"We claim responsibility for what happened in Madrid just two and a half years after the attacks in New York and Washington. This is an answer to your cooperation with the Bush criminals and their allies. ... If you don't stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small compared to what can occur in what you call terrorism."

Video Claims Al Qaeda Set Blasts in Spain

Dave will discuss Weblogs, RSS, aggregators, OPML, content management, how we can work together, and the care and feeding of online communities.

Dave Winer gave a talk in February as part of the Microsoft Research Lecture Series. There is also an extended Q&A discussion between Winer and Microsoft employees. Watch it in streaming video.

Dave Winer: 'Weblogs and how we can work together'

As accomplished designers know, a good appliance blends machine and person for both functionality and pleasure. Cumulatively, all the little machine-human interactions build into psychological and social states of place and culture.

A short article, worth the read, but I especially liked this part.

You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where?

Joss Stone, George Clinton, and many others are among the acts set to appear at the 11th annual Music Midtown festival. The event will be held April 30 and May 1-2 on a 42-acre site in Atlanta; tickets go on-sale Saturday (March 13) via Ticketmaster.

Music Midtown

"We have to rely on trusted sources, education and technology ..."

MemeStreams needs inline image support, and more.

The Camera Never Lies, but the Software Can

"Where do you get off listening to me?"

Average Americans are the new Raymond.

In a comment on an NYT editorial about McDonalds, I suggested that the logic had a sort of Mad Lib quality to it. Other NYT readers were thinking along the same lines.

McDonald's decision to downsize its meals causes one to reflect on other aspects of our lives that need downsizing.

Our wants, needs and necessities have bloated, just like the average American waistline. More clothes to wear, bigger cars to drive, more space to live, more power, more influence -- the plague of gigantism has hit us. In our mad rush to the big, we should remember that dinosaurs were not the most successful form of life on this planet.

Eating Too Much? Time to Pay the Price

As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a wake-up call for US workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."

The Great Indian Dream

When completed, the entire Virtual Los Angeles model will cover an area well in excess of 10,000 square miles and will elegantly scale from satellite images to street level views accurate enough to allow the signs in the windows of the shops and the graffiti on the walls to be legible. The finished model is estimated to exceed 1 terabyte in size and will be maintained on a large multi-client server that will allow multiple simulation clients to fly, drive and/or walk through the Virtual LA Model simultaneously.

Urban Simulation Team

Gates: "Well, I'm very excited about the breakthroughs that will take place in computer science over the next five years and the next ten years. And it's a paradox to me that people are expecting less, now, than they did, say, in 1999, where there was the bubble, the hype, and all that ... and yet, the really neat stuff, whether it's how you use computers in the home, or in business, or education, that's what's in front of us."

Bill Gates, with Charlie Rose, for the hour. It's worth the listen. (I mentioned this last week. The streaming audio is now available. This is a RealAudio link.)

Microsoft's Bill Gates on The Charlie Rose Show