The Economist
Caught in the net
"IF THE internet will force difficult changes on democracies by handing power to individual citizens, it seems reasonable to believe that it will have a devastating impact on dictatorships. But it is not impossible that instead of undermining repressive regimes, the internet could become the most effective tool of social control that autocratic rulers have ever wielded."
"As more human interactions are conducted and recorded electronically, as the ability to analyse databases grows and as video and other offline surveillance technologies become cheaper and more effective, it will become ever easier for authoritarian governments to set up systems of widespread surveillance. George Orwell's Big Brother of "1984" might yet become a reality, a few decades later than he expected."
8:31 PMredux [01.09.03]
"In today's networked, globalized world, many presume that the Internet will pose a grave threat to authoritarian regimes. Such has been the power of this conventional wisdom that it remains for the most part unchallenged, and largely unexamined.
A new book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes, offers the most comprehensive and thought-provoking work on this subject to date. Authors Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas trace Internet use in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries: China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. They discover that authoritarian governments, far from fearing the information age, have chosen to direct Internet development in ways that bolster the state. At the same time, many regimes are struggling to cope with the potent challenges posed by new technologies. The authors encourage policy makers in the U.S. and other industrialized democracies to promote specific Internet-based initiatives that foster political liberalization, rather than perpetuating the myth of the Internet as an unstoppable "virus of freedom.""
redux [09.30.02]
"After resisting the Internet as a freewheeling tool of globalization and political anarchy for a decade, Saddam Hussein's government has cautiously embraced it.
Internet cafes have sprung up all over Baghdad in recent months, and even in smaller cities such as Karbala, a religiously conservative city 75 miles southwest of the capital. Just last month, the government took another major step, permitting some citizens to have Internet connections at home
Iraqis can now surf the Web and send e-mail to their hearts' content -- as long as they do it via www.uruklink.net, the government-controlled service provider monitored by Saddam's agents."
redux [08.29.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
"THE Saudi government is censoring public Internet access to a degree that goes significantly but haphazardly beyond its stated central goal of blocking sexually explicit content that violates the values of Islam, according to a recent study by Harvard Law School researchers.
The study's detailed list of blocked sites offers a glimpse into the areas that the Saudi government has deemed most troubling. Among them are sites related to pornography, women's rights, gays and lesbians, non-Islamic religions and criticism of political restrictions. Many humor and entertainment sites have also been blocked."
The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy."
redux [06.25.02]
""This version of the bill still allows the ability to prevent Internet activities without any necessity," said Kovalev, a 72-year old civil libertarian and member of the liberal "soyuz peravikh sil" faction.
Kovalev cited the portion of the bill that says it is "forbidden to use computer networks for extremism" and pledges a vague punishment that may "take into consideration" existing Russian criminal laws."
"Unlike the less-populated but richer countries Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which only last year overtook Egypt as having the largest Arab Internet population, Egypt is not trying to restrict the Internet.
But security police are monitoring chat rooms and local sites deemed immoral or damaging to the state or religion have been shut down. A few people have been imprisoned for soliciting sex on the Net."
redux [06.06.02]
""Without the internet the story may still have got out," said Mr Zheng. "With so many people killed it would have been hard to keep it a secret for ever, but it would have been much more difficult."
The internet is changing China in subtle but profound ways. Information is now being spread and exchanged in ways unthinkable just a few years ago.
The Chinese state's once total control on information has been broken and hard as it may try it has little hope of regaining that control."
redux [04.16.02]
"A decade or so ago, it was all clear: the Internet was believed to be such a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it. What we've learned in the intervening years is that the Internet does not inevitably lead to democracy any more than it inevitably leads to great wealth.
The idea that the Internet itself is a threat to authoritarian regimes was a bit of delusional post-Cold War optimism."
redux [03.21.02]
"Mao once said, "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." The entrepreneurs in China Dawn seem to want to change the last phrase to "ISP access."
But their enthusiasm betrays a streak of naivete. As Tiananmen so amply demonstrated, in China today, political power still grows from the barrel of a gun. And the prediction that the rise of the Internet will liberate Chinese from authoritarian rule is far from certain."
"One notable loophole in the content watch list are weblogs. Weblogs are content websites maintained by ordinary users that can act as introspective online diaries, soapboxes to rant opinions, and a vehicle guide the horde of Internet users to swarm to other obscure links to be found on the net. They are easy to update, cheap to maintain, and difficult to block because so many new ones appear each day. They utilize a client relationship with a server and can be updated with a simple browser."
