Peter Durand of AlphaChimp has posted the posters he did in real time illustrating each of the PopTech talks. (My blogs from PopTech start here.)

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Terry Heaton blogs an interview with Anniesj who got a friendly visit from the Secret Service after she blogged — irked by Bush’s talk of prayer — that she was praying that God would inspire Bush and his pals to commit mass suicide. Anniesj seems to think she’s actually done something worth being investigated for. Terry concludes:

…if you’re a blogger, for crying out loud be careful about what you post, even in the comments section of somebody else’s blog. The first amendment is not absolute, and it’s pretty easy to find you.

I conclude that when the Secret Service can tell you what you are and are not allowed to pray for — especially when you’re writing satire — this country has had it.

I personally pray the Rapture comes before Nov. 2 and that it takes Bush and his cronies to Hell to do some nation-building.

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In an article in Salon in February, I disputed the idea that the Net consists of echo chambers:

…Even if I spend most of my online time in my echo chamber of choice, the minority of my time may bring me into contact with a more diverse range of opinions than I would have encountered without the Net. That seems to me to be the relevant statistic, however elusive it might be.

Micah Sifry at the new Personal Democracy Forum cites a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that says: “Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions.”

Since the study supports my position, I have can only conclude that the study is deeply flawed.

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Mithras at Kos proves that the Bush campaign’s latest ad doctors a small crowd into a large one.

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ProgressiveMajoritySpeaks has posted a mp3 mix of Martin Luther King, Robert LafFolette and Paul Wellstone. Loop it and listen for the next 4 years…

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Chris Locke weaves a nasty little web of ideas – personal, psychological, industrial, historical – over at this site that puts Maslow’s self-actualization in a disturbing light.

My new tagline for Chris: RageBoy: Giving being fucking nuts a good name since 1985.

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Hmm, Candidate Bush overheard calling a NY Times reporter a “major league asshole.” VP Cheney telling Senator Leahy to go “fuck himself.” And now Governor George Bush giving the finger to the camera. All just part of the return to civility and Christian decency that this great man represents. (Ask yourself: What would Jimmy Carter do?)

Yes it’s petty. I present it as nothing more than that.

This video comes courtesy of VideVote.org. Here’s a description of the project, courtesy of Jon Lebkowsky:

Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we’re putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day…We aren’t quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. This all began when the NY Times ran an article over the weekend saying the Republicans plan to challenge some voters at polling places – “winning through intimidation.” We’re hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we’ll have video and photo records which we’ll place online as close to realtime as possible.

Citizen-journalists to the rescue!

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Jason Kottke in September guessed that Google is building its own browser. Slashdot got all slashdotty on that idea’s ass. The supporting evidence: Google has registered gbrowser.com, they may be hiring people from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, and there are reasons to think it makes sense for Google to do so…at least in terms of Google’s ambitiousness.

I’m not good at this type of prognostication. (So, what type of prognostication am I good at? I accurately predicted that John Travolta would be a huge star back when he was a Sweathog. That concludes my list.) But, yesterday’s purchase of Keyhole — yet another Windows-only service, as Dan Gillmor points out — got me to thinking. If Google is building a browser, what might it be like?

It would not be a Web browser. It’d be a world browser. It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it’d also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

And it wouldn’t be just a browser. It would let me work with the information I’ve found: Manage my photos (Picasa), manage my desktop files, translate documents (Google Languages), shop…

If that’s what Google’s aiming at, they need a file manager (no big deal) and would probably want to have a e-wallet and maybe a digital ID offering (Whoogle? — currently owned by AK PRadeep in Berkeley).

The result would replace current browsers but wouldn’t look much like them. You’d do so much of your daily work in it it that it would feel more like a desktop…

…which is where it gets really interesting.

Click here for a disclosure statement.

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Apparently, athletes hired by the New England region were successful in their efforts to defeat similar athletes hired by the greater St. Louis area. I commend them all.

But, this leaves us with an incomplete narrative. The Boston team failed for 86 years because it was insufficiently grateful to a particular porcine athlete who went on to great success. This resulted in a curse. Now the curse has been lifted. But how? Did Manny Ramirez accomplish seven impossible tasks set for him by the wily Odin? Did David Ortiz slay a Minotaur? Did Johnny Damon pull a thorn from an enchanted Yankee’s paw? Without knowing how the curse was lifted, the story just doesn’t work, people!

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Bush‘s official campaign site seems to be rejecting visitors from outside North America.

Yeah, way to build a coalition, George.

[Thanks to Paolo for the link. Paolo comments: “This must be the most stupid move in the short Internet history.”]

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