One good thing about travelling all the time is being able to finally put faces to the myriad personas and names that I encounter online. I lucked into being in Seattle for the Cascadia Anarchist Tech Skillshare (cAts), where lattice, kellan, evan, and gaba and many others who I hadn't "seen" before, online or off, spent the weekend geeking out and talking radical tech. I also met Paul Ford when I was in Brooklyn. One of the many benefits was a cool tshirt:

...which probably makes a lot more sense if you're a Debian user. I'm not, but I managed to absorb enough from the skillshare that I vaguely know that apt-get is a neat command that makes updating software easier or otherwise better on Debian than other Linux distros.

I also had some good discussion about open publishing with Salaud of the Portland IMC, using SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra), a very cool little app that does one thing really well: it lets multiple people to edit the same text file in real time. Now, they just need to combine it with the hypertext capabilities and wiki interfacing of VoodooPad, and we'll be on our way to Xanadu.

Ideas

Some ideas I meant to discuss, but didn't get around to, due to a persistant headache, overflowing Dominion work, and other web work... not to mention the packed schedule of geekery and many exciting ideas that the cAts people had lined up.

Syndication everywhere
[Moved to its own seperate post, because it's long]

Voice Over IP
Someone made a comment about Cyberpunk becoming reality--the internet becoming its own world that you jack into, with its own norms, points of reference, etc. I find myself increasingly fascinated with the opposite direction: the internet as something that ties two ends together, but becomes increasingly invisible. Thus my focus on a newspaper that draws from online independent media but is aimed at the physical space we inhabit, on ways radio stations use the net to collaborate, and so on.

The latest technology to connect meaningfully to the internet is the phone, as seen in Jeremy Scahill's dramatic description of the work Evan and Co did in NYC during the Republican National Convention.

That's all. Just something I want to think about and learn more about.

The idea of credibility, which will also get its own post.