The bureaucrats and censors in China who block and monitor websites will be hard pressed to try and control the future flow of weblogs both in and out of China due to the number and diversity of this new information platform. Having met actual Internet content censors from China, they are decent people but come from a different time and different place in terms of technology. They don't really get it yet since weblogs remain a concept difficult for them to understand for now."
redux [08.08.01]
"It is widely believed that the Internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. But political science scholarship has provided little support for this conventional wisdom, and a number of case studies from around the world show that authoritarian regimes are finding ways to control and counter the political impact of Internet use. While the long-term political impact of the Internet remains an open question, we argue that these strategies for control may continue to be viable in the short to medium term."
"In this paper we illustrate how two authoritarian regimes, China and Cuba, are maintainng control over the Internet's political impact through different combinations of reactive and proactive strategies. These cases illustrate that, contrary to assumptions, different types of authoritarian regimes may be able to control and profit from the Internet. Examining the experiences of these two countries may help to shed light on other authoritarian regimes' strategies for Internet development, as well as help to develop generalizable conclusions about the impact of the Internet on authoritarian rule."
redux [06.19.01]
"Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister has warned the internet threatens democracy and people's sense of patriotism.
Lee Hsien Loong says governments must find new ways to build a consensus on national issues and strengthen national identities."
"The internet "opens up societies and helps individuals link up with like-minded souls anywhere in cyberspace," he said.
But it "may weaken the bonds of place and circumstance that have always tied citizens to their home and nation," he added."
redux [10.26.00]
"The world is changing fundamentally. Images and information respect neither time nor borders. Hierarchy is giving way to networking. Openness is crowding out secrecy and exclusivity. Ideas and capital move swiftly and unimpeded across a global network of governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. In this world of instantaneous information, traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance."
"Nations once connected by foreign ministries and traders are now linked through millions of individuals by fiber optics, satellite, wireless, and cable in a complex network without central control. The Internet, with 100 million users today, will reach one billion people by 2005 and will be available to half the world's population by 2010. The network will become the central nervous system of international relations."
redux [10.10.00]
"Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols - indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment."
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."
ISP Planet
War at the Core
"The core of the Internet is stitched together by agreements that allow traffic to pass from one company's network to another's. A recent dispute between AOL and Cogent Communications showed that these agreements are shockingly fragile."
"It is a complex process that AOL allegedly hopes to complete no sooner than end of 2003. Cogent appears not to be on AOL's list of desirable peering partners. Reports claimed AOL sought to charge Cogent $75,000 per month in order to keep the peering relationship intact, an amount that Cogent's chief executive David Schaeffer described as "approximately correct.""
7:47 PM"FEDERAL Communications Minister Senator Richard Alston said Australia is getting "screwed" by internet carriers' peering arrangements and that he would be directing competition and consumer watchdog the ACCC to do something about it."
" "The current arrangements for international and domestic internet traffic charging between networks, in particular the system generally known as peering whereby charges are levied on the basis of the relative amount of traffic exchanged between networks, is a significant issue for Australian broadband providers," the report said."
redux [05.25.01]
"The consumers' connections to the Internet are controlled by companies who are in the business of delivering content and services funded by advertising. Consumers who wander the Internet represent lost revenue. Customers who use IP telephony no longer make phone calls. Customers who experiment with creating new services are called abusers.
As long as these companies control connectivity, we do not have a marketplace for the connectivity services vital to the growth of the Internet and necessary for innovation and the benefits we have come to expect.
We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity. It is a dramatic case of conflict of interest and antitrust violation. We cannot afford to tolerate such behavior. It is allowed and abetted by accepting the self-serving fallacies of the existing players. We must challenge their claims and create the opportunities so necessary for our continued prosperity."
redux [06.06.01]
"The blockage that stopped traffic flowing between two of the top 10 networks in the United States for more than four days stemmed from a relationship called "peering," in which two networks agree to swap traffic back and forth without charge. In this case, Cable & Wireless has stopped peering with PSINet, saying the struggling company no longer had enough traffic to make the relationship worthwhile."
"Because of the complicated set of histories and relationships that make up the Internet, this had far-reaching ramifications. Cutting off this link prevented either network from seeing the other, though both could use different routes to get anywhere else on the Net."
"That no one owns the Internet is taken as a truism. But the infrastructure on which the global network runs is owned by a handful of powerful corporations that can, and often do, use their control over the Internet backbone to their advantage in business negotiations. The influence these companies exert, some industry insiders fear, is strangling smaller companies and reducing customer choice."
