|
Monday, September 29, 2003
Magnidudes 
| | Early this year, in a conversation with Ev, I said I believed that in reality there might be as few as maybe thirty or forty thousand active blogs. He disagreed. And he was right. Dave Sifry just announced that Technorati has gone past one million blogs watched, and that a new blog is being created about every twelve seconds. Amazing. |
Way to go, Cam.
| | Generally Speaking is the new official Wesley Clark campaign blog. And I just learned from Dave that Cam Barrett is a prime mover behind it. Camworld has been an alpha blog since before there were blogs. His latest post says he's putting Camworld on a hiatus. Now we know why. |
Dean gives as good as he gets
| | Networked markets get smarter faster than most companies, we said in Cluetrain (with more words, but less is better). A corrolary: Networked citizens get smarter faster than most politicians. That means smart politicians follow the lead of smart companies and take delivery on the clues that networked citizens are trafficking by the trainload. |
| | That's clearly what's happened with the Howard Dean campaign, which is the first to come through with a killer Internet Policy. (Or "principles for" one, which is close enough.) |
| | That policy the only plank in the dude's platform that matters — because it's the only one that's truly democratic, in the literal (rather than the partisan) sense of the word. |
| | A big thanks to David Weinberger for the pointer. And for getting the snowball rolling months ago with World of Ends. He rolled that mother rigtht into Vermont, and now it's come out the candidate's mouth. (Or at least his site, which is close enough for now.) |
| | Earth to the other candidates (including G.W. Bush): Now is the time to get behind this thing. Because it's not about Dean. It's about citizens, democracy, governance and other good stuff we forgot when we began thinking all that mattered was how our faces looked and our "messages" sounded on TV. |
| | It's time to get past that. |
| | As the statement says, this is just the beginning. |
Meanwhile, back in reality...
| | A reader in Africa points to WorldSpace, a "satellite media network" that beams to Central and South America, Africa, the Midle East, South Asia... pretty much everywhere other than Northern Europe, North America, the former Soviet states and Australia. I'll run the whole email once I get permission. |
California in 4D
| | For a geology freak like me, this is long-awaited good news. |
| | Thomas Dibblee is one of the world's great field geologists. Now in his 90s, Dibblee has probably walked, and certainly mapped, more of California than any other human being. |
| | Helmut Ehrenspeck, Dibblee's colleage and co-author of many of his maps, also ran the Diblee Geological Foundation and its mapping program. I've was told by museum personnel last year that the map production project languished after Ehrenspeck, a much younger man, died in 2001. From the looks of the latest news at the foundation, there were quite a few setbacks in 2001. Now it looks like things are moving forward well again. |
| | These maps are beautiful things: true works of art. I had the San Marcos map with me while we were having lunch at the Paradise Store on Saturday, and I was able to see that the exposed rock there was Cozy Dell shale, that the rock in the road cut at the crest of the ridge was Coldwater sandstone, that the rougher sandstone at LaCumbre Peak is Matilija sandstone, and that most of the boulders laying around our yard (which sits on fanglomerate alluvium — an old landslide) are of Matilijan origin — about 50 million years old. |
| | Geologists like Dibblee often talk about The Picture. Rather than a two-dimensional flat thing bound by a frame, a screen or a page, they see a four-dimensional picture of the world — one containing not only the locations and compositions of the earth's rocks and the crustal segments they ride on, but a detailed chronological portfolio of former pictures, of the same rocks and their varied provenance, and of scenes, climates, movements of dirt and wind and water and heat and pressure that have combined to produce each picture in its turn. |
| | Over the last fifty years, the center of gravity in the geology profession has moved from the field to the laboratory. Field geologists like Dibblee are a smaller breed, if not a vanishing one. The great David Love, who did for Wyoming what Dibblee is still doing for California, died last year. Like Love, who discovered uranium and other resources that brought wealth to others, Dibblee's discoveries attracted and informed exploitation of California's oil reserves, and hardly brought him a dime. Like Love, Dibblee has never been interested in weath, but has rather been moved by a hunger to know and discover, to build and improve the rough scaffolding that frames our understanding of what can never fully be known. |
Making a delivery
| | In My System is You Are Here's well-said reluctant agreement with some of what we said in Cluetrain. I suddenly found myself agreeing with some of what I'd long ago dismissed. |
Digital Work Management
| | I planned to be at Digital Hollywood today, but I have too much work to do. Might make it tomorrow, though. |
| | Interesting exercize: Compare last year's agenda with this year's. Gone is "the Threat of Internet Piracy" and "Has the Industry Been Napsterized?" Now it's "Embracing the Connected Consumer" and "DVD - Hollywood¹s Booming Programming and Marketing Sector." While paranoia isn't the theme this year, there's still a day long workshop today on "Digital Rights Management, Content Piracy and Security." Among all the sessions in the workshop, there isn't a single speaker from outside the industry. Check the roster. I don't see anybody speaking for the Net, or for the customer. |
| | I see Google is a sponsor of one of the sessions tomorrow, but that one's about "search marketing," not DRM. |
There are responses to this message:Re: California in 4D, Frank Horowitz, 9/29/03; 8:02:59 PM Re: Monday, September 29, 2003, lou josephs, 9/29/03; 5:31:07 PM Re: Monday, September 29, 2003, lou josephs, 9/29/03; 5:26:13 PM
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
