I never thought Dean would be the nominee, but the little excerpts from his Portland, Ore. appearance with John Kerry remind me that I miss his pith and passion. Compare Dean's jabbing, upbeat style to the oratorical circumspection in Kerry's quotes. Just makes me wish for a little bit o'Clinton or Buchanan in the mix. Yes, I said Buchanan. If you've got someone pithier and punchier, feel free to let me know.
The other day NYTimes.com info architect Rob Larson pointed me to the newly-launched NYT Travel section online. Check it out - very rich in data and "ways in." I first got the chance to see Rob's thinking in action when he found ways to divide up Times content for AOL readers using sub-collections that you couldn't create on the web. NYT on AOL had a standing archive of Gardening, Wine, Dining, Dance articles long before the web site even had a decent search function. That was all Rob - he thinks in new media ideas the way Neo sees the code. Try going to the new Travel section and searching on the word 'shoes.' Note the results brilliantly sorted into folders on the left side of the page. How cool is that? Flat taxonomies and flat results-lists were two of the earliest features of the web - but I've never…
Saw an announcement from Zack Rosen about his sweet aggregator of progressive blogs and lists, Progressive Pipes. Zack's the guy behind Deanspace, which powered much of the local organizing online for Dean. Ppipes.org is wonderfully streamlined and user-friendly. It's also wicked fast. Feels much faster and easier to get around than Feedster, which I also basically like. Ppipes is created in
The web has become an informed source - which means that you have, gentle reader. In an AP story about problems with Apple's iPod mini, the primary citation isn't to polls or professors, but people on customer web sites:The diminutive music players, which have been shipping since February, sometimes generate the noise when users touch areas around the headphone jack, according to a handful of reports posted at iPodlounge.com and Apple's own discussion forums. In the obituary of Estee Lauder, a Lauder spokeswoman vies with a new company source for the podium, the Lauder web site:Estee Lauder Companies was formally launched in 1946, with what the company Web site says was a skin cream developed by her chemist uncle. ... Estee Lauder products are now available in more than 100 countries, the Web site says. I love all the "saying" these sites are doing. But in today's world, surveillance is…
At the Kettering Foundation, where I presented a paper about online discussion and democracy Tuesday, foundation president David Mathews paraphrased the same challenge Joe and I were talking about last week. "Being off the page," he said, "is a product of the kind of work we do." Kettering's work is research into the mechanisms of democracy and the relationships of citizens to government and other institutions. The focus, though, is often on exploring the possibility of a revitalized citizenry, one that engages with those mechanisms of democracy in a more conscious and ongoing way. The complexities of this revitalization, and its foreignness to everyday life in the U.S. circa 2004, are what put the inquiry "off the page" and in culture's hopeful margins.