I'm going to offer free hosting on Buzzword.Com to any current weblog on the server that has been updated in the last six months. A more official announcement will be forthcoming, but for now, I wanted y'all to know there's no need to find a new home.

whatever a nonce is* - I'm at interimtom.blogspot.com -- tom

*nonce

Nonce (n[o^]ns), n. [For the nonce, OE. for the nones, a corruption of for then ones, where n. in then is a relic of AS. m in [eth]am, dat. of the article and demonstrative pronoun, E. the. See For, Once, and The.] The one or single occasion; the present call or purpose; -- chiefly used in the phrase for the nonce.

Update 6.20.04: Redirects appear to be working. Links that pointed to tom.weblogs.com over the past few years should now be coming to tom.buzzword.com, transparently. Please let me or any one of the people below hear about of any problems?

Thanks to Rogers Cadenhead, Steve Kirks, Lawrence Lee and Dave Winer for creating in what seems like an impossibly short time Buzzword.com, now hosting over 3,000 former weblogs.com manila blogs, including my own commonplaces, now found here. I can only imagine the amount of work these people put in, on short notice, and the solution seems at once pragmatic, generous, and fully in working order. Here's the faq, here's the Yahoo Group, here's where any former weblog.com user can back up hizzorher blog. Tutti bravi!

I now face the predictable quandary posed by being on a network. People have just gotten done updating their links to find me here. I mean, here. Now I am able to move over to the new old blog, here, requiring the same people to yet again update links. But this new move is itself potentially temporary, as I should, like a smart consumer, evaluate a number of competing options, including one of just moving to my very own domain. So another round of link changes could lie ahead.

So it's a puzzle. Right now, so far as I am aware, the old link to my former blog is dead, no redirect. In the interests of keeping things simple, I am inclined to keep on here, I mean here, for the interim.

I am most open to suggestions. What would you do?

Blogging may be related to journaling, but blogging while journeying seems parasitical. It takes time from the journey.

Blogging while driving seems unwise.

Some 25,000 school teachers from the state of Oaxaca took up residence in the city's center the other day. They pitched tarps around the zocalo and neighboring streets and proceded to relax all over the city's tourist center, staring at the gringos staring at them from the cafes.

The next day they marched. I made a few notes:

By mid-afternoon city traffic is entirely snarled. The teachers have blockaded every major and minor artery going into and out of Oaxaca. Trucks, buses, cars are backed up along highways and sidestreets. Near the heart of the city, it is nearly impossible to make any headway. The bolus of educators has reached critical mass, the city is choking on it.

The strike annoys the town. It offers sand to the crankcase of the Oaxacan quotidian. It offends the nose of an editorial writer who, doubtless thinking of his newspaper's advertisers, bemoans the reeking feet of the marchers.

It's not a general strike - just teachers, gluing themselves to the cogs of the place under orders of the jefes of the union. It isn't a spontaneous outpouring of anger, it happens every year. It is an organized pain in Oaxaca's arse, scheduled by bureaucrats to disrupt civic order and to nonplus tourists without violence. With a sigh of collective ennui and Kafkan aplomb, it's included in the school calendar.

By the third day, the teachers had won at least one key salary demand and relaxed their regimented lounging. The city's pulse began to return to normal.

In the US, we get mad as hell and can't take it anymore. We rise up in blogs and in letters to the editor, hurling our words. The Tutor is right to point to this magisterial summary of much of what has been articulated about the place, power and position of the media.

There is much to learn about organizing, though.

30 some hours on buses, to a land of gods.

Much I'd like to address, but various time consuming preoccupations - towering US corporate stupidity figuring largely in that number - make it not so simple.

Here's one:

Calling it ''the most beautiful idea in history,'' David Weinberger gives us Pythagoras' Music of the Spheres in his latest JOHO:

This idea assumes the Greek notion that perfect orderliness and reason is indistinguishable from beauty. It adds that beauty is so always-present that it is absent; we could only hear its presence if it were to become absent.

David goes on to suggest that without disruption we cannot know:

Knowledge requires lack, imperfection, absence, separation, apartness, nothingness. Our knowledge is a disruption of the perfection of order. That's why the world can be other than it seems. Its truth is in the unheard and the unspoken.

Striking to me is how this appears to undermine the possibility of method, at least with regard to discovery. If knowledge ''is a disruption ... of order'' then we can only accede to knowing through disruption. The next big thing might be right in front of our general nose, but until it peeks through some chance rift in the unseen or unheard, it remains unknown and perhaps undreamt of.

Knowledge, science, discovery on this view have no reliable method. What we know does not give us a leg up on future knowledge, nor do we control or possess insight into the odds of productive disruptions.

Science then depends on the vagaries of chance. Our schemata, taxonomies, organons, rather than describing the world, are more like tunes that keep us from appreciating how much is chance, including our notion of chance.

