BuzzMachine

TomMart: The Ridge Emergency Preparedness Store
: Every generation has its absurd moments that capture the Kafka-essence of the age. My generation had a few: duck-and-cover commercials and reefer-madness propaganda.

For this generation, the apex of absurdidty may have come this morning when Tom Ridge and his wife appeared on Today to show — like Mr. and Mrs. Martha Stewart in their fallout shelter — what Americans should be doing to prepare for terrorist assault.

But they didn’t show anything. They just looked ludicrous standing in a kitchen surrounded by stuff. They simply looked like people who had no idea how to pack for a camping trip.

Jamie Gangel:

What he says
: I’ve been continuing an email debate (well, really more of a ping-pong game) about mass v. niche with Clay Shirky but it’s late and I’m on a crappy dial-up connection (excuses, excuses) and I haven’t really written my own good definition of mass media v. niche media yet, so I’ll drop the ball for the moment and instead point to this smart analysis of links and weblogs by Kevin Marks that concludes, as I did below (which, of course, is why I’m quoting it) that “the many lightly linked weblogs outnumber the few heavily linked ones.”

In other words: The power of the niches is greater than the power of the powerful.

Blogger PR
: The purchase of Pyra/Blogger by Google still hasn’t shown up on the list of Google press releases. Could it be that though this is rating high on the psychic seismometer of bloggers, it’s too small to matter much at Google? Or could it be that Internet companies simply got out of the habit of writing press releases?

Joe half-a-millionaire
: I’m so proud of myself. The sum and total of my viewing of Joe Millionaire was the last 15 minutes. It had all I wanted to know.

Cold war
: A photo of an antiwar protest in Antarctica.