""I can give you an example that shows that the Internet is owned by someone," says Jilani Zeribi, a senior analyst at market researcher Current Analysis in Sterling, Va. "Look at old peering arrangements, which were basically, 'I'll connect to your network, you carry my data and I'll carry yours.' The carriers started to realize that smaller ISPs were free-riding on their network, so they started charging for peering arrangements. Just the fact that someone wields that kind of power shows that someone owns the Internet.""
"As a consequence, the rules for Internet interconnection are still in the process of being worked out - and in this uncertain environment, Internet interconnection is an inherently risky business. The new technology presents its own interconnection complexities, with multiple layers of virtual networks built one over the other - so that an operator at any layer of the infrastructure will have its costs determined by the prices charged by the virtual network below it, while its prices, in turn, will determine the cost structure of the layer above. Furthermore, while commercial principles would suggest that money should flow towards those operators which produce value, this does not always happen in practice (a hangover of the historical expectation that Internet access should be free for all). The uncertainties of the environment are aggravated by the fact that there is currently no consensus on the issue of how to attribute "value" to the various elements of Internet interconnection."
"We discuss economic rationales behind peering decisions in the Internet. In the first part of the paper we analyze the decision about a bilateral peering agreement between two commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) who are in Cournot competition. In the second part we discuss multilateral peering between commercial ISPs and an academic research network (ARN). The latter is organized as club of academics who share the cost of their network. It is discussed whether peering threatens the existence of the ARN and under what circumstances a commercial ISP would want to use strategic pricing to win all ARN-members as customers."
News.Com
RIAA chief
to step down
"During the past several years, Rosen has served as a focal point for all the criticism and complaints levied by advocates of unfettered technology. Indeed, she was featured in the most recent issue of Wired magazine as "The Most Hated Name in Music"--a bold statement in an industry notoriously rife with avaricious record producers and label executives.
She has been cast by her critics as an unswerving enemy of technology, an impression she has tried with little success to dispel by saying she did not oppose peer-to-peer or Internet technologies per se, but only their use to distribute music without permission."
7:21 PM"Most people in Rosen's place would consider themselves lucky just to make it out alive. Reviled by college kids, music fans, and more than a few recording artists for the RIAA's role in forcing the shutdown of Napster, Rosen is seen as the embodiment of a venal corporate culture hurtling toward obsolescence. It seems she'll stop at nothing to frighten those who share music online instead of buying it in a store - hacking into networks, threatening universities and businesses, sending out subpoenas to unmask music-swappers. Some Hilary haters have protested her speeches and urged others to mail her excrement. On a scale of odiousness, devotees of the Web site Whatsbetter?com rated Rosen just below Illinois Nazis but better than Michael Bolton (and way above pedophile priests). On the more serious side, death threats once prompted Rosen to travel with security. "People take their free music seriously," Rosen says wryly."
" What speaks the loudest in the music industry is losing money hand over fist. And that is exactly what they are doing while at the same time video gaming and home video boom in sales despite of the slumping economy. The new successor to Rosen will be given an opportunity to put on a happy face with all of the parties (consumers who love the convenience of MP3s and record execs and artists who want to get paid for their music) and try to redirect the music business back to the ongoing success that they are accustomed to."
Wired News
This Is Your Business, Virtually
"Few companies have made a common practice of holding meetings in what analysts call a "virtual room" because the technology is still prohibitively expensive, said Christine Perey, president of Perey Research & Consulting. What's more, not everyone feels comfortable speaking in front of a camera. But as the technology improves and costs continue to drop, Perey said she could see virtual rooms becoming mainstream "in 20 years.""
"By then, the generation that grew up with a video camera stuck in its face by doting parents won't think twice about being recorded for business presentations, she said."
7:07 PM""We look at this as a long-term thing," Microsoft Information Worker Group lead program manager Dan Leach told internetnews.com. "We make big bets and long term bets... and this is one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if Web conferencing becomes even more commonplace in the next five years.""
redux [05.14.02]
"Videoconferencing peaked in the two months after Sept. 11 as all travel -- especially airline travel -- was curtailed, said AT&T spokeswoman Jean Hurt. "Now it has settled back to normal growth trajectory," she said."
""Usage remained high until around Dec. 18, and then it crashed and burned,"' Gold said."
redux [03.07.02]
"Analyst Phil Leigh said that after Sept. 11, business users are more inclined to try Web conferencing technology than face the added ordeals of a business trip.
"It's still a new thing and it's still not as easy as picking up the telephone," said Leigh, vice president of technology research at Raymond James & Associates.
