by Asheru
I am the stone that the builder refused
I am the visual, the inspiration
That made Lady Sing the Blues…I’m the spark that makes your idea bright
The same spark that lights the dark
So that you can know your left from your right…I am the ballot in the box, the bullet in the gun
The innerglow that lets you know
To call your brother sun…The story that just begun
The promise of what’s to come
And I’m a remain a soldier ’til the war is wonJudo Flip, chop chop chop
Craig Newmark is an impressive guy. I’ll never forget talking with him (and another Internet giant) after a Commonwealth meeting. As people stood around him and peppered him with technology questions, he started to talk about the birds that had been nesting near his house. That kind of grounded perspective is downright refreshing. And since I happen to be a fan of craigblog, I commented on the birds he had been writing about a few days prior. You could literally see his eyes light up.
The birds matter. The color of leaves inspire. This reality is not new, but many of us forget it when we get caught up in another set of values espoused by those at the top of their heap.
We are wise to be careful and respectful observers before we try to apply our best guess about things that can and will impact hundreds of millions of users.
The natural essence of Craigslist is no coincidence, but a reflection of someone who genuinely cares about real value in real (not monetary) terms. You can call him crazy, but when he says things like this to Reuters you know he is really on to something and his influence on the world will last far beyond yet another nouveau riche story:
“Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming,” he said, adding that he and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster agree on not cashing in.
“We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards,” he said.
Thank you Craig.
by Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)
1
Stray birds of summer come to my
window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which
have no songs, flutter and fall
there with a sigh.
The Associated Press reports that a poem by Robert Frost, about the tragic loss of a friend (poet Edward Thomas) in World War I, has been uncovered by a student reviewing Frost’s papers archived at the University of Virginia.
“War Thoughts at Home” will now be published in the next issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review:
And one says to the rest
We must just watch our chance
And escape one by one
Though the fight is no more done
Than the war is in France.
First-hand source material is the holy grail of the Internet and information security. Rather than all the citations and quotations (like the one provided above), which diminish in quality, meaning and integrity as they become more and more removed from the source, access to original source material is golden. If primary source material were available, we could have a far more rich and rewarding source to study and learn from. Imagine hanging an exact replica of a famous painting on your wall compared to the ability to print a precise copy of Frost’s handwritten poem.
I will never forget the time I was perusing some original papers in the British Archives and stumbled upon a note from the desk of Winston Churchill. The handwriting was unmistakable. The dark, rich strokes from his fountain pen made me stop and think about the amazing treasure trove of information locked away in the rows and rows of folders that the vast majority of people will never see.
I left the archives that day imagining giant racks of spinning optical media (maybe I liked the idea of a shiny surface) serving primary source material to everyone in the world as they sat liesurely at desks hundreds or thousands of miles away. This was the summer of 1994 and I saw the Internet as a place where the source could finally bubble up. Not editorials, not analysis, not books (although those are also important) but the raw source material. As it turns out, I myself found someone had published a book misquoting original Colonial Office and War Office memos (quite badly, in fact, if I remember correctly).
I also spent an evening in the basement of an old library and found actual leaflets distributed in Ethiopia by RAF planes in the early 1940s. I mentioned the leaflets in passing to another historian and he became excited and insisted I publish them so others could someday enjoy the information I uncovered.
He was right. That library was “rennovated” and I fear it may be impossible to find the original leaflets again. Sadly, today you are most likely to find my copy of the leaflet at the end of my master’s thesis hidden away in an obscure folder in an archive or buried in some university library, and Frost’s poem looks like it will be “published” and then filed rather than posted online…