Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

Posted by ben at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Posted by ben at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Mets have come into their own as a team, finally. They have a convincing claim on leadership of the East, built with hard work and despite missing their best pitcher, while the Yankees cannot find a win with a huge roster of monster talents and an almost hysterical desperation. It shouldn't be this way looking at it from the "moneyball" point of view, or the momentum point of view, or any point of view really. The Mets are comprised of a decent payroll of good players, a couple of stars, and a good coach, but they have no superheros among them to speak of. They play doggedly year after year, occasionally miraculously, mostly unevenly, sometimes heart-breakingly badly, but come back again and again somehow to compete in the most tantilizing, frustrating place in the world: just outside the Yankee's spotlight (clearly, a great place to get slowly and quietly good, though).

It's worth mentioning the way The New York Times has dealt with this switch in fortunes: amazingly badly. Here's a grudging, fourth-paragraph quote from their main story as the Mets took their second win in the series with the Yankees, and pulled away from the Braves to first place in their division as the Yankees fell apart: "But nothing about this game [...] could alter what those around here already suspected: The Mets are a better team, and not only because of their record, which improved to 28-14, the best in the National League..." As the capper, the headline for the article is "Another Injury to Another Pitcher And Another Loss for the Yankees." Give me a fucking break. They should stop reading team popularity polls and cover what's actually happening.

Regardless of what happens this year (the Yankees will eventually do something, the Brewers and the Indians look pretty good; it seems wide open), these Mets look like they are settled down and playing for themselves, and it's great to watch.

UPDATE: Wow, what a difference three weeks makes! Despite all the injuries, I'm still loving watching those Mets...

UPDATE 2: Oh my fucking God what the fuck was that?????!?!?! Utter, complete, total humiliation!!!!

Posted by ben at 2:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This screengrab is the list of tags for a Flickr photo I ran across randomly. It feels more like micro (or nano?) blogging than tagging, in fact it's anti-social!

I love casual personal revelations. It feels like there is a great deal of rich meaning in fragments of thoughts and ideas set down semiprivately (in a search box, or a tagging input) that is lost in the ultra-self-conscious blog post. Also, making a disorganized list of thoughts is more personal than a diary entry. It feels like there are several epiphanies somewhere in gathering my private thought fragments and using social media and networks to connect them to other people's fragments.

technorati tags:tags, terms, private, thoughts

Posted by ben at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Ben Fry (a genius himself) has a great quote at the bottom of his site page:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life,
when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
— Albert Einstein

Besides being utterly true, it hints at the social nature of happiness -- human happiness does not occur in isolation (despite what the pop psychology says). Creating or stumbling on the circumstances that get a few people together in their enthusiasm about an idea or anything is the key, the answer, the holy grail. But how elusive that turns out to be!

Posted by ben at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

An excellent article in the New Yorker recounts that in the U.K., in the thirties, there was a mini-movement called the "Mass-Observation" experiment. Members gathered as much detail about the lives of everyday people as they could, and synthesized it into a series of books (sample details: when a train goes through a tunnel at least one person per car will make loud animal noises in the darkness, most people tap the filter end of a cigarette before lighting it, many women had fantasies of torturing Hitler to death, and in Blackpool on a given night there were an average of four outdoor copulations). The catalyst came from the concurrent Surrealist trope in art; Surrealism attempted to give access to the hidden and primitive sides of ourselves (normally hidden away by our need to adhere to socialized reality) through accident, automatic writing, and exploring the unconscious. Beneath the polite exterior of social niceties there is a chthonic underworld that contains our real fears, dreams, and needs. For the Mass-Observers, this world could be accessed by simply recording what people actually did in their lives and gathering the details together into a "people's poetry."

This historical quirk was a direct prequel to the phenomenon of authentic media (or participatory media, or [shudder] user generated content), the realization of what could only be hinted at back then. It's goal and value, to know ourselves better through the aggregated stuff of our everyday needs and desires, is the best rationale for blogs and sites like MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, etc. Despite the headlong rush to treat these applications exclusively as a business model, it's worth remembering that as they become part of people's lives they will be creating a more and more authentic picture of what people are really like, in all their neediness, beauty, nastiness, ingenuity, anxiety, stupidity, sweetness, laziness, and practicality. It's not happening yet (and probably won't happen in this mini-boom), but it will happen, and it is the best reason for the Internet.

Posted by ben at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I'm not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn't notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures, and I've disabled my ShoZu account so it won't happen again. See update, below.

But: what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don't just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior. The photos are below.

Update: the kick-ass car of the person who stole my cell phone. I've decided to not disable the ShoZu account, seeing as this person is obviously much cooler than I am. I expect that random pictures will keep showing up in my flickr photostream, and I hope the coolness keeps flowing...

Update 2: It looks like the ShoZu function has been disabled, as there have been no other photos uploaded in a few days, sad to say. Thank you for the many kind words! I have received a spike in traffic on this post, and it seems that there is some problem with commenting, sorry about that!

Update 3:It seems that the car pic was not taken by the camera but uploaded as a wallpaper. Several people have said that I must have done this as some sort of marketing campaign for ShoZu, or that it's a hoax of some kind. It is not a hoax, and I have no connection to ShoZu. Thanks for your interest...

Posted by ben at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

A few people get together and create a new product or service, in secrecy. The product or service gets a ambiguous name like Jiffr or Remebo, is then previewed with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs, and is launched, sold to a large company, or (most often) fails.

The most valuable products are those utilitarian ideas that almost anyone would need and are engineered to be able to serve millions of people without too much added cost (and thus are very profitable if successful). Throughout this process, the bulk of the product design is done by the engineers or business owners, who mostly trust their own instincts about what the right experience is. Sometimes a design firm or designer is brought in to add some visual polish or create a logo.

So what's so great about this model? It hasn't produced any truly new products in a long time (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft were created publicly at schools, MySpace, Flickr and Blogger were created right out in the open as businesses). Despite the extremely hot focus on start-ups and the possible wealth to be had from a successful one, as ways of creating new ideas they are functioning pretty badly. Each new product is somewhat interesting, but after a pretty solid year of trying a lot of these, there isn't a single one that I still use (in particular, I am still wishing for a good Web-based RSS reader).

I think Om Malik may be right about what "Web 2.0" really is: a collection of exciting new enhancements for Web sites that will be integrated into the offerings of big companies like Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo!, rather than a hothouse for new companies. This would be fine if we had mature Web products that just needed refinement, but none of the major pieces of the Web work too well yet (search is "5% solved," Linux is a ten-year old, social networks are in their very awkward pre-teen days, email is choking, Windows has chronic illnesses, even my iPod crashes a lot).

What's the answer? Stay in school. Don't read eHub. Assume that your ideas have occurred to other people. Don't take the venture capital money for the first idea. Don't be secretive about ideas. Think past the semantic Web, Web 2.0, social media, etc., the implications of which are pretty clear to everyone, already being executed on and will be fairly played out in five years. What will come after that?

Posted by ben at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

At my job (and in Silicon Valley in general I think), Agile development is supposed to be the best way to do things. Specifically, the Scrum method encourages an evolutionary approach, where an entire team works together in short cycles and creates a product iteratively (first a barely-functional demo, then a rough prototype, then a more finished version, etc.), without an overall plan.

Scrum works very well for implementation, since it empowers a team to do its own planning, breaks a large project down into brief chunks and reduces the amount of churn and decision-making that can cause delays and rework. It is an approach with an evolutionary philosophy: no one can know at the outset what the right solution is, so let's just start working and refine as we go.

Coming from the perspective of design, there are some built-in tensions to this approach, however. Design as a discipline has as an article of faith that people can sit down and create a drawing or visualization of an idea that will make things better, and that this idea can help push the expansion of what's currently possible to engineer (this is not to say that only designers can do design, just defining the activity, everyone does design all the time).

Scrum allows no time for the messy task of conceptualization (other than beforehand), and divides up all the aspects of a project into small, unintegrated tasks, making it hard to see the 'big picture.' The team-focused environment encourages strong collaboration, but does not ensure that the value of a product is realized by itself (and the proponents of the method don't claim it does, either). In fact, the method ensures that engineers, designers, and product people spend less time thinking about whether the product is the right product overall.

What's needed is less of a focus on methodology, and more of a focus on ideas and people's talents. Scrum is a fine method to do work, but doesn't actually solve the problem of making good products. Rather than talking about intelligent design vs. evolution and assuming that one way of doing things explains the entire world, we should be valuing time spent on hard thinking and idea generation just as much as we value the time spent implementing things. There are certainly limits to emphasizing creativity, but there is a sameness to Web products these days I think. We need more really new ideas.

Update

People (ok, one person) have asked me why I refer to intelligent design vs. evolution in the context of making Web sites. I didn't mean it just as a snide reference; I do think there is an interesting parallel to the religious debate. Warning: this gets weird.

The evolutionary approach is based on a scientific approach to understanding the world — there are natural forces at work and we can best grasp them with the scientific method — the activity of implementation is fundamentally a rigorous scientific analysis of options and solutions. The intelligent design approach is faith based (secular faith, but faith nonetheless) — a person with luck, skill, humility, and talent can improve things — the activity of design is fundamentally a personal struggle to create something new, a big improvement.

People are fundamentally spiritual beings, with big needs for meaning and a sense of themselves in relation to the world (whether they believe in God or not). Scientific thinking is always needed and important. But what we most need now is that messy old-time religion: creative thinking, design thinking, the faith that we can know the right thing to do, to make the world better.

