In the discussion group, David Grenier remarks on the below observation about voting with one's wallet. "Voting with ones dollars assumes one *has* dollars to vote with."

Jamie Zawinski's diary of the early days of Netscape Communications has some interesting comments: "We had one of those 'we're going to win big' meetings today, where Jim and Marc wave their arms a lot and say 'these are not the droids you're looking for,' and we all sit there and nod enthusiastically and grin and say 'these are not the droids we're looking for.'"

Today, I've been spending alot of time on MP3.com, looking for interesting music to listen to. My previous experience with jumping into the genre top 40 lists rendered a lot of novelty songs with low playability over one listening. This time, I started out on Paranerd's page, looked at the 'other artists we like' sidebar, and found lots of cool stuff from there, such as Woodworm and Les Paiens.

There's lots of good stuff out there, but people need an opinion to start them off, so IMHO, community - lots of interlinked artists, weblog style - is the killer app on the web for music, not the top 40 lists.

The reason I'm doing this is to test a theory about whether the web can revive the 'midlist' - that is, books and other published media with circulations under 50,000 that are still viable. Or maybe just distribute that cultural force that is music/media consumption a little more evenly.

That, and there's a lot of great innovative music out there that I'm definitely not hearing on the radio.

JLG talks about Be in the new Be Newsletter. Did I mention that I still hate their new logo? Aargh.

The Amazon boycott seems to be spreading pretty fast - Slashdot mentions it in the same tone that they mention that the NY Times has "free registration req'd". The net may not be affecting politics in the electoral sense, but it seems that voting with your wallet is a more effective means in this day and age.