In general on social media if someone posts a bit that’s an oft-repeated bit of wisdom from the cable networks, I delete it, esp if it’s from someone I don’t know. I could watch MSNBC if I wanted to. No need to practice such idiocratic punditry online, imho of course ymmv. #
6 Jan
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Andrew Guidroz II on January 6, 2007 at 9:22 am
The flooding of New Orleans in 1927 was from the cresting of the Mississippi River, not a hurricane. The levee system in place today was built in a reaction to flooding from the melting of winter snows draining down the Mississippi River and the flood of 1927.
That was on 60 Minutes, for crying out loud.
Posted by Dave Winer on January 6, 2007 at 9:29 am
Thanks for the correction, I updated the post on SN.
Posted by rob friedman on January 6, 2007 at 11:42 am
Welcome to the OpenID world Dave. 🙂
Hopefully the hosted WordPress.com solution will add OpenID support in the future. Already there are plugins which accomplish this for users who run their own WordPress installation. The best solution I’ve found is currently hosted at SourceForge. WPOpenID
Posted by Heather Flanagan on January 6, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Here is a quirky video about global warming I thought you might find interesting:
http://peoplegeek.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/global-warming-a-clear-and-present-danger/
Posted by Nick on January 6, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Dave after all the times you have claimed that blogs are superior to traditional media, I am suprised to learn that you are trying to be like the traditional media. If going to the same PR events that the major news outlets do is what a blogger should do I do not see a difference between the two types of journalists.
Posted by Anil on January 6, 2007 at 11:46 pm
There’s a lot of cool stuff that I think you’ll like about OpenID Dave, glad you’re checking it out. One important point, as I pointed out in our post about OpenID gaining momentum, is that we at Six Apart deliberately *did not* patent OpenID when it was created by Brad Fitzpatrick and his team, and we’re happy the rest of the community that’s run with the spec has done so in an open manner as well.
I’d somewhat taken for granted that things had happened that way, but your recent reminders about patents made me think it was worth mentioning again.
Posted by Raines Cohen on January 7, 2007 at 1:38 am
Dave,
Right you are on Global Climate Change (preferred as a phrase to Global Warming/Greenhouse Effect, because it’s really about increasing instability/chaos, the interruption of centuries-old patterns and mechanisms that we as a civilization have come to rely on — there will be places with more snow, locally cooler spots. Thanks for bringing it to the attention of your readers.
I just got back the day before yesterday from three days in Nashville with Al Gore and several hundred others (a thousand overall) he was training through the nonprofit The Climate Project to deliver the slide show from “An Inconvenient Truth“, customizing/adapting it for different regions and audiences, each of us committed to present at least ten times in the next year, to drive the message home and link people to action.
There were people from every state, ages 13 to 75, teachers to politicians/city managers (our mentor was Oregon’s Secretary of State Bill Bradbury), priests to Katrina refugees, Republicans to Greens, ordinary people who have heard the call from as far as Uganda. Our regional breakout group included John Doerr (and his young daughter, she’s clearly got some experience at effective communication, perhaps from hearing VC pitches?), entertainment professional Cameron Diaz, all working together with leading scientists to understand the arguments (and debunk the counter-PR) and to help each other more effectively communicate the key messages, often to people who would never see the movie or who would never be able to hear it come straight from Gore:
Global Climate Change is real, beyond politics, caused by humans, proven beyond a reasonable doubt, here already, getting worse faster.
Despair is not the right response. Hope (driven by realism) leading to Action/engagement is.
Here’s what you can do to make a difference, individually and collectively.
This workshop made it real for me. Not that it wasn’t real already, but it drove it home and equipped me to pursue it with the passion I’ve brought to organizing communities of practice, like Mac users, in the past quarter century. As you know, that is no small passion. 😉
I appreciate your attention and support, Dave, and would like to ask one small thing: if you’re considering front-paging this, please hold off a couple of days, I’m planning some grassroots action at Macworld Expo that will have associated web sites currently in the domain-registration-churn that will be worthy of linking and will help focus/galvanize action in the computer-user communities, on a time scale that can make a difference and save lives and prevent suffering.
Posted by Margaret Saizan on January 14, 2007 at 1:20 am
Dave –
You are correct. New Orleanians have been warned for several years now that a direct hurricane hit could inundate them–any Louisiana resident who expresses that they didn’t know this was a possibility is/was obviously in denial. I suppose the old adage of “it could never happen to me” has never been truer. However, by the time these warnings began to surface residential and commercial development in flood prone areas had already happened.
The chief complaint is that the federal government (Army Corp of Engineers) fortified the existing levees and built new ones– and then encouraged residential and commercial development in what were previously known to be flood prone areas. There was assurance that the levees were built to withstand storm surge. Post-Katrina The Corp of Engineers have admitted accountability for faulty engineering in the building and fortification of the current levee system in New Orleans.
On another note the flood of 1927 took place prior to the fortification of the present levees – My parents experienced that flood. And as one person commented here, the flooding wasn’t related to a hurricane hit nor did it involve Lake Pontchartrain —which was the source of the flooding from Katrina. In 1927 NOLA was inundated when the Mississippi River crested from melted snow moving downstream.
Margaret Saizan
Beyond Katrina: The Voice of Hurricane and Disaster Recovery