Cathy raised this interesting bit, an extract from here, about the powerful people not participating. Or listening, maybe.

I don’t know about this “echo chamber thing, but I do know of one VC blogging, and folks like Baruth seem to be well plugged into both worlds. I even recall an interview with GW, him saying he liked to look at his ranch on “the google thing.”

But it is so hard to get a take on this thing when we know that people seem to clump up sort of naturally.

I mean, I know personally of no one who voted for Bush. But someone must have, and I am sure that if I knew the right contact, had the right social thread to pull on, I could just as easily find myself standing around chit-chatting in a group made up of only those who did.

The danger is, I think, when the public sphere, the common space in which these little circles interlock starts to get lost. The public square gives way to the mall, the library to borders. The bus, the train to the auto, and the village green to the gated community.

When we succeed so well at being safe and private, at surrounding ourselves with what we like, with what is like us, that is when it starts to turn from discussion to disassociated echo chambers. When there are no longer any circumstances in our lives that force us to have an everyday interaction with someone who might not be “like us.”

So does web 2.0 “suck?” The answer comes down to conversation. Does web 2.0 give us the tools that broaden the conversation? Or just a bigger geek box?

Interesting question, interesting link. Lot to chew on here. Thanks, Cathy.

Went to the blogger meet-up Saturday. Good to put some faces to the blogs I’ve been reading. I didn’t have my camera, nor am I good with names, nor the whole social thing … which may explain why I am writing this rather than being say, a prize winning photo journalist, or even moderately popular. But Stan Cyendom put together a nice write-up with pictures.

The company was interesting, the coffee was good and the wifi was ‘buck in the basket’, one of my favorite funding mechanisms. I would have liked to stay longer, but the kids were getting restless. I left wondering when then next one would be … but not where …

Because Monday, headed to Waterbury, I found the perfect site for our next meetup. The Williston Rest area on I89 (southbound). I stopped at the Williston (southbound). This place is amazing. Beautiful high ceilings, plenty of light, airy. Very nice architecturally. Plenty of free parking, as they say.

And, the coffee! Green mountain coffee roasters … buck in the basket! Not to mention, the wifi is free.

Thanks to the state of Vermont for this wonderful oasis. I am sure I am not the only one who might take a break from the Burlington rat race, the scramble for high speed access, and head out to Williston for an alternative hipster wifi coffeehouse scene.

What do you think, guys?

Some species specialize. The Koala Bear, for example, eats only eucalyptus leaves. This, naturally, restricts their range, their habitat. The Leaf Cutter ants live on a specailzed fungius, a species of Lepiotaceae family. They can live in a broader variety of habitats, as they garden this fungus.

Humans, on the other hand, have taken the other tack. We can live pretty much anywhere, partially because we can eat pretty much anything. Any place can be our local habitat because we can pretty well eat local wherever we happen to be living.

One thing about eating local, though, that is a challange is that you have to eat what is avaliable when it is avaliable. And, pretty much eat it till you are sick of it when it comes in, cause there will be a lot of it. Strawberries in the spring, corn in the late summer, squash in the fall. A lot of meat over the winter.

I think that psychologically this is fine. Not only are we well adapted omnivors, we are pretty well adapted to a “feast-or-famine” diet.

The problem is to some degree psycological, cultural. We live in an “always on” society. So, while the strawberries taste better in the spring, we have come to expect that we ought be able to have straweberry shortcake whenever we want. It has been a long time since anyone went to the grocery store and couldn’t get something because it was not in season.

I think one of the biggest challanges facing the budding community of localvores - a community which I think is one of the most important movements in vermont today - is going to be overcoming the the attitude of always avaliable.

Up at Small Dog today getting a battery for the little apple laptop and ran into their recycling day. Monitors, printers, telephones, a jumbled mountain of electronics out in the parking lot. I’ll bet most of it - well, maybe not the gutted cpu boxes - still worked.

I was amazed. Being a bit of a junk hound, I had to stop myself from starting to pick through it.

Over and over, I look with awe and disbelief at the huge amounts of material things this culture of ours cycles through. This stuff was all new not so long ago. Desired, worked for, cutting edge … it was going to make a life better, make someone happy, impress someone maybe … It was going to be just the thing, just what we needed.

And here it all is, no respect, (where did the love go?) out on the pavement, enough to fill a 50′ tractor trailer. I know that there is more where that came from. In your closet, maybe?

In a spllled heap these beauties look slightly tawdy, a theater with the lights coming up, the fair midway the morning after. Almost don’t want to look too closely, like we don’t really want to take in that person asking us for spare change. We might see a person underneath the grime. Here, we might just see the fact that this old junk looks a lot like the stuff we just loaded ito the car at the mall today.

We buy it, off it goes to the landfill. Here is some information on why that is not a particularly good idea from from the Small Dog site It is nice to see yet another small vermont company doing the right thing because, well … it is the right thing to do.

E-waste, electronic equipment such as computers, televisions, printers and related peripherals, is both an environmental problem and a health hazard. Electronics contain substantial amounts of hazardous materials such as lead, mercury and hexavalent chromium, discussed in detail below. When electronics are not properly disposed of or recycled, the toxins can potentially seep into the ground and affect our groundwater and the air we breathe.

Some discarded electronics end up in landfills in the U.S., but many are shipped to third world countries where children and other workers sort through the discarded electronics searching for parts they are paid several cents for. They often do this work without gloves, masks or goggles, suffering exposure to the harmful chemicals, glass, and other sharp objects.

Over in Shelburn tonight, helping sheetrock. G__ is very independent, very obsessed with his projects, so typically blows through them alone, but sheetrocking a ceiling is something that is just, well, let us say, … difficult … to do alone. Quick job though, a small bathroom. Ripped down the old acoustic tile, ran the new wiring, and hung, say, the better part of three sheets.

Couple of hours, and got a family dinner out of the deal. Last time G__ and I were up in a ceiling, though, the family was mine, was my boy toddling amongst the tools and extension cords, and my other little one in the bath with Mom. Now it is his kids, mine being only home half the time since the divorce, and pretty well grown besides.

Bittersweet. Good to think we’ve been friends, working on each other’s houses, sharing meals, for so long. Sad, even years later, about the divorce.

Walked out to the car, clear blue sky of twilight, silver crescent moon hanging low in the northwest. That impossible blue, fading to black in the east, light enough show the clearest intricate silhouette of the trees up on the ridge in the west.

And I heard peepers. Maybe we won’t have eternal winter after all.

Was over a friend’s house watching baseball on TV tonight - prime time commercial TV, something I never see (don’t have a set myself).

The car ads are amazing. A guy walking down the street, notices a car and stops to look it over. Were it a woman he was checking out like that he would have been arrested for stalking, or maybe just lewd and lascivious. A Range Rover driving on a newly formed lava field, I believe this car would make your life exhilarating, some BMW promising that you would be extraordinary should you purchