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Man, it is busy out there! It's all happening...
So let me start tonight with Kerry's (and Edward's!) victories over Dean in Iowa. They say Iowans don't pick the winner, but they prune the field. So Gephardt is out, and Dean has lost momentum, if not the race.
Doc Searles, who is an ardent Dean supporter, lets the roots speak. The results, and the emotions. He also observes "The best looking candidates won in Iowa... Kerry and Edwards aren't just the best looking candidates, but the best-talking ones as well. They are practiced and excellent public speakers. As message delivery boys, they hit the porch every time. Dean is an okay speaker. He's not great." Is communication important? Yes.
It is pretty tough to follow "everything" in a campaign these days; Taegan Goddard posted this wonderful quote from Michael Barone: "In the 1980s, I believed that you could cover a presidential election from five rooms--the morning meetings of the two campaigns, where the day's message was set, and the afternoon meetings of the three networks, where executives decided what part of that message would make the evening news... But today you couldn't cover the 2004 fall campaign from 100 rooms. Too much of it will be going on over back fences and on the Internet."
Dave Winer premiered an RSS feed for political junkies following Dean: Channel Dean.
My favorite way to follow the campaign is The Command Post, which has a 2004 Presidential Election feed. What a wonderful resource. I love comparing their timeliness and accuracy against "big media"; they are consistently better.
Martin Luther King Day. Doc Searles posted a picture of a plaque with this quote: "Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development, we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools." Amen.
Did you know 35 countries have troops in Iraq? Unilateral action, eh?
Steven Den Beste lauds Japan as an unsung ally. "Japan has emerged as the second most reliable ally we have." Who would have thought...
As I was spacing out the other day, I noted a difficulty of manned space missions lies in the need for return. Space.com contemplates the Helium-3 found on the moon. "Helium 3 fusion energy may be the key to future space exploration and settlement." It could be a "cash crop", or merely fuel for a return voyage, or a trip to Mars...
 is cheering again, as are their shareholders; AlwaysOn reports Yahoo emerging from dot-com gloom. "Yahoo's comeback represents another hopeful sign for the high-tech industry. As more people get high-speed Internet connections in their homes and invest in portable devices to stay online, tech leaders also are reporting higher profits." I don't use Yahoo nearly as much as I used to, thanks to Google, but they have a huge variety of useful services.
Apropos, the NYTimes reports Television Commercials Come to the Web. "Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites will run full-motion video commercials in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising." Yuk. How soon before someone builds a free tool to disable them?
Joi Ito links some excellent articles on writing, including this one: Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do). Really great stuff.
Ottmar Liebert ponders the difference between Musiker and Musikant ("craftsman" and "artist"). "Think of a musician who plays only cover tunes... Not art, but a lot of craft. On the other hand a punk guitarist who knows only two or three chords may be an artist because of his vision. Not a lot of craft, but art. Very tricky, this stuff, isn't it?" Then there is Ottmar himself, who is both :)
 Is this the musical instrument of the future? The OpenSynth Neko64 has a music keyboard, and a computer keyboard. With dual AMD 64-bit Opterons, 64MB of memory, and MIDI interfaces. And it runs Windows.
Vertical Hold wonders about Radiohead's desire that their albums be played all in one piece. "My CD player has a random feature. Am I allowed to listen to the Radiohead album on random play? If my house were to catch on fire while I was listening to the Radiohead album, would I be allowed to escape certain death if it meant not hearing the whole album?" If they regard the album as one piece, why not release it that way? On the other hand, few people play the movements in Vivaldi's Four Seasons out of order.
I love Adam Curry's Quote of the Day series. Yesterday's was from Eric Hoffer: "You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." Indeed.
More Adam: He notes Big Hair is back! You have been warned...
And finally, the Joke of the Day, courtesy of Citizen Smash: The Cow from Minsk.
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