It gets even trickier if we switch from a phenomenal model of seeing/hearing to a hermeneutic one of interpreting/reading: That which appears through rifts in order's fabric, whenever it does appear, might very well be mistaken for something else, or simply remain unread.

In his teaser to this bit, David says the idea is "irrelevant to JOHO and everything it cares about." Irony is suspected, since JOHO, pace its author, cares very much about whether our claims to control and to manage our knowledge and the world our knowledge allegedly represents are valid or not.

Perhaps he's just trying to take some of the sting out of a beauty that does little to bolster the claims of knowledge management and other modes of systemic understanding in the technosphere.

WASHINGTON, May 5 — President Bush went on Arab television on Wednesday in an effort to limit the diplomatic damage from the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, offering no direct apology but saying the mistreatment "does not represent the America that I know." - The New York Times.

"We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn't kill 'em, she didn't cut 'em up. She should have shot some of the suckers." - Lynndie England's mom.

Don't get around much, do you, George?

Is the notion of the "creative commons" Anglocentric? Does it presuppose the framework of the English common law, and is it translatable into the terms of other legal systems (such as Brazil's Roman and Napoleonic legal system)? How do such questions affect the ongoing project for the international commons, which aims to "port" the Creative Commons license in collaboration with local initiatives such as International Commons Spain and International Commons Brazil?

This whole post from Blogalization is of interest. Unless you're sure blogging is supposed to be a bunch of white guys typing.

A corporation that sounds like a community -

Our goal is to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible...

And workers consumed by the lord -

The general manager of our dealership was fond of saying that if we demo-ed three cars without selling one, he would give us a "come-to-Jesus talk." This was like being read the riot act. You had to come to Jesus — to give everything to the dealership — or you'd be fired.

¡Oyez! La Sessum:

There is something to be said for blurring the lines between potatoes and tampons, between phone cards and baking soda.

There is something profound in the brushing up of one against the next.

There is something precious in searching among the unlike.

There is joy in the finding.

There is a world between a polite reply and a soulful response. This too needs to enter the relation of blogs to other modes of conversation. While some bloggers reason, Jeneane is.

Dave Winer and Doc are impressed by a ''vigorous web conversation'' here, the gist of which is that bloggers offer an editorial function.

The point is valid. However, I couldn't help but notice that Jeneane Sessum offered precisely the insight that blogging is editing (she called it "reader-as-story-maker") in the comments to Jay Rosen's intro to Bloggercon.

In vigorous web comments with Jay Rosen and others Jeneane took it further:

Now, as reader-journalists inform stories across an entire landscape of context and content in the blogworld, stories have both a rapidly unfolding, unpredictable, and sometimes indefinite lifespan. Story re-informed by perhaps hundreds of other voices with other angles realtime. So stories hatch stories. And all of this happens so quickly with the "unknown" writers/readers in blogdom because of the nature of the space. Stories pick up speed with each link. No one scoops and everyone scoops at the same time.

Doc quotes liberally from Micah Sifry:

But the alchemy of the blogosphere--where we each read or hear about a few things and blog them, and some of us read several other bloggers and reinforce their choices with our own echoes or dissents--produces a pretty good zeitgeist watch...

All the above are sensible folks with sharp ideas, and blogging is supposed to be an open realm. The credibility of that depends on our being able to avoid selective deafness. A good idea should be recognized for what it is, not for who offers it. For that we already have academia, the mainstream press, and other white networks. The idea that blogs serve an editorial function has legs. In this case, they happen to look like Jeneane's.

The Mexican telephone monopoly, TelMex, has telephone stores. These casetas telefonicas don't sell phones, but exist to enable people uncomfortable with the technology to make long distance or collect calls with the assistance of a human being. Here, where sewing machines remain a big retail item and the frozen food section of Wal-Mart is miniscule, some people still don't own phones or understand them all that well.

These shops don't altogether maintain the washed-out preppy look of BigCo outlets. They have the requisite person behind a desk and rows of phone booths, but the floor space might include a display case with shoes for sale, a tray with some baked goods, an ice cream case, a CD rack, cold sodas, baby clothes. These various microenterprises kind of roost there.

Anyone who has been in a Mexican market knows how their spaces exhibit horror vacui. This sort of aggregating would have a harder time occuring in the U.S., where the borders between kinds of businesses, types of property, and modes of economic activity are more sharply etched in our imaginings of propriety and order.

Mexican order, which can look like disorder to USians, might have something to teach us about modes of composition, if we are willing to suspend some of our cherished assumptions involving identity, property and logic. I hope to return to this shortly.

