Monthly Archives: April 2008

Revisiting Refresh

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Tonight I quietly resurrected my attendance at Refresh DC. The first one I went to took place in a meeting room at the Library of Congress. My former colleague Jackson Wilkinson spoke at it, evangelizing Microformats — something he had recently encountered and gotten us both interested in as an extension of our shared desire for extra cases to prove web standards were more than just pedantic rules enforced by annoying geeks. Eric Meyer happened to be in the audience that day.

That one visit, with me lurking in the back (as I always do when I show), made Refresh instantly valuable as a meaningful connection to a range of professional insights into a community I care about because I want to use the fruits of its labor (even more than I want to build it — I got into building it so that I could use it).

Tonight’s Refresh session was a panel discussion, with Jackson moderating. The topic was start-ups, and the participants ranged from just-out-of-college but-already-veteran partners of Publi.us, who started out with FantasyCongress.com, to a veteran who had seen many start-ups mature and is trying to create a new service, LaunchBox, to help others through the same process. Within that range there was Eric Rupert, who I met by accident as I greeted Jackson — and who turns out to be behind the re-launching of Odeo.com. Odeo, coincidentally, I got to try out early in its first incarnation via a long-time long-distance acquaintance Rabble was working on it in its very early days.

I’m not sure I have a point. This is the selfish trumpeting of a wallflower.

I have managed to plug a bunch of things I can say have piqued my interest at various points and that I’m keeping an eye on — but I’ve got no dramatic insight or particular endorsement to give. I’ll just echo that, anecdotally, DC is feeling like a pretty vibrant new media community. It’s gratifying, also, to see how simply paying attention and making connections can give even a gadfly or a bystander (I consider myself slightly more than that in this realm, but maybe not too much more) a unique insight as how incredibly small the world can be.

It also makes me think about how large the world remains for others, in other contexts. But that’s a heavy tangent to jump onto tonight and, for the moment, I’m weighed down by too much to really get and distill that perspective.

Newfangled Palm Thingy

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I had a weird experience on the Metro yesterday. I was keeping it real, heading over to Arlington with the late work crew, all typing away at their Blackberries and iPhones.

I happened to look over and see a young woman writing away on some sort of palm dealy. I’m a reasonably tech savvy dude, so I was surprised by the fact that I didn’t recognize the device she was using. “It must be really new,” I thought. So I watched her for a while, trying to figure it out, when she flips the stylus and starts erasing what she wrote. “Wow,” I thought “it has an erase function!?” It took me another minute or so to realize that she was writing on a notepad. You know, analog. Huh…

Of course it’s political

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A declaration that something is not political in itself will highlight the politics of the thing.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.