Good life.

Dave

 10/5/2011; 9:01:52 PM.   .

Windy! Whoooo.

Strong headwind uptown, beautiful cruising tail wind coming home.

75 degrees and bright sunny day.

Map: 1 hour 4 minutes. 11.59 miles.

 10/5/2011; 4:16:12 PM.   .

Yesterday I was given a list of Occupy sites on Daily Kos, about 200 of them. Most were Facebook sites, there were a handful of blogs with feeds.

Of course without feeds they can't be part of occupyweb.org. But that's okay, because occupying Facebook is every bit as good as occupying Wall Street. Seriously. And because of what's happening on Facebook, the show is going to move out to the web.

Read this article about where Facebook thinks they're heading. And then try to imagine the conversations they're having with advertisers. How long before there's an Occupy for individual brands. And do they really want to compete with the occupiers on Facebook. Who are they kidding. People are going to find what the brands have to say very easy to ridicule. Basically I can't imagine they will do anything but cede the space to protestors.

There you have the coming faceoff. And it's going to be a good one. Whatever plays out won't be in Cairo or Tunisia, it'll be in New York and Silicon Valley. It'll look a lot like the faceoff on the Brooklyn Bridge. But visible to everyone in the world. This is what American democracy looks like. It's always been class warfare, but now the formerly disarmed class has a way of organizing.

But everybody, be sure you have a good backup plan. Where will you congregate on the web if you lose your Facebook presence? Really, seriously be thinking about that.

At the DNC in Chicago in 1968, the protesters chanted "The whole world's watching." This time in a whole new way.

 10/5/2011; 11:28:23 AM.   .

When a new phenomenon shows up, like Wikileaks or OccupyWallSt, or the web itself, my immediate impulse is to try to get my arms around it. To get enough input flowing into my brain so I get a feel for the story.

Following a hashtag on Twitter is useful, but it isn't what I'm seeking. CNN or MSNBC is a substitute for it, but they aren't really covering this stuff, and aside from that, I know that they are giving me a superficial story. I want something less processed, with less MSM judgment. Something more raw.

What I'm looking for, of course, is a river. So yesterday I took a look around to see how many of the Occupy sites had feeds.

My algorithm was simple. I got a list of the top cities in the United States from Wikipedia. And I typed into Google, one after another: Occupy <CityName>. And about half of them came up hits. An overwhelming majority are planning events. But it seems most of them are using Facebook to plan the events. Since Facebook doesn't reliably produce feeds for its groups (if they do I don't know how to find them) I can only use blogs. And I don't really want to go into Facebook, since I feel strongly that it's as much a part of the problem as the culture of Wall Street. I want to produce a "green" river.

Anyway -- it's here! Flowing slowly, but there are stories there. I hope that by spreading the news it will attract more readers, and thereby more new feeds, and more news in the feeds we already have.

http://occupyweb.org/

And of course the OPML reading list for this river is publicly available.

 10/5/2011; 8:27:47 AM.   .