Nothing to do with Master (of BLX) Turner, but a note that the mail server used for the blog email (over there on the right) is apparently down. It's not serving mail, and the absence of any cue keeps failing to remind me to mention this fact. I am trying to raise the human behind the server, but perhaps he too is absent of mail, or mind, or both.

In a discussion of a paper by Peter Karoff, K of Kombinat! muses upon what stands behind self reliance (besides the megalocephalic pixie pate of Emerson):

Self Reliance emanating from a statement like "You can't count on anybody. You have to count on yourself' is perhaps a sign of a Pathology of American Democracy. How can you ever create any Partnership with that kind of thinking? (via Gifthub)

He may have a point. An antipodian semblance of the problem:

"This cumulous of demands, dangerously swirling around in the vacuum left by the defeated Spanish monarchy, explains the appearance of the superficial Latin American tyrant, Juan Manuel de Rosas. This Machiavellian character, both lion and fox, quickly grasped the trenchant dualism of Argentina. There the centralists were called unitarios. They favored the hegemony of Buenos Aires and the coastal region surrounding it. The power of the capital was based on export-import operations, the estancias, and the importance of the saladeros, the meat salting plants, which handled as many head of cattle as possible; these were the bases of Argentina's so-called cattle civilization.

On the other side stood the federales, autonomists and regionalists who favored a loose association of provinces. Their power was based on mining activities and a population of nomad, landless masses."*

How to win the hearts and minds of these and other mutually destroying constituencies?

A French traveler noted that Rosas had conquered the anarchy "which devoured the land." To accomplish this, he "substituted his personality for the existing institutions."*

The French diplomat Count Alexandre Walewski (Napoleon Bonaparte's child by the Polish aristocrat Marie Waleska) expertly discerned that Rosas did not know "how to maintain himself in power except by force."

"Vindictive and imperious," Rosas committed a host of bloody acts that surrounded him with "a halo of terror," said Walewski.*

E.g., in the city of Cordoba, the local chief of one of Rosas' death squads (mazorcas) arrived at a ball and rolled out onto the dance floor, where their families were dancing, the severed heads of three young men.*

*Fuentes, The Buried Mirror.

So many threads, so little time:

- The Tutor alias Phil of Gifthub, convening a July Saturnalia promising to constructively confuse some very separate realms of money, influence and humanistic value in Chicago.

- Jay Rosen guiding a potentially vital conflagration of journalism and blogging at Bloggercon, which kicks off today. A worthwhile confrontation to the extent to which representatives on all sides succeed in being open to critique. Mine is here. See also below.

- The garage band known as Stavros has been spotted by talent scouts and is gearing up to play a major venue. Don't let the suits leash your wonder, chicken.

- Speaking of garage bands, does anyone care about Dave Hickey? I recently read Air Guitar and thought I was reading a blog, but also a tract that seems very much attuned to much of the sacral chanting about democracy and free speech and art and commerce and free culture and community.

- From the always worthwhile and underlinked-to Blogalization, a translation of a somewhat sniffy critique of blogs, journalism and public spectacles from the Portuguese critic António Guerreiro:

Blogs...whose practicioners are much more actors than they are authors, in the service of an overarching public spectacle. Newspapers and blogs are so closely tied to the same functional and cultural universe that it is impossible to criticize one without criticizing the other.

The only blog comment I've seen on this was from AKMA, who solicited opinion and got none. This is partly what I meant above by being open to critique. Is this acting or just acting? Or as Leonardo used to say, "Tell me what was ever done..." ¨[edit: actually, he said, "di me se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa" which might be better rendered as "tell me if anything were ever done."]

- For all of these and more threads that I haven't time to list, this:

I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. Whitman.

One of the things I seem to be learning from blogging is the extent to which the promenade of one's thoughts can be circumscribed by the texts one inhabits. For most of the past eight months, I have been, geocoordinately, in Mexico. In the past couple of weeks, I've been through about about a thousand miles of some particularly lovely places here. I have felt little impulse to blog about it, since Mexico is not exactly on the menu of Amazing Acronymized Features (AAFs) on offer, wetdreamwise, in the sizzle of blogtalk. So there is a tension between the discursive space of the blogosphere and the literal space* I'm in. Which it is I actually inhabit?

(*"Literal" is somewhat misleading. I mean, "Mexico," whatever else it is, is a kind of text. Part of the difficulty is that it is organized differently from USian texts. Space is different here from there.

(Which prompts the further thought that one first when blogging need consider that the world and every single one of the wonderful people in it are not all USians, and that the regimes everyone seems so intent to implement might not necessarily be what the bulk of the world is hankering for.

(After all, space and time, if anywhere, here could be considered more broadly than one finds in more limited context bound materials, print publications, US TV, radio, etc. To send out a note and hear it ring back with other overtones, alien instrumentations. Less a conversation than a mistranslation offering its own gloss on what we thought we thought to and did not say.