A better man than I, Gunga Din
: John McCarthy, the British journalist who was held hostage by Islamic Jihad for more than five years, is returning to Beirut and also going to Iraq and Iran to do a TV documentary. I’d bring along some Marines, a few Mossad veterans, and P Diddy’s posse, if I were him.
Howard Dean has nothing on me
: My embryonic experiment in hyperlocal blogging has attracted the attention of a local politician running for county office. The guy’s a Democrat in the land of suburban Republicans. I’ve told him he should blog.
Our guys in Afghanistan
: Ben Hammersley finds another Afghanistan blogger, an aid worker:
We just had one of our expats resign today after only two weeks.
She’s never travelled outside of Europe before and I think Kandahar is freaking her out. I guess it’s not for everybody this bouncing around war zones swatting flies and trying to come to terms with 45 C daily temperatures. Sometimes I wake up feeling like Martin Sheen in the opening ten minutes of Apocalypse Now and go to bed feeling like Brando in the last ten minutes. Mr. Kurtz could live here in splendid madness as easily as Vietnam or the Congo. Armed thugs ripping around the IDP camp last night set the tone for the whole bloody day. One shitty thing after another.
: And Ben files another report from a Kabul Internet cafe (I think we’re leaving the stone age):
Yesterday I moved from my hotel into the spare room of the house of the correspondent here for Radio France. Sebastian is trying to start a little side business by renting out rooms, drivers and LandCruiser he is about to buy, to visiting journos and documentary crews. His driver, Babrack, although probably not spelt that way, is an ex-Mujahadeen who credits Stallone
The private Private Lynch
: Private Lynch has an honorable discharge, so she’s now free to tell/sell her story.
We’ve only just begun…
: I got to see Ev Williams today, for the first time in way too long. (See his moblog photo here. Scroll up and you’ll see an odd picture of a mean injury on Ev’s photogenic face. Judging by the way I look in my picture, as if I’m about to lunge across the table at him in some heated moment of RSS argument, it may appear as if this is an action sequence. But he arrived with the scar. I didn’t do it. Sporting injury, just for the record.)
We had fun (or at least I did) talking about so much that is left to be done with weblogs, tons of new functionality, lots of important uses, many new dimensions of data.
So add this thought to my post below in which I tweak my friend Jimmy Gutterman for tweaking bloggers: We are still at the dawn of this weblog thing. There is much more to be done before weblogging in its many forms — community, content, advertising, organizing — can begin to reach its potential.