"Some resistance to change is endemic to all of us," Leigh said. "You can't shake hands across the Web. But in terms of personal productivity, I can do more with WebEx -- I can reach out to more people in the same fixed amount of time.""
redux [10.29.01]
[requires 'free' registration]""Corporate America is developing a different strategy of place," said Charles Grantham, chief scientist of the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work. "The bottom line is a hard-core business logic -- you're better positioned for business continuity if you're distributed. But Sept. 11 also crystallized for a lot of people that they want a better balance between their personal and professional life, and managers are going to have to confront that in the coming year."
Such revolutionary zeal may be premature. After all, the longstanding conviction that a centralized workplace is essential to enforcing corporate culture, loyalty and hard work has been behind big real estate investments in corporate campuses and towering headquarters buildings. Those expenditures can make it prohibitively expensive to switch to a distributed workplace."
redux [09.20.01]
"The economy and corporate budgets are in sharp decline, new safety checks have made moving through airports slower than ever, and there's a general reluctance to travel in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks.
If corporate America is to attempt some semblance of normality, there must be meetings with customers, suppliers, far-flung co-workers, bankers, lawyers and distributors.
To keep things going, many companies are turning to videoconferencing, the technology touted years ago as the movement that would end corporate travel. It never did and it never will. But videoconferencing is on the rise, and experts said last week's events will further accelerate its use."
redux [07.11.01]
"While researchers tap Internet2 to extend collaboration between universities and push the limits of new Internet technologies, another group of social scientists is looking at how Internet2 is affecting those who use it - in effect, researching the researchers."
"Still, human beings clearly prefer working face to face. Teasley says that although scientists at each CFAR site can meet and examine data from their own PCs, they still tend to cluster around a single computer. "Their biggest complaint was that it was too hard to see that small screen," says Teasley. "I told them they should buy a projector. That was my high-level PhD advice.""
"Beyond Being There was a research project at Bell Communications Research in 1991 and 1992. Its key insight was that computer and communications technology cannot in the foreseeable future achieve the same quality of human interaction as that afforded by PPR (physically proximate reality - our somewhat obscure term for meeting in person). Thus, while most other projects aimed at every-higher communication bandwidths and higher-fidelity video, we aimed at making computers help people communicate in ways that cannot be done in PPR (for example, anonymous interactions). In other words, we wanted to be better than reality and move beyond being there!"
"Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f. "For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to automatically archive communication.""
MIT Technology Review
Creating a Culture of Ideas
"Not so many years ago, Bell Labs conducted so much research it could easily house some very high-risk programs, including the so-called blue-sky thinking that led to information theory and the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. But the world benefited, and sometimes AT&T did too. Now, Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self, subdivided several times through AT&T's 1984 divestiture and subsequent split into Lucent, NCR, and the parent firm. Moreover, it is not alone. As the economy sags and companies trim their expenses, some of the first cuts are in high-risk or open-ended research programs. Even if the research budget does not drop, the nature of projects is prone to be more developmental than really innovative. If the trend continues, eventually we will suffer a deficit of new ideas. Already, fewer and fewer big corporations are focusing on new ideas. And the formation of startups has come almost to a standstill.
More than ever before, in the new "new economy," research and innovation will need to be housed in those places where there are parallel agendas and multiple means of support."
8:29 PMredux [08.02.02]
"Neuvo is the humble, if eccentric, technologist who heads research and development at Nokia (NOK), arguably the best product-driven R&D organization in the world.
Nokia's R&D apparatus is unlike anything in multinational corporate history. Most large-scale R&D operations are centralized, hierarchical, no-nonsense -- science as brute force. Nokia's 18,000 engineers, designers, and sociologists are scattered across the globe and form a kind of federation of rule-breaking, risk-taking hackers. Most of them answer not to countless layers of managers but to Neuvo, who considers it his missionary duty to break down his people's mental inhibitions, freeing their minds to roam toward the next big breakthrough. "We operate the way a great jazz band plays," Neuvo says. "There is a leader, and each member is playing the same piece, but they can improvise on the theme.""
redux [11.18.01]
"Balancing an increased market focus--and closer ties to customers--with the pursuit of world-class science is now the trick for many corporate R&D groups. Gone forever are the days when large industrial labs churned out scientific papers and conducted long-term research far removed from business pressures. But while R&D groups have clearly gotten more business friendly over the last decade, they are also feeling pressures to come up with tomorrow's high-growth opportunities.
Indeed, industrial-R&D expert Richard Rosenbloom, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, is convinced that most high-tech firms--especially in the information technology sector--"still aren't doing enough to invest in the future technologies that will be the next big revolutionary business. They've been experimenting with new venture units, spinoffs, joint ventures and the like, but I don't know of a single big corporation that has a track record that is exceptional in any of those initiatives.""
redux [10.18.01]
"Corporate research labs have traditionally been called too narrowly focused, existing solely to turn a profit. Also, the argument goes, corporate labs don't have the broad mandate or intellectual freedom of university labs to delve into what might be considered "far-out" concepts, otherwise known as "disruptive technologies.""
