23. March, 2003 - I guess I am going to talk about the war

• But first, I sat down yesterday and decided it was time to add a RSS feed to Dave’s Picks. It’s RSS 0.91, and I think I got it all right, but I haven’t really done much in the way of testing yet. Please let me know if you spot any problems with it. I’m not saying I’ll fix them right away, but I’d at least like to know about them.
• If you wanna watch current events by way of blogs, Dave Sifry’s Technorati: Current Events, with context is pretty handy. It’s a DayPop for the past two hours, complete with some context. [doc]
• The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article showing how demonstrators used affinity groups to paralyze the city on Thursday. This type of tactic will, most likely, start to spread throughout the country especially if there’s a protracted war (perhaps unlikely) or a succession of military actions by Herr Bush (perhaps likely). [Jim]
• After a few days of silence, Kevin Sites has announced that he’s been asked to suspend his blogging for now. Kevin’s a CNN reporter who’s in Iraq.
• Don’t despair though. Iraq Conflict Coverage Weblog -- Great Work Gallery has a list of embedded journalists, blogs and maps. One stop shopping if you want to know more about the war. [fark!]
• Nick Denton is Mapping the invasion. I find myself wondering why one of the major news services isn’t doing this? [scripting]
• Finally, from Jim: I attended two rallies in St. Paul yesterday. First off there was a call on Indymedia for a counter demonstration at the pro-war rally put on by liberateiraqsign.com. Unfortunately the counter demo didn’t really happen. There were maybe a dozen people compared to a crowd I’d estimate at (high end) 2000. Officially this was a Support our Troops rally, but the guy selling Bomb Saddam signs was doing a brisk business. There was also a racist element in the crowd that jeered a Muslim speaker. More people showed up after I left (just as the rally started) but the Strib’s of 17,000 is a prevarication at best.
  A peace rally crowd that looked much larger to me marched through St. Paul neighborhoods. The Pioneer Press said that crowd was 5,000-10,000.
  Also of interest is the unscientific survey and done at both rallys posted on TC Indymedia. [Jim]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Sun, 23 Mar 2003 11:13:22.