George Packer, in Mother Jones: the Revolution will not be Blogged.  "To see beyond their own little world and get a sense of what's really going on, journalists and readers need to get out of their pajamas."  This is the argument that we're all in a little echo chamber, writing for each other, ignoring the bigger world outside.  Which is ignoring us.  Wishful thinking on the part of a Luddite, methinks.  But read it and form your own opinion...

Want an example of blog dialog?  Charles Johnson quotes Joe Lieberman: "a marginalized and ignored voice in a party which increasingly caters to its most extreme elements, [who] reminds me why I used to think of myself as a Democrat:  Who’s really owed an apology?"  Mark Frauenfelder put the same event a bit differently: "Fake democrat Joe Lieberman sucked up to his true allies during Rumsfeld's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week."

So who's right?  Well, that's up to you.  You read, you decide.  That's the power of blogs.

I really like this post from Halley: Come Away From the Window.  I can so see that little girl.  Or is it a little boy?

John Robb: "Everytime I get concerned about offshore outsourcing, I go back and read Marc Andreessen's e-mail to me on America's strengths."  Read it yourself, it makes me feel better, too :)

Of all Marc's points, the most insightful is this one: Risk-friendly culture (this is hugely important).  The "hugely important" is Marc's comment on his comment, and I agree.  This enables the memetic variation which provides the grist for selection.

Mark Cuban: Success and Motivation, part 3.  "...what was done, was done...  I had to get my ass back to work, and do so quickly.  That’s exactly what I did."  Follows part 1 and part 2.

Joz has more on that missing Stradivarius cello.  "A grainy surveillance camera videotape from a neighbor's home showed a man lugging the 4 1/2-foot-tall silver-colored cello case in one hand as he tries to ride away on the bicycle.  A few moments later, there is the sound of a crash as he apparently runs into some trash cans on the sidewalk."  Ouch.

Apple is sponsoring a competition for bioinformatics projects, and they're giving five bioinformatics workgroup clusters away as awards.  This is really cool.  I'm going to apply on behalf of Aperio; these systems would be perfect for running pattern recognition algorithms on large virtual slides.

Dare Obasanjo has Some Advice for the Bloggers @ Google.  I agree with all of them, especially #4: "Provide an RSS feed.  I understand that Evan and the rest of Blogger have had their beefs with Dave Winer but this is getting ridiculous.  If an evil Microsoft employee can turn the other cheek and rise above holding grudges, I don't see why Google employees whose company motto is 'Do No Evil' can't do the same."  Amen.  [ via Robert Scoble ]

This could be really important: the Internet archive has announced FreeCache, a free HTML caching service.  "FreeCache works by moving content 'hot spots' on the web closer to users.  This provides several advantages to various parties involved: Users get faster downloads, content providers pay less for Internet-bound traffic, and ISPs pay less for Internet-originating traffic."  This is so simple it is going to work.  Say you have a page and suddenly everyone wants to download it.  You build a URL like this: http://freecache.org/<your_original_URL>.  The freecache servers get the page from your site, cache it, and serve it to users.  You don't have to do anything else.

lulop.com is the market place for video news.  They have an RSS feed with enclosures.  [ via Adam Curry, who notes: "perhaps the revolution will be televised after all?" ]

And on another video-on-demand front, CNet reports Disney to expand MovieBeam service.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the movie, is in production.  And the production team has a blog.  So, I loved the book, but I'm unsure about whether it's going to translate well into a movie.

Tim Bray has some awesome pictures of Mount Fuji.  (be sure to scroll down.)  "Sometimes you just get lucky."  Yeah, right.  There's a lot more than luck going on here...