Fountain of Bedlam

The first two URLs of this week's link-dump are about blogging itself and a take on the difference between pundits, the pundocracy, and expertise.

• Slow Blogging: In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
• Slow Blog Manifesto
• So You Want to be an Expert
  

  9) Recognize your limits. True experts don't just know a lot -- they are also aware of the vast oceans of knowledge that they don't know. 
  10) Quit reading blogs. They rot your brain and give you cooties.

Next is a bit of computer lore, the first prognostication is making all the rounds, i.e. talking head-o-rama, while the 2_nt is drowning in that fountain of openness; Homeland.

• The web is dead: It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 —
• Pentagon wants to secure domains of contractors: Under the proposal, which is being informally circulated throughout the department and the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA could set up equipment to look for patterns of suspicious traffic at the internet service providers that the companies' networks run through. The agency would immediately notify the Pentagon and the companies if pernicious behavior were detected.

I'm not to sure how I feel about steampunk lately. I'm told that there are writers and salespeople clamoring for a new marketing slot - dieselpunk. Sorry, I'm more of a rocket and ray-gun reader. For those of you that do enjoy that sort of thing, here is a bit of exotica.

• More Brazilian Steampunk: It was with great surprise I saw this cover, published in the City Phantastica of Romeo Martin. I was mesmerized with the quality of it and sure it take to see a cover of this genre better than this, so soon. I do not know the stories that rechearão editing this show, but they are so amazing, we have a work to remember for a long time.

The next two are about different business models.

• How to Run a Maritime Militia: The UNSC-mandated Monitoring Group on Somalia presented its report to the Security Council Tuesday. The part of the report detailing corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid is getting all the press, but for my money the most interesting part of the report is the discussion of piracy, which has morphed into a multi-million dollar business replete with investors and an informal business model.
• Soft Rock Power: For decades, the world has considered business giants like IKEA and Saab the bright lights of Swedish industry. Yet the real symbol of Sweden's economic power is not the Poäng chair or the Gripen fighter jet, but the catchy choruses of the 1970s pop supergroup ABBA.

And last, politics. Let's see, what's a good word: bedlam? loonie bin? Inane? Inmates running the .. uh .. courtesan residence?

• Just how broken is the Senate?: Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber.
• Getting Digital Statecraft Right: In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the United States to pursue a policy of "twenty-first-century statecraft," which would use modern information and communication technologies to promote development. She foresaw "a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."
• Rebuilding the Democratic Brand with Jobs: That leaves the Democrats not as the party of government so much as the party of paralyzed government. That the Republicans are largely responsible for the paralysis isn't a big problem for a minority-status GOP so long as the public has concluded that activism per se is a bad idea.