Trippi, or someone else on the Dean campaign, who was that blog comment from? Do you need to go look it up? Would you have known a week later without looking it up? Blogging is about putting your voice into the world of the web and creating a personal community. If the people as individuals are unimportant and only as an aggregate they matter, as Trippi comments at one time, then how is this a more decentralized and interactive campaign? The people are not a resource to tap.

As a weaker point, these comments about "how to better run the campaign." Do they extend to how to form the policy that the candidate will run with? Do we want to use the Internet as a forum for political discourse or a way to "run a decentralized campaign?"

This paragraph is to cover my ass. Joe Trippi is a very interesting guy and Dean is "Doing Something Different" but is it really as amazing as people make it out to be?

Lance Arthur posts The Gay Agenda, Part 5.#

"Yes, the charming young lady with the black lipstick?"

"Hello, my name is David."

"Oops. Sorry, the tiara threw me."

"S'okay. I was wondering about love."

"Not something I'm overly familiar with, but I'll give it a shot. What was you wondering?"

"What is it? I mean, it seems like everyone gets focused on fucking. On getting between the sheets and getting it on, but I want something... else. I want something more. I want...."

"You want it all. You want to feel good inside and out. You want him to stay. You want kisses on street corners and hand-holding in the park and watching sunsets from rooftops. You want to instantly cheer up when you hear his voice on the phone. You want his arms around you when you're asleep and you want to grow accustomed to the smell of him, and the taste and feel and presence of him. You want him to be the first thing you think of when you wake up, and you want him to be thinking about you. You want the sex to be not just about the sex, you want the sex to be about being with someone as close as you can. To be a part of them, and please them, and be with them all the time, in every way you can be. Is that what you want?

Must read!