This is a truely excellent blow by blow war blog.

The Agonist--by Sean Paul Kelley

] A spokesman for the 101st said two grenades had been
] thrown into a command tent at Camp
] Pennsylvania, one of the desert bases from where U.S.
] forces have launched an invasion to try to
] overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

] Central Command gave no details of the wounded. It did
] not name the suspect or comment on a
] possible motive. U.S. broadcaster Fox News said he was a
] Muslim American and that he had been
] described as "acting strange" before attack.

Swissinfo | Reuters | US 101st Airborne Command attacked at Camp Pennsylvania

(From: http://www.kevinsites.net .. No permalink for entry)

] Title: Pausing the warblog, for now.
]
] Dear readers:
]
] I've been asked to suspend my war blogging for awhile.
]
] But I don't want let you down -- I'm chronicling the events
] of my war experiences, the same as I always have, and hope
] to come to agreement with CNN in the near future to make
] them available to you in some shape or form, perhaps on
] this site.
]
] In the meantime, thanks for participating in this remarkable
] forum. It's been a remarkable experience to be your witness
] here.
]
] -- Kevin Sites.

This SUCKS. I had great expectations for this blog..

[U: I just sent a scathing email full of vitriol to CNN@cnn.com. ]

] The official White House gloss on why acres of newsprint
] previews were made to look stupid is that the CIA
] suddenly got a fix on the Iraqi figurehead and tried to
] take him out: "target of opportunity" replacing "shock
] and awe" as the Pentagon catchphrase of choice. That
] explanation has been accepted by the press as meekly as
] they bought the supposed war plans. But healthy distrust
] demands examination of another possibility. Did the US
] military - playing on the media's desperation to publish
] conflict strategies in advance as if they were sporting
] fixtures - sell them a false yarn about the action's
] likely shape?

Of course the media is being played.. The media always gets played in wartime. That should be obvious. Everyone knows the media was played durring the first Gulf War. Hell, its such common knowledge that its makde its way into Hollywood movies as a punchline. It is shocking that this is the first article I've seen that make this case..

The TV war coverage has really sucked.. Yes, the digi-fuzzy footage of the armored vehicles rolling at high speed across the desert is impressive.. But its not useful to have running on the TV for three hours while I gotta listen to a talking head tell me how cool it is. Not helpful. Not the information I want, certainly not the information I need. The "embedded" journalists have NOTHING useful to say. I have heard way more talk about their damn masks and bio suits then anything actually happening with the conflict..

And furthermore, the best shot of something blowing up came from Al-Jazeera [U: Abu-Dhabi actually]. The US news outlets fail on all levels..

] Yet when asked to explain what is actually happening in
] these violently pretty pictures, politicians contemptously
] refuse to give "a running commentary", while press
] secretaries hide behind the sandbags of "classified"
] information. This trick of appearing open while being
] closed is also seen in the military tactic of attaching
] reporters to army units. It looks fantastically democratic
] but even the most skilled journalists risk becoming, in
] the jargon, "clientised": coming to share the fear,
] excitement and eventually triumphalism of the troops
] beside them. And if heaps of charred bodies should occur
] on either side, these "embedded" journalists will be kept
] well away from them.

Anyone who made it up to the start of this war, and actually thought this administraton could be described as "open" in any way, should have their head checked.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Military mind games

Woah. This site is extremely cool. Beats the hell out of Blogdex, Popdex, and Daypop.

Very similar to some things going on here. Their "Technorati Anywhere!" bookmark is pretty much the same as our Discuss bookmark in how it works and what it does.. This site works much like MemeStreams threads and the top level page, only all their content comes from feeds, and our content comes from MemeStreams user blogs. Our threads aim to be more like discussion areas. Different thrust, some of the same methods.. MemeStreams revolves around the users and the reputation system. The top level (democratic) view is a product of the way the system works, not the focus of the system.. The agent is the focus.. Popularity rules on the top level page, and your immediate community (users whom have high reputation with you) rules in the agent. Its not really clear yet, because we have such a limited number of active users, the system allows for a high amount of clustering.

