BuzzMachine

Protest the evils of oil and polyester!

: The World Naked Bike Ride protests oil dependency. Who the hell knows what flesh has to do with fuel but, hey, anything for cheap peeps. [via Jimmiz]

Unnews

: Ethan Zuckerman links to the U.N.’s list of most underreported stories and then lists five of his own. What are yours?

Catching up in Iraq

: I’m catching up with my reading of Iraqi weblogs. Read this from Baghdadi, an Iraqi-American, on the new government, and tell me whether you saw any of this excitement in media coverage:

The beginning for the new Iraq has started and the people of Iraq finally got a government they should be proud of. I was so happy this morning watching the new Iraqi government and the names of those ministers and of course the new president. There was one moment during the whole ceremony that equated to the moment when they announced the capture of Saddam and that is when they announced the new president of Iraq, to me that was a dream comes true. I believe most of us young Iraqis when we hear the phrase president of Iraq, we think of Saddam and only Saddam. Well, history was made today Saddam and his clans have no chance of getting the power or any position in the new Iraq. Iraq is changing and I believe it is changing toward a free and democratic Iraq. I spoke with my family in Baghdad twice today and they are so excited about the new government, my brother was telling me that we all are praying for these guys and Inshallaha god will be with them. I think this is a new era for us and for the Middle East as a whole. Listening to all the names that were announced today, you can not, but think that this new government is the most educated individuals among all the governments in the Middle East. Most of them have a doctorate in their fields of expertise not to mention a lot of them have lived and gained there experience in the west. With the help of the US and the rest of the world, I believe these guys will definitely get Iraq out of this mess.

A year in the life

: A picture a day for a year in one of my favorite cities, Berlin. [via Kunstspazierg

Good swarms

: Steven Johnson not only gives some link charity to Spirit of America, he also seems something bigger going on here — good swarms:

But the site makes me wonder whether this isn’t the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web’s gift economy. Thanks to the passion of the bloggers themselves, and clustering technologies like Technorati and Blogdex, we’ve already mastered the art of locating and quickly swarming around the week’s hot news item or thinkpiece. (You know the drill: Clay posts a provocative essay about power laws on Monday, and by Friday there are fifty in-depth responses, a dozen fact checks, ten suggestions for future research, and a handful of requests for the Lazy Web.) What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they’re flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.