BuzzMachine

Google++
: Jason Shellen hacks the Google toolbar nicely.

The cradle of civilization
: The Messopotamian, Baghdad’s newest blogger, has insightful observations about what’s really happening in his neighborhood:

Jolted and shocked by the events of September 11, the United States of America, the greatest and most powerful politico-economic power that humanity has ever known has realised that the advanced and rich western world can no longer ignore the plight of the poorer and underdeveloped world. Those “nation states”, who have totally failed the test of self determination and self goverment, and degenerated into obscurantism, sectarianism, tribalism, and all the other isms of hell, pose a mortal danger, both to the people unfortunate to live there and to the Western civilisation itself….

So Action was decided upon… to bring the values and standards enjoyed by the prosperous world to these places, by force if necessary, by example preferably….

The old style of european imperialism, which aimed at exploitation, cheap raw materials, and keeping people backward and in a state of peasant low existance, has gone and is no longer suitable for the world. A globalised world where every body can enjoy the freedoms and benefits taken for granted by the “advanced” world. This is liberal neo-imperialism.

Years ago, in my earlier youth, had I heard somebody talking like this, my hair would have stood on end, I would have been thrown into a fit of rage enough to give me heart attack. But years of suffering, years ground to dust and wasted living under a system which had hardly anything right in it, atavism which took us back to a moral state comparable to that that existed even before the reforms of Islam fifteen centuries ago, have finally brought me to this forlorn conclusion: that perhaps it is better this way – perhaps that really, salvation lies herein.

Caution to the wind. Consider this: if the U.S. tommorrow announces that anybody willing to come to its land would be given the “Green Card” immediately with no further question, how many people do you think would stand in line? Answer this question if you dare ? Why if Western values are so bad and so terrible would you find Muslim, Hindu, Buddist, and every colour and every breed standing in that hypothetical line, in their billions ?

But America cannot take in the entire humanity, so america decides to go to them instead.

See the Democracy Doctrine, below. This is about making the world safe for its citizens. This is about setting a standard for human rights in the modern age that includes the rights of freedom and self-determination. And, as this post so wisely points out, this is also a matter of self-defense for the democratic against the tyrants.

: I had suspected it but only saw today that, indeed, the author of the Messopotamian, Alaa, is a friend of Zeyad’s and Zeyad convinced him to blog. Bravo, my friend. The more the better.

Hoder started two years ago with just one Iranian blog and now there are as many as 100,000 new voices silent no longer. Yes, the more the better — in the service of democracy.

The U.S. Blogging Service
: Dave writes that blogs will be like mail servers; they’ll be everywhere serving many publishing needs.

Yes, and they’ll also expand to store and serve (that is, publish and broadcast) many more types of information and content: video, audio, presentations, data, shopping lists, spreadsheets, forms, tests, conversations, photos, songs, sermons, lessons…

Weblogs are about more than publishing. They are about storing, organizing, and presenting our thoughts and our digital stuff for ourselves, our groups, our world.

(un)wired
: Time does a big special thingie on wirelessness. (Sponsored by — surprise! — Intel.)

A radical view of a newspaper
: Hugh MacLeod, who leaves a blog’s worth of wonderful comments here, has a brief and brilliant view of what newspapers should be (in response to my call for things we bloggers want newspaper people to hear at next week’s Online Newspaper confab). Hugh said:

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as “things”, rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like brain trust, held cohesive by a good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won’t (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

Hmmm… somebody must’ve spiked my drink.

Bartender: Give me some of whatever he’s drinking.

That’s a radical, transforming way to look at a newspaper’s role in a community and I like it. I’m not sure many newspaper people will take to it, for this requires intensive interactivity.

But in my experience, now that Hugh says it that way, I think that is what I’ve been headed toward online at the day job. As you’ve heard me brag many times before, our forums are wildly popular, getting between 75 and 100 million page views a month. We’ve found that if we put up a forum on its own, it won’t work; we need to have related content; we need to start and contribute to the conversation. The thing is, most times, we just start the conversation and then don’t continue to contribute and interact. We need to find a way to do more of that (not as easy as you’d think because, as Clay Shirky said at the AlwaysOn confab this week, conversations don’t scale at big-scale operations like newspapers). We also need the new improved tools of audience content creation — weblogs — and interaction — friend networks. And we’re working on that, too.

I like Hugh’s view.

(Please continue to contribute things to say to online newspaper honcho here.)

A-fib
: As I write this, my heart is exhibiting the rhythm of an ornery, coked-up jazz drummer, which is to say, no rhythm at all. It’s in a-fib, as we say. So I take another pill and sit (and blog) and wait and hope it “converts.” And if it doesn’t, it’s to the damned ER I go. This is what Tony Blair had and Bill Bradley, too. It’s apparently a liberal affliction.

Facing the devil
: Joseph Duemer comes face-to-face with a scum-sucking spam devil. Great reading — but then, good vs. evil always is. [via Anil]

Finding the enemy
: Are we still at war? Who’s the enemy? And can we rebuild Iraq while we are still at war?

Those were the key questions in the discussion on Iraq at Foursquare.

Well, clearly, we’re still at war. But I believe it’s a much wider war than some would like to see as a skirmish with “insurgents” or “guerillas” in and from Iraq. This is a wider war with terrorism and its supporters.

Michael Ledeen says that in his latest column:

The destruction of the Taliban and the shattering of al Qaeda sent a shockwave through the Middle East, and the impending liberation of Iraq was only a matter of time. The terror masters and their gangs of killers did the rational thing: They planned for the next battlefield, and we gave them every opportunity, 14 or 15 long months. During that time they devised the strategy we see in Iraq: a terror war, modeled on their successful campaign against us in Lebanon. This required coordination, both between the tyrannical regimes that sponsor terror, and the various terrorist organizations….

The destruction of the Taliban and the shattering of al Qaeda sent a shockwave through the Middle East, and the impending liberation of Iraq was only a matter of time. The terror masters and their gangs of killers did the rational thing: They planned for the next battlefield, and we gave them every opportunity, 14 or 15 long months. During that time they devised the strategy we see in Iraq: a terror war, modeled on their successful campaign against us in Lebanon. This required coordination, both between the tyrannical regimes that sponsor terror, and the various terrorist organizations….

We are involved in a regional struggle, not just a national conflict. This is not a civil war, it is part of the broad war against the terror masters, and it cannot be won if we limit our vision and our action to Iraq. The remaining terror masters cannot and will not permit us to create a stable, peaceful, and democratic Iraq, because that would threaten their own survival.

If we persist in narrowing our vision and our actions to Iraq, the attacks will get more lethal, killing larger numbers of Americans. And they will not be limited to Iraq. Significant numbers of terrorists have been rounded up of late, from the Middle East to Europe and inside this country. They are coming after us, just as we should have expected, and there is a limit to how long we can forestall catastrophes by playing defense.

This is also why, to answer the last question, we must work hard to rebuild Iraq now. The better we rebuild the more the people will support that rebuilding over the destruction of terrorism.