I enjoyed pulling together the first set so much, here goes the 2nd:

Is the Internet today's Punk Rock?

Punk Rock gave a voice to disaffected youth.  It spawned fashion trends and music genres.  But it was a  specific taste.  Punk music is not for everyone.  But the Internet is for everyone.  And it is vitally, desperately important.  James Moore calls it the "connective tissue" of the "second superpower" of world opinion in The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head.

Click of the Light / Start of the Dream

Throughout the album, there's a sense of generations having been handed a very bad blueprint concerning life, love, and meaning, up to their necks in false covenants; generations now trying fitfully to grieve the loss of wisdom, lament lost time, and gather together what goodness remains amid the risk of losing each other to vampires and a sleep epidemic. Think "Rock Album as Exorcism.

Seeing the Possibilities

Our lives are all too short not to share what and who we know so the world can profit and the journey to sustainibility can be shortened.?

So wrote social entrepreneur and co-founder of the International Business Leaders Forum, Robert Davies in a blog post written on May 14th this year, titled ?Why do I blog??.  Just over three months later, on August 18th, aged 56, he would lose his battle against cancer.

Professor Theodore Zeldin thinks that life is a search for people.  It?s a shame that all too often we find out about amazing people when it is too late to meet them.

Unresolved Chicken Soup for the Soul

I read "look what our church is doing" accounts in newsletters, but don't hear the invariably messy follow-ups.  We get the "victory" stories over sin and depravity, but no one publishes books called, Wups, I'm Totally Messed Again.  Yet, that's where the stories of my actual life are.  We don't like our stories open-ended.  So we clean up our stories, and act like they're finished.

They're not.

We like resolution.  But we don't live in resolution-time.  Forgive me for ever giving the impression otherwise, that I believe myself fully resolved, fully arrived, somehow finished. The story isn't over.

Community Roles

In considering the nature of open source communities that gather around various Free software commons, I often find I need to distinguish between the different roles people play. It's common to characterise community members as either "developers" (the "open source" worldview emphasises this) or "users" (the "Free software" worldview does this). But it's increasingly clear that neither approach is sufficient.

As I've watched various community engagements by various companies and individuals, and discussed this with various people (most recently Luis Villa), it seems to me that there are four different roles. These are:

• Originators (originating co-developers) - people who co-develop a particular Free software commons using open source licenses and norms;
• Extenders (extending co-developers) - people who co-develop software that builds on or aggregates the work of Originators, for example making extensions, plug-ins, localisations and distributions;
• Deployer-developers - people who take the work of Initiators and Extenders and configure and customise them for deployment;
• Users - people who use - and often pay for - the work of Deployer-developers and put it to productive use.

Countdown Special Comment: You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir

And there it is, sir. We?ve caught you.

Your goal is not to bring some troops home ? maybe ? if we let you have your way now;

Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal;

You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

watch it all

and finally, sit back & watch Marching Band Plays Radiohead.