BuzzMachine

The very foundation of democracy
: John Perry Barlow started a blog, as many others have noted. He opened up comments; good for him. And he’s impressed with the discussion and sees it as “the very foundation of democracy.” He’s not afraid (so far) to find himself in political discussion and to scold his own:

If we in the anti-Bush forces continue to bray about our moral and intellectual superiority, we will almost certainly piss off the troubled folks in the middle who will decide the future of America in the next election. Unfortunately, elections these days are more about style and policy. I think we’re right on the policies – though more thorough and direct engagement with the other side will be necessary to put persuasive sinew into our arguments. But our style sucks. We are too often arrogant, hyperbolic, self-righteous, vindictive, and mean-spirited. Anger, no matter how justified, is not attractive to the unconvinced.

Now would be a good time for us all to come and reason together, and I am grateful to the pro-Bush newcomers to this blog for their willingness to do just that.

As we used to say, right on.

New kids
: Also via Heiko: New Kids on the Blog, a service that lists new blogs with at least two but no more than 20 posts that are less than a month old. A few good titles: Schmuddelblog and (translated) Arent’s We All a Bit Schizophrenic and, my favorite, Dead Cat Bounce, about a piece of performance:

Autolocal
: Via Heiko and Loic, the IP address locator (it got me right). Apart from AOL (which puts the world in Virginia), I’ve found these IP locators to be useful in business for targeting content and advertising. So far, the services have been rather expensive; maybe this is an indication that they’ll soon be free.

Building an empire, a link at a time
: Jason Calacanis has been (uncharacteristically) quiet lately but he emails that he has been busy with new blogs: He started a Sundance blog (smart way to get juice at the festival) plus one on documentaries and another on indies.

And he’s signed up his first blogger, Greg Scher, to create the spam blog and one coming on grid computing.

Next up, he says: the revenue bits. Amen to that.

Social software without the effort
: John Robb continues to speculate, fruitfully, on what it will take to uncover the friends networks that already exist in the social software called the Internet. He’s dying for better data: author profiles in XML, means of searching, means of sharing, means of categorizing.

All this will be tremendously valuable but we need (a) the motive and that will be value to the person expected to post the data and that will come in the form of jobs for resumes or ads for weblogs; (b) the standards that make this possible, and (c) the tools that make this possible.

See also David Galbraith’s one-line bio; it’s a simple start.

Whereabouts
: Somebody in the comments ask where I am. Busy. Back later.

A-heh!
: So Glenn Reynolds is not all-powerful. He is mortal. He confesses:

I’m finding it hard to blog and pay attention at the same time. Back later, if I get free.

Outkast outcast
: My colleague Scott Brodeur agrees with my son: Me listening to Outkast is scary. I have one thing to say to both of them: Hey ya!