How many times have you seen American "news people" standing in the middle of a hurricane to "report from the scene." And when you've seen it, have you, like I, said (not on your blog of course) -- "That idiot is going to get himself killed." I suppose that's why people watch it.

For all I know when Anderson Cooper does it (and he pioneered the form as far as I know) he's in a studio and the whole thing is simulated. But it often looks like a tree or sign is going to come swooping by and knock off his head. In real-time, while kids all over the world watch.

I'm still talking about Anderson Cooper.

I did see the parallels in an idiot standing outside, unprotected, in a hurricane and a rich, white, American standing in the middle of Tahrir Square during a revolution. As spectacularly great as the Egyptian people were during this event, there were assholes floating around out there. Major assholes. People who hate America and Americans. Did Cooper and CNN not know that?

I wonder if they made him sign a disclaimer before he went out there saying that if he was killed his family wouldn't sue CNN for causing his death.

Just some thoughts.

 2/16/2011; 10:47:46 AM.   .

I've done something unusual in the last few months, I've made a few public rivers. I've been publicizing them. Beating the drum. Trying to get people interested. With some good results.

Here are three of them:

1. wikiriver.org.

2. daveriver.scripting.com.

3. east-village.org.

Today I did something to extend the interestingness.

If you look in the address bar when viewing each of them, if you use Firefox as I do, you'll see a blue "radiator" icon. If you click on it, you'll get to the OPML subscription list for the river.

Now you can subscribe to the same sources I do. My OPML is automatically updated whenever I add or remove feeds, and if your aggregator supports dynamic subscriptions (also known as reading lists), you'll get exactly the same feeds I have.

By making OPML as readily available for rivers as RSS is for blogs, we're taking the next step in a bootstrap.

Hope you like it!

 2/16/2011; 10:09:02 AM.   .