A quick note about my blog writing habits. I usually start the morning by scanning my RSS subscriptions in NetNewsWire. I’m no Scoble, but I currently subscribe to 109 feeds, from friends, Microsofties, an assortment of other bloggers, journals, newspapers, etc. Most days I do a quick hit and run, but there are days like today that I end up following almost thirty links, many from the popularity engine Blogdex.
(Aside: Blogdex is one of the ways that I think we can overcome the mental filter of only looking for blogs and news that support our own biases. Blogdex and Technorati both let you see what everyone has written about a particular link, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.)
So, then, today’s around the blogosphere roundup:
- Man goes over Niagara Falls without a barrel and survives, defying “the laws of physics and Canada” (Greg)
- BBC launches iCan, intended to give Britons collective participation in their government (Boing-Boing)
- Ross Mayfield’s SocialText goes 1.0 with a workplace collaboration package that mixes features of wikis and blogs (Joi)
- Glenn Reynolds says that the Rumsfeld memo shouldn’t have been leaked because the resulting furor will discourage critical thought and examination in the future by the military. Glenn also asks “where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak?” Probably it’s too complicated for them to understand it so they aren’t writing about it. Lisa and I talked about this one last night. She thought, at least before the announcement that the memo was leaked by someone other than Rumsfeld, that he was positioning against the growing power that Condi Rice is taking in Iraq. Now it looks like he’s being positioned in another direction… (Blogdex)
- David Pogue reviews Panther in the New York Times and sounds the Microsoft paranoia note: “When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it’s yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you’re using someone else’s toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you” (MacNN)
- Who killed Daniel Pearl? Asra Q. Nomani wonders in Salon whether there was a link between al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, now that 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been linked to Pearl’s murder… and to Omar Saeed Sheikh, who masterminded the murder and has been linked to the ISI. (Salon)
- And, finally, since the press is barred from reporting on the arrival of the bodies of our soldiers from Iraq, I’m going to start picking up the slack by pointing to the list of names of those killed in action. Here’s today’s list.