This is a quote of a quote. It is taken from Chapter 1 of Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities.

"What will on-line interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest. . . ."

I repsonse I would like to say there exists no reason why computer mediated communication will turn into ."communities not of common location, but of common interest."

In its essense, the web can be regarded as a cyborgian extension of the human psyche. By harnessing the power of this tool, people can and do rebuild local communities. Communities that are barley existant in a world where people have replaced their human interactions with their television and their local public sphere/marketplace with carefully constructed global supermarketplaces such as walmart that we arrive at in our very solitary SUVs.

While the television, film, and video have created a society that shuns community interaction, the computer, and specifically the internet, can act as a tool to bring local community back together.

I am not just saying this to promote my own site. Computers bring people together locally on so many levels. Just look at IM, email and chat rooms. I would argue that with the advent of IM, especially portable IM, that people will actually end up spending more time of the day involved in human to human communication than they do know, and definately more than they did 10 years ago. I can persoanlly attest to the fact that portable CMC eventually starts to feel like a psychic connection.

And do people really suppose that most time spent communciating online is really only with far away strangers. I know so many people that spend hundred of hours communicating with people online locally, especially those in search of the perfect mate. They are using tools like friendster, date.com(this one is funy ) , yahoo chat, aol, craig's list, gay.com, etc

The reality is that people will never find local community through film and video, unless the local community is based on a love for film and video. So put down your television and contribute your local online community, you never know where it will take you.

I converted all of Chapters of Rheingold's Virtual Communities to audio files.

Chapter 1 -
Chapter 2 -
Chapter 3 -
Chapter 4 -
Chapter 5 -
Chapter 6 -
Chapter 7 -
Chapter 8 -
Chapter 9 -
Chapter 10 -

I seriously cannot believe a freakin' serial cable cost $19.99 plus tax at compusa. That is such a ridiculous price to charge for one. I am sure there are millions of used ones out there looking for a home or living in the trash but after a week of searching and begging, I had to breakdown and buy a new one. It kills me because it is also so seriously environmentally irresponsible. I really should have just invested the money in a usb board for my basic stamp seeing as it would have only been another $30.00 and at least it would work on macs too.

This better be fun to program. I already have some plans but I need the digital color meter module and the bluetooth module. I can already see hardware costing too much. I should just stick with software development, where the development costs are relatively low when you know what you are doing. There is such a huge difference in the problems cause by errors in development with hardware.

Losing a chip is way more "expensive" than losing a file and you can't physically die from software development the way you can with hardware. I found myself deciding to touch the electricity yesterday, just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Wish me luck.

My birthday party was great. I am glad so many of you turned out. I wonder what happend to the neighbors up front. There were planning on coming to the party and never made it. It is really straneg caus eit was loud, so they must have heard it, and had indicated earlie rthat hey were exicted about coming. Maybe something came up. (e:chris) said the best excuse would be the bad weather, lol.

I started keeping more complicated usage statistics on the site. Since last night at 11PM there have been 92 non-bot / non-user guests with unique IP addresses who have visited the site. 6 Users have signed on since then.

Here is my preliminary Goldshlaeger collection not including the e-goldschlaeger send by (e:twisted)

Just to get an idea the large size bottle is 1 liter. I am aiming for a gallon.