Internet pundit fantasy camp this summer

IPFC, Inc. announces the launch of the Internet Pundit Fantasy Camp, and a chance to be among the presence of such luminaries as Jason Kottke, James Lileks, Doc Searls, Glenn Reynolds, Esther Dyson, Cory Doctorow, Christopher Locke, Clay Shirky, Xeni Jardin, Scott Rosenberg, Joi Ito, Marc Canter, John Dvorak, Dan Gillmor, Andrew Sullivan, Dave Winer, and David Weinberger.

Another satellite

My heart is taken it’s not lost in space
And I don’t want to see your mooney mooney face
I say why on earth do you revolve around me
Aren’t you aware of the gravity
Don’t need another satellite
I’m happy standing on my feet of clay
I have no wish to swim your milky milky way
I say why on earth do you send your letters ’round here
Only to gum up the atmosphere
Don’t need another satellite
So circling we’ll orbit another year
Two worlds that won’t collide
So circling we’ll orbit another year
Moon still tries to steal the tide away
Don’t need another satellite
Don’t need another satellite

Abort your mission let’s just say you tried
Before you glimpse I have a darker darker side
I say why in Heaven’s name do you come on these trips
Only to freeze in a total eclipse
Don’t need another satellite
So circling we’ll orbit another year
Two worlds that won’t collide
So circling we’ll orbit another year
Moon still tries to steal the tide away
Don’t need another satellite
Don’t need another satellite

now playing:

“Another Satellite” by XTC [Skylarking]

His marbles

Dave’s back, having made his point, rallying support for “mature leadership” against competing big companies and personal vendettas. That was fast.

Syndication list for developers

One tangible effect of the recent weblog format/syndication/api/archiving/interop debate recently is that Rogers Cadenhead has started a mailing list, the Site Syndication Format development list to discuss “ambiguities in the RSS 2.0 specification.”

The goal is to develop a new specification from scratch … that clarifies or corrects these issues…. The members of the list should be developers who have written software that produces or consumes RSS 2.0.

Note: I just added Rogers’ Workbench weblog to my subscriptions.

Also: Dave Winer has taken Scripting News off the air to protest “lack of support, even namecalling” coming out of the current discussions.

Wiki – the flood

So it occurred to me a month or so ago that the best potential use of the Dead Beat website might be to set it up as a Wiki. Wikis are, among other things, highly collaborative websites.
See, for example, the
Grateful Dead entry in the Wikipedia, a project building an entirely collaborative encyclopedia.
Technically, all this would require is me setting up a wiki engine on the backend. There are many free choices, including several that run on the LAMP platform I prefer (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
The tricky part is bringing in participants, seeding the wiki, etc. It could build off the strawman taxonomy on the Dead Beat home page (itself sketched out in one of the Dead conferences on the Well).
We could still offer blogs to Dead heads on the site, possibly using Scoop (which powers k5) or Drupal, for those who want a more structured, more “self-owned” writing environment. If the mission of all blog posts are to be somehow Dead related (and maybe categorized), then a combined news feeds from all participant blogs. Currently, just this one, with two active contributors and a few others in the background, and complement the more freeform wiki side of the site.
Something tells me Dead heads would just more naturally prefer the wiki.
[ObDead] Joan Osborne is getting raves.

Fact-checking Frist's ass

Billmon, whose list of WMD-related quotations posted to his Whiskey Bar blog rocketed around the political web a month or so ago has tracked down a series of quotations from Senate leader Bill Frist that seem to contradict his more recent take on the reason we went to war with Iraq.

Lies, lies, lies, yeah

I’m looking forward to reading Al Franken’s new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Here’s the BuzzFlash interview that whetted my appetite.

Echo's out

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.

Jeremiah, 52:7

The Echo Project, née Sam Ruby’s wiki pie, needs (again) a new name. I’m warming up to Shelley Powers’ suggestion (Pubs) and Timothy Appnel’s suggestion (ESP).

How to backup and restore the world

I just added David Pollard’s How to Save the World weblog to my subscriptions. His blog is a nonstop source of fascinating thoughts about business, the web, society, and so on. He has also done some interesting analyses of Salon bloggers by traffic and interconnectedness. (Since Harry Potter will be knocking me out of Salon’s top ten all time blogs within a day or so, I cherish my relative interleavedness with the rest of the blogosphere.)
Anyway, I kept forgetting to check his site until I saw a link back in, and that was the clue that I needed to subscribe. It will also make it easier for me to quote him and x-post to the salonika category when he posts something about the Salon blogs community.
I need to update the feed boxes on the salonika page, I know, especially since the untimely retirement of the Raven.

"I am content"

Dave Winer’s commitment to RSS is beyond doubt. In fact, he says he himself is content in an RSS container. He has also issued a broadminded endorsement of the Echo project, saying he’ll recommend Userland support it without, of course, backing off from RSS support.