Clay Shirky‘s written another sterling essay, this time on the nature of communities vs. broadcasting and why only fools think they’re going to take their broadcast audience and build a really cool community and everyone will come and like hang out and then they’ll be like all popular and everything.

The essay make five points:

1. Audiences are built. Communities grow.
2. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus.
3. Participation matters more than quality.
4. You may own the software, but the community owns itself.
5. The community will want to build. Help it, or at least let it.

Clay is one of my favorites.

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I confess to being a knee-jerk, pacifist-leaning, NPR-listening, white-wine-swilling, heart-bleeding, Kennedy-voting, cigarette-banning, tie-dye-wearing, Mondale-mourning, Vineyard-vacationing, West-Wing-Tivo-ing, decade-old-spare-joints-in-a-bottom-drawer-stashing, male-distrusting, race-apologizing, criminal-coddling Jewish atheist pointy-headed bleeding-heart middle class middle aged Liberal.

So, Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe today was thought-provoking. (I usually find his writing just plain old provoking.) He points out that the Conservatives have much more fun than we do. They get to drive in their SUV’s, blow up bad guys, and rant on talk shows about how the media don’t give conversatives any air time.

There’s something to this. They’re the Bad Boys/Girls. We’re the scolds. It’d be real good to make Liberalism fun again.

Again? Yes, kiddies, there was a time when being a lefty-liberal meant that you were cool and the conservatives were squares. We got to smoke dope while they watched John Wayne movies. We got free sex while they reproduced via the missionary position. We got to rethink the world while they were pledging their allegiance. If nothing else, the left was the happenin’ place to be. Now it’s as glamorous as sensible shoes.

We should work on changing this. Maybe a new hairstyle or something.

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There’s a particularly thoughtful article by Renee Tawa about blogging and Journalism in the LA Times today. Best of all: Not a word about “teenagers writing about what they had for breakfast.”

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I like the idea of CNN’s breaking news service. When there’s news that’s significant and urgent, CNN sends me an email to let me know. Thus has email replaced PointCast as the “push” technology of choice for me.

So, yesterday is September 11. In addition to the grief, occasionally overwhelmed by the beating of the war drums, there was the “heightened state of alertness” posted by everyone’s favorite bluegrass group, Tom Ridge and the DC Fear Boys. So, when an email came from cnn.com with the subject line “Breaking news!,” I tore it open expecting to read about a new outrage or calamity.

It was with more peevedness than relief that I learned that the urgent, significant news was that Johnny Unitas had passed peacefully from us. I should have known: cnn.com’s news alerts routinely are trivial, no-need-to-know items with no long- or short-term bearing on my life.

What next? “Britney Reunites with Justin!”? Stop the presses! “Jack Welch Had Another Affair!”? Hold my calls! “Matt Lauer Regrets Haircut!”? Alert the media! Oh, wait, you are the media.

Oh, please.

And, no, there is no way to set preferences at cnn.com for this “service.”

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I’ve got nothing worth the electrons today.

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“The Tsunamii.Net Crush Server is currently online live from the Millbank Gallery in London! Watch as the webserver counts itself down before it activates the industrial crusher attached to it, bearing 150-tonnes of brute force onto itself and terminating its existance. Check out the details on the Tsunamii.Net website or visit the webserver directly at http://195.195.81.5.

(Thanks S. Lamb)

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Jacob Shwirtz blogs a response to my question “What did a faithful person see when he/she saw that attack on the World Trade Center.” From a Jewish point of view, according to Jacob, we didn’t see God and Satan arm wrestling….well, Jacob describes it better than I.

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J. Thomas Vincent points us to the PromoGuy’s suggestion that we begin our remembrance of Sept. 11 by turning off the media for the day.

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Yahoo has eliminated the email account for a long-term user, the Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace. From its home page, LMNO4P seems to be your basic community lefty-pacifist vigil-attendin’, Pete Seeger-singin’ peace group. According to the group, Yahoo says the account was turned off and the mailing list was deleted because the group violated Yahoo’s service agreement, but Yahoo won’t tell the group what its violation was. Yahoo does say that accounts are only terminated in response to complaints.

In a display of subtle, pre-emptive anti-Semitism, the group says: “We think Yahoo! overreacted to a complaint by someone who disagrees with our politics, especially our public support for peace & justice in Palestine,” although it has no evidence of this. When in doubt, let’s blame the damn Zionists.

It’s bad enough that Yahoo is censoring groups it doesn’t like, worse that the groups seem innocuous, and worst that it’s denying any accountability. You might consider moving from Yahoo before it decides it doesn’t like what you have to say, either.

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The Veepers technology from Pulse3D animates a still photo of a face and adds the sort of mouth movement familiar from the movie “Babe” (you know, the talking pig) synced up with a voice track. The results are somewhere between laughable and ghoulish, especially after the talking head has finished and remains staring at you, randomly bobbing and twitching.

Seeing it for yourself requires a small download. There’s an example here.

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