I'm currently working on a system for allowing users to import content from RSS feeds into MemeStreams.. Its still not completely clear how all the details of it are going to work.. Its all work in progress. I'm not in a position where I'm ready to give any kinda ETA for it making it to the site either. Normally I wouldn't even mention it till it was farther along, but after seeing this, its on topic, its unignorable, its inspiring.. At some point we are going to have functionality much like this.

Also, From David Sifry's blog (http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000251.html):

] Technorati's got a new feature called Current Events that
] I just whipped up. It is a list of the top links to
] "professional" news sites by bloggers in the last two
] hours, along with comments and analysis. I created it
] because, like most people, I've been following the progress
] of the war, watching and reading the mass media, and I
] wanted to know what people out there were saying about the
] news. What are the most important stories? What is real,
] and what is propaganda? What is not being reported, or is
] being underreported? These were the questions on my mind
] when I created Technorati's Current Events. Ever since the
] Google purchase of Blogger, the thing that struck me as the
] most compelling potential new feature was the combination
] of Google News with Blogger users' commentary. Perhaps
] they'll still do it, but I think I just beat them to it.

I like that attitude.

] I'm constantly amazed by the collective wisdom of a huge
] number of individuals, each publishing their thoughts, and
] voting their attention by linking to things. I wanted to
] tap into this collective brainpower, organize it, and
] present it back to us all.

And that is what we are working on here too.

---

Argh.. It makes me feel really uncomfortable every time I see something thats uber similar to what I'm working on.. It seems to happen often.

/me needs to spend less time reading news and more time coding.

Wait.. Thats it.. The war.. The War!! I can blame it on the war! I like that. "The War is holding up MemeStreams development." If anyone asks, thats my excuse from here out.

Technorati: Current Events, with context

] SAN FRANCISCO -- While protesters against the War in Iraq
] attempted to jam busy downtown streets, police attired in
] fashionable riot gear have implemented a new tactic to
] stem the flow and demoralize the crowds.

This is really funny.

Quiet Riot Police iRock Iraq Protesters With iPods.

Eyewitness account of the bombing a few hours ago:

] Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's main presidential
] palace, a great rampart of a building 20 stories high,
] simply exploded in front of me -- a cauldron of fire,
] a 100ft sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears
] singing for an hour after. The entire, massively
] buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four
] more Cruise missiles came in.
. . .
] No doubt this morning the Iraqi minister of information
] will address us all again and insist that Iraq will prevail.
] We shall see. But many Iraqis are now asking an obvious
] question: How many days? Not because they want the Americans
] or the British in Baghdad, though they may profoundly wish
] it. But because they want this violence to end: Which, when
] you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.

ArabNews: Baghdad's Night of Terror

] U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had this to say
] on Tuesday: "The Constitution just sets minimums ... Most
] of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the
] Constitution requires." According to Scalia, during
] wartime, "the protections will be ratcheted right down to
] the constitutional minimum."

] The next day Justice Scalia received a "Citadel of Free
] Speech" award from the Cleveland City Club. The camera-shy
] justice banned broadcast media from recording his remarks
] at the award ceremony, leading a C-SPAN vice president to
] write the City Club, commenting that the ban "begs
] disbelief and seems to be in conflict with the award
] itself. ... How free is speech if there are limits to its
] distribution?"

Justice Scalia says rights excessive, can be scaled down in wartime

] A schism has struck the XFree86 movement, an open-source
] graphics project key to Linux and several other operating
] systems, resulting in the expulsion, by the core group in
] charge of the project, of one of its members.

Schism hits key open-source group | CNET News.com

] The notion that microbes have anything to say to each
] other is surprisingly new. For more than a century,
] bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded
] opportunists, little more than efficient machines for
] self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue,
] in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline
] additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive,
] but their lives seemed, well, boring. The "sole ambition"
] of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973,
] is "to produce two bacteria."
]
] New research suggests, however, that microbial life is
] much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and
] teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers
] have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules
] comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this
] cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively
] track changes in their environment, conspire with their
] own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with
] other types of bacteria, gain advantages over
] competitors, and communicate with their hosts - the sort
] of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees,
] ants, and people, not to bacteria.

Wired 11.04: The Bacteria Whisperer