Robert Scoble weighed in on the whole weblogs.com mess. In the comments of his post is the most wonderful, in-context thing written about it yet:

"When there are technology users in pain, we should do whatever we can to take care of them."

The rest of the world's poor, diseased and starving can blow us.

The URL scoblecomments.scripting.com, incidentally, is one of the sites Dave chose to leave running.

New York City has put out an RFP for a city-wide wireless network. Intended for "public safety" workers, the proposal calls for 2Mb transfer rates and streaming video support.

It will be interesting to see who submits bits, and what kind of technology is proposed for the network.

Via Dan Gillmor, a beta version of Boingo for MacOS is in the works. Cool.

POTD

How can you ever be alone in a city of eight million people?

It is, in fact, quite easy.

This just made my day.

POTD

Today I'm trying to think calm thoughts.

Does anyone know of any good (or reasonably workable) Microsoft Word to JavaHelp converters?

I just bought one of these. I'm a dork.

POTD

This fence surrounds Bowling Green, at the southern end of Manhattan. Southern Manhattan is rich with history, and Bowling Green may be at the epicenter.

The land where Bowling Green sits was reportedly a Council Grounds, or meeting place, of the Leni Lenape Indians, the Native American tribe that inhabited Manhattan before Dutch Governor Peter Minuit "purchased" the island.

The early Manhattanites used Bowling Green as a parade ground and marketplace. It wasn't until the 1730s that Bowling Green was leased to a group of private citizens who turned the site into New York's first public park. It was this group of citizens who created a bowling green on the site, giving the park its current name.

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read to George Washington's troops, stationed in Manhattan. Upon hearing the declaration, the troops marched to the Bowling Green. There, they tore down a statue of King George, removing the statue's head and placing it on a stake. Surrounding the Bowling Green was a fence, each twelfth spike decorated with a crown symbolizing the British Royal family. A mob consisting of George Washington's troops and the Sons of Liberty sawed off each crown.

The crowns and the statue of King George were then melted down and fashioned into musket bullets, used to fight the British Army in the American Revolution.

To this day, you can visit Bowling Green and see the fence, originally constructed in 1771, still perfectly intact. The roughly-cut tops of each spike are still there.

This is one of my favorite bits of New York history.

Great video for a Radiohead tune.

[via Andrew Grumet]

POTD

Sometimes I just don't get these public art installations.

This one is in Battery Park.

Well this sucks. I have mirrored 'blog content on weblogs.com (at eric.weblogs.com, to be preceise) since about 2000. The site was a free 'blog-hosting service run by Dave Winer (and others, I assume).

Today, I was greeted with a rather shocking sight: eric.weblogs.com was replaced by a message stating that Dave couldn't afford to host the 'blogs anymore. My stuff was gone. Yikes.

So now I'm:

• Unable to post an item that tells people where the new home of eric.weblogs.com will be
• Unable to set up a redirect, either in HTML or RSS
• Unable to get at the site's membership list to send out an e-mail regarding this change.

I completely, asolutely understand Dave's unwillingness to pay for hosting these sites, but from where I stand, this sucks. This was not done in a considerate manner. No effort was made to meet the weblogs.com community half-way. Of course, the death of weblogs.com may have been announced somewhere, and I certainly may have missed the announcement. Or it may have been swallowed by a spam filter.

This is personally troubling, as well as inconsistent with Dave's public message. Dave has consistently (and correctly) pointed out the importance of a collective web-memory, of permanent URLs, and of accessibility of web content to search engines. This is even more troubling, when I see sites like doc.weblogs.com still accessible.

As of this morning, years worth of my posts are gone. Rather than just redirect the index page of the 'blog to the message above, the whole site archive is gone. All that content, all indexed by Google, is now gone.

Even though the site was hosted for free, I feel deceived.

Oh...I forgot to mention. This was my Bush. My apologies if this offends you. I'll try to find an animated Clinton to offset this one.

Well, this is fun.