Posted by ben at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Most people have a tremendous longing for something, a place in the past they wish they could have again, regret about a bad thing they've done, a wish for something that seems out of reach. You keep going ahead with your life in some way, but you have a "hungry backward look" (Phillip Roth's phrase) towards when you were younger, or to someone beautiful, graceful, smart, etc. It's a strong desire that feels necessary to ourselves, part of who we are, and at the same time probably impossible.

(Also, although I imagine this longing is universal and basic to being human, most people won't admit this; they will tell you their sexual tastes and family problems first. That wish might seem greedy, or grandiose, inappropriate, or just plain ridiculous.)

The truth about these desires (I think everyone knows on some level), is that no matter what they are, they would not transform your life fundamentally -- you would still be the person you are today, the person whose life has brought you to this point. What you actually want (I believe), is some way to re-experience a memory exactly as it was, or live the small vision you had in your head, the way you can play a CD or video again and again. But memories are mushy and indistinct, and fade (unevenly). Watching my daughter grow is breathtaking, not just because she's so fabulously big now but also because realizing how fast she's changing makes me a little panicky -- the sweet baby part of her life is slipping away so quickly. The way that memory erodes is just like mediated experience: first comes the movie, then the spin-off sequel, then the TV series, each one less connected from the story and emotions that made it powerful at first. And the more you try to recapture the feeling, the more it gets away from you.

The cure for this is similar to when you are wrestling with any hard thing: write down some something, make lists, get whatever it is into a place where you are not just wrestling with your own thoughts and hearing them rattle around in your head. The cure, in fact, is for people to make more authentic, public media (photos, journals, podcasts, shoutouts, posts, tags, avatars, etc.); not imitations of professional media, not stagy fake material or imitations of other people's stuff, but the small-scale, awkward, unselfconscious storytelling that comes naturally when you are talking to a friend. This kind of authentic media is in very short supply -- in fact, most bloggers are doing the exact opposite, wanting attention and aspiring to manage some slick bullshit public persona.

The tools are available to reify and make public all the small, modest pieces of life, and cheaply. What you are doing when you do this is ultimately getting all the thoughts and memories out of your head and into a place where you can have some sort of perspective on them. If memories, and the memories and experiences of others, were out there and always available, they would for us what Portnoy's Complaint and other books probably did for Roth: put him at peace with the sometimes conflicted, embarrassing, messy, but ultimately good person that he is.

Posted by ben at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

What could be more uselessly meta than blogging about the reasons for blogging? Whatever. Here we go:

The Good

People blog for attention, or in the expectation of getting more attention. Since blogging originated with geeks, "attention" paid to blogs has been turned into a set of equations (trackbacks, comments, etc.). In this realm, blogging is about promoting oneself in a marketplace of ideas. The more traffic you can drive, the more important you are, and the more influential you are. By enlisting your friends, commenting on other more prominent blogs, or just plain pimping your content to others, you can try to get people to visit your site and track your status. It's a more efficient version of the ways people have always spread ideas, influenced people, and measured their impact. It's open to almost everyone, it promotes the free flow of information, and it provides a real alternative to existing media outlets for more immediate, more opinionated, deeper dives into topics.

For all the good, blogging has big limitations, however, in the gap between the technical solution and the genuine human need (and, as I am a blogger with just slightly above zero traffic and just trying to impress his wife, I think I'm perfectly positioned for the discussion).

The Not So Good

First, people in general don't have a getting media attention problem, they most likely have an experience-deficit problem. That is, the fundamental drive to be social and belong does not get solved by blogging, or any mediated experience. You can see this in online romances (the torrid email exchange is followed by an awkward meeting), or telecommuting (people on the conference call or email thread are second-class citizens). The simulation doesn't satisfy. Bloggers don't think this way, however; for them, everything important is on the Web, and the first impulse after having an experience is to blog about it.

Second, bloggers are mobs, or latent mobs (and a weird kind of mob, where no one in the mob knows they're a mob). All relationships in blogs are individual-to-individual (or even hand-to-hand). Where conflict happens there's a lot of amplified passion and strife that flares up and dies down, without much understanding or knowledge being created (and the winners will often be the people who shouted the loudest). People say things to each other on blogs that they would never say in real life. When there's an argument between bloggers, small fires turn into big ones quickly and often and the results are boring and stupid.