"To the chagrin of pure-research advocates, corporate labs are now more willing to look at 'far-out' science - if it has possible practical applications.
redux [08.16.01]
"Bell Labs invented the transistor, the laser, and Unix, but it never invented a way for its parent, Ma Bell, to cash in. Xerox (XRX ) PARC presented the world with laser printers, Ethernet computer networking, and the point-and-click interface; the world capitalized on the technology.
Lucent (LU), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Eastman Kodak (EK ) also employ brilliant scientists who win patents for big discoveries. But like the other storied R&D operations in corporate America, they have succeeded far better at R than at D. "We invented everything and developed nothing," laments Xerox PARC's founder, Jack Goldman.
Then there's IBM Research."
redux [05.30.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Bell Labs and its parent company, Lucent Technologies, are still giants of innovation despite recent management fumbles and business failures, many industry experts say.
"Their technology strength is four or five times" that of Alcatel , the French electronics giant that was trying to acquire Lucent, said Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks companies' inventiveness by analyzing their United States patent portfolios and by tallying how often other companies rely on them."
"But for decades, critics have called Lucent and its predecessors slow in turning the bright ideas into market-leading products that produce a steady flow of revenue."
redux [03.28.00]
"Transmitting a pulse of light faster than the speed of light is the kind of mind-bending, prestige-building discovery that the NEC Research Institute (NECI) was built to produce. So when Lijun Wang actually performed that astonishing feat last year, no one seemed to care that commercial application of his research is probably many years in the future. The kudos from the scientific community and terrific publicity were justification enough. But with parent company NEC struggling to boost profits, that kind of payoff may no longer be sufficient."
redux [03.21.00]
"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms."
Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.
Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the "R" to do more "D.""
The Village Voice
D.C.'s Second Massive Antiwar March--Populist Enough for the
Heartland
"Just maybe the zeitgeist is beginning to shift. This week a Pew poll found that only 42 percent of Americans believe that President Bush has made the case for war--down from 52 percent in September. Last week, a huge Chicago local of the Teamster's--one of the unions that's been cosiest with the Bush White House--hosted the launch of a national labor antiwar coalition. Republican business leaders raised concerns about a war with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, joined a list of 38 city councils that have passed antiwar resolutions. And despite freezing temperatures that never topped 24 degrees, more than 100,000 demonstrators took over the streets of Washington, D.C., on Saturday in the second massive national antiwar protest in three months."
"Sure, one heard flashes of tone-deaf rhetoric blaring from the morning stage in front of the U.S. Capitol, as a few speakers threw out terms like "cryptofascist" or stumped for Mumia Abu Jamal. But the march was huge, with a tone was as populist as they come."
8:24 PM"American flags outnumbered Palestinian and Iraqi ones at Saturday's antiwar march in Washington. Though the enormous protest was called by ANSWER, a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party, the National Mall next to the Capitol building was flooded by ordinary, outraged citizens. They completely overwhelmed the Spartacus Leaguers, the Maoists and other assorted wackos who turn out to support anything opposed to the U.S. government."
"The broad-based anti-war movement many have awaited is here."
[requires 'free' registration]
"A largely missing ingredient in the nascent debate about invading Iraq showed up on the streets of major cities over the weekend as crowds of peaceable protesters marched in a demand to be heard."
"Other protests will be emphasizing civil disobedience in the name of Martin Luther King Jr. But any graphic moments to come of confrontation and arrest should be seen in the far broader context of the Capitol scene: peaceable throngs of mainstream Americans came forward demanding more of a dialogue from political leaders. Mr. Bush and his aides, to their credit, welcomed the demonstrations as a healthy manifestation of American democracy at work. We hope that spirit will endure in the weeks ahead if differences deepen and a noisier antiwar movement develops. These protests are the tip of a far broader sense of concern and lack of confidence in the path to war that seems to lie ahead."
"Despite Mr Clark's presence, Answer's roots are on the extreme left of American politics, and they have had trouble attracting frontline politicians to their platforms."
"The next breakthrough will come if one of the real Democratic aspirants for the presidency chooses to take over the Sheen role. The Rev Al Sharpton, a declared candidate but not a serious one, was a speaker on the Mall. However, it is no longer unthinkable that, say, John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and Vietnam veteran, might be emboldened enough by the polls to assume leadership of the anti-war movement."
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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