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Reaching the world

At breakfast yesterday, Mike Arrington made it clear that if I didn't show up at his party, he would take it personally. I made it clear I would but first I wanted him to kick somebody important down or off the list (or everyone down the list) and insert me in his wiki, which I cannot be accused of ever accessing.
Written by Steve Gillmor, Contributor

At breakfast yesterday, Mike Arrington made it clear that if I didn't show up at his party, he would take it personally. I made it clear I would but first I wanted him to kick somebody important down or off the list (or everyone down the list) and insert me in his wiki, which I cannot be accused of ever accessing. As of 3:30 Sunday, no action has been taken.

The last wiki I logged into was the FOO Camp one several years ago when I was still welcome, and I've not had that problem since. I would note however that I requested credentials for Web 2.0 quite some time ago and have heard nothing since. Two years ago John Battelle graciously put me on his personal comp list when O'Reilly said the ZDNet quotient was filled up. Last year I was a speaker along with Seth Goldstein at the rollout of the AttentionTrust's Attention Recorder. This year, silence.

Update: Heard from Battelle, invites haven't gone out and I'm on the list, that "there are no monsters under the bed...." Well, alright.

With InfoRouter shuttered as of the end of the month, the rationale for identifying me as a legitimate member of the mainstream media might diminish, though I will continue as a ZDNet contributing editor. But that's not what this is about. This is about connections, as Bob Dylan writes in Chronicles Volume One:

It went to the very root of things, gave unfair advantage to some and left others squeezed out. How could somebody ever reach the world this way? It seemed like it was the law of life, but even if it was, I wasn't going to sulk about it or, like my grandma said, take it personal.

Speaking of conferences I'm appreciated at, Tony Perkins' AlwaysOn Summit begins Tuesday night. The feeling is mutual: Tony's Republican act cleverly submerges his razor-sharp instincts for the real story in the Valley. I couldn't help cracking up over an AlwaysOn ad on the home page hyping thought leaders and such with Tony, my younger smarter brother and I bracketing Marten Mykos of laMp fame. Our father (who was liberally defined at the extreme left end of the Democrat Party as Tony might put it, would be or is rolling over in his grave. But our grandfather, Rear Admiral in the Navy and friend of Ike and other righties, would be suitably proud of us.

Regardless of which party you belong or are invited to, there really is serious business going on here beyond popularity contests and political maneuverings. During the Gillmor Gang recorded live at Gnomedex this year, Dave Winer brought up the possibility of Senator Edwards supporting BitTorrent with the candidate's aide Ryan Montoya. As Ryan allowed how it was possible the campiagn would support the peer-to-peer technology, I got a laugh by asking how the fundraising was going with the Cartel. Several days ago, the Edwards Campaign announced BitTorrent support. Laugh line to campaign promise in less than 30 days.

For Dylan, "I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand." But now came a startling thought, "that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn't know." That was Mike Seeger, of whom Dylan wrote: "It's not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them."

I pondered it. I wasn't ready to act on any of it but knew somehow, though, that if I wanted to stay playing music, that I would have to claim a larger share of myself. I would have to overlook a lot of things--a lot of things that might even need attention--but that was all right. They were things that I probably felt totally powerless over, anyway. I had the map, could even draw it freehand if I had to. Now I knew I'd have to throw it away. Not today, not tonight, sometime soon, though.

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