Now, honestly, how could I not intend to get on here after talking with you. It'll take me a while, what with my other work, to really learn how all this works, but it's not the first time I've been pointed at or seen stuff on memestreams.

The only thing that's really not the clearest about the posting end of the site is the bookmarklet. If you have that installed in your bookmark bar, its trivial easy to recommend articles. In fact, if you highlight text in the article when you select the bookmarklet, it appears blockquoted in the recommend window. In my opinion, the real killer application for it is news stories, which is what I really like to see massive discourse surrounding. The more informed we are, of both what's going on, and each other's opinions.. The more likely we are to be able to find solutions, establish political power, and actually exercise it.

We are committed to creating a political neutral/agnostic platform. Both Tom and I have no intention of letting our various political viewpoints shape this system. I have no intention of trying to make a MoveOn. I'm more interested in creating a "common carrier" style environment. It's more challenging, and more rewarding.

Every time you and I were in the same general area, it ended in a great conversation. More of that!

Hell yes. There were a number of good discussions coming in and out of phase at Phreaknic this year. In terms of convention size, I think Phreaknic hits a good head-count point. When you have between 300-600 people, it has a different feel and a much higher level of interaction between people than a convention like Defcon.. In the case when you have a very high number of people, it seems like most people stick with the folks they already know. In that situation, it's even a challenge just to see all the people you know. Let alone meet new people. At smaller conventions, it's easier to attempt to at least say "hi" to everyone, so people are more likely to do it.

That's why we keep building these tools. I like to look at it like this.. When the consumer Internet hit the scene in the mid 90's, it pretty much destroyed the BBS scene. There was a good reason for it. The Internet is a much more powerful tool. Still, we were all very sad to see it go. Something was lost, but I don't think it was premaritally lost. It's taken some time for the real "replacement" to hit the scene. I think the approach we are taking here _is_ that replacement. At least for the message boards... The standard web BBS just doesn't do it for me. They do get a certain community feel to them, but there is still something missing that I can't every quite put my finger on. The filebase issue was taken care of about a dozen different ways first. The message system angle was more complex, and I'm sorry, usenet was not that replacement. It had all the problems FidoNet had, and way more. With an approach like we are taking, we will be able to get that community feel that any given BBS with activity had. Right now, this system feels like one group. When we do finally implement our public grouping architecture, I feel that will change radically, and very fast.

Here is to the hope that we can start executing on this vision a hell of a lot faster than we have so far. I do get upset when I think that we have had our hands locked around this vision since 2001, yet have still not managed to truly bring it to fruition. We have created something cool, but its not even 30% of the way we wanted to have it by this point in time.

RE: Post PhreakNIC 2005 - We are drawing the maps for these territories