The distorting effect of the technological solution also causes "blogger-voice," people speaking with the same high-pitched self-consciousness you hear in loud cell phone conversations, bad acting, or people caught lying. Since the stakes for bloggers are high ('love me'), the audience goes on the same emotional roller-coaster with the blogger, and that investment exaggerates their reaction (either it 'sux' or it 'rulez'). Doing the public voice gracefully is an art. The people whose writing does stay with me are all journalists or writers (unrepresentative samples: Danah Boyd, Steven Johnson, Mickey Kaus, Paul Ford, etc.). This suggests to me that people who have experience with writing and thinking in the real world are more valuable than those who live in only in the electronic one.

So...

To me, all this doesn't mean that blogging is bad, I hope that there are more bloggers so all these issues can sort themselves out. It means that blogging doesn't really change what people's actual needs are that much. In the end, blogs are just slow motion phone calls, speeded up postcards, tiny threads of communication between two people, with the goal of understanding and intimacy. The public quality is real, but ancillary. The self-consciousness that the public display engenders is something to get over, a test of the blogger's ability to keep their personal perspective and identity. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blogs, media, mobs, motives, psyche, social, technology

Posted by ben at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Web needs tagging or some other bottom up and scalable system for managing the tons of information that everyone is creating. Librarians and specialists will not be able to keep up with classifying the tsunami of information, and we'll all lose out if we don't find some way of capturing the patterns of behavior that people sharing information create: there are business needs for sure, but mostly there is a lot of general improvement to people's lives that can be had (e.g. if I subscribe to popular links for a tag on del.icio.us, I know most everything that people are thinking about a topic on a real time basis, and I am included and benefit from thousands of small intentions and thoughts).

So the goal is a good goal. Tagging has become sort of popular, but some problems have started to crop up. Many people still are unable to see the value of the practice, and for those that do tag there are limitations built into the standard model (it works much better as a tool for collaborating than for personal organization, and you spend a lot of time reinventing the classification wheel). In response, some geeks have started talking about extending the model to include relationships between terms or normalization, or ranking through collaborative filtering. That's natural (in fact, it has a precedent; in the 50s there was a single-term, non- hierarchical classification system for libraries called UniTerm, but it was not generally accepted and instead we have the hierarchical Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems). Time Tags and Zone Tags are interesting ways of adding layers of social meaning to tags.

This direction feels wrong to me though. Tagging has had success because it is lightweight enough metadata to be easy, and it's non-hierarchical nature lends itself to social applications (like quick aggregation of photo themes on flickr). I think a better approach will be to build tags into the interaction model of applications, turn the actions and intentions of users into inferred or implied tags, then surface that information as a basis for explicit meta-tagging action later (instead of putting so much of a burden on the user).

Right now, for example, a searcher types in one or two words as a query to a search engine, then they might pick one or two Web pages to visit. Essentially, they have tagged those pages with the query term, but that metadata is currently lost to the searcher. Instead we ask the searcher to take explicit action to save a Web page, then tag it with terms that may have nothing to do with their original query; the relationship between the two metadata linked to the same entity could be very valuable to both the user and the system. I think this kind of explicit/implicit tagging could add a lot of relevance and richness to a lot of sites and applications.

Posted by ben at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Large numbers of people joined the companies and culture that participated in the venture-capital-fueled dot-bomb, which was believed to be created by the vast potential that the Internet had to change many aspects of human interaction, business, and culture. For many, this personal involvement in discovery was the rationale for their participation. It turned out that the Internet does alter a great deal, but much more modestly and incrementally than was supposed then. The end of the boom created a large group of people, versed in technology, who no longer had a transformational, exciting focus in their work. The rebirth of the boom most recently has led to some of the same feelings, artifacts and parties, but this time instead of some illusion that there is nowhere to go but up there is the assumption that at some point the party will end, but still the enterprise is somehow one involved in 'changing the world.'

Many have looked for a similar transformational experience in creating technology to help developing nations (as seen at the TED conference in 2002 with Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway device, demonstrating a water purification device). Others have joined politics (as documented in the _New York Times Magazine_ in "The Dean Connection," in which many people have traded their devotion to creating new interactive software for electing Howard Dean). An older, but similar group of ex-liberals called the "neoconservatives" created a set of thinking about American power that informed much of the drive to invade Iraq; George Soros points out in _The Atlantic Magazine_ that this has the qualities of a "bubble" of American political power that was based on false precepts, and has now collapsed.

The drive to be involved in an enterprise that is personally meaningful and connected to helping others is a strong, and undoubtedly good, one. Working long hours and pouring oneself wholeheartedly into a community of others that share your passion for a single goal is powerful stuff. But despite the appeal of transformational events and communities, the larger world is often ignorant of the desires of a few people or the beauty of their dreams. In the case of faith in technology in general, a desire to solve the problems of the Middle East with American power, and especially in a project to defeat George Bush, those who wish for success need to combine their elaborate plans with more rigorous checking-in with those that are not part of the special group, or else they will suffer the same broken hearts as the dot-com boomers and many, many others before them.

Posted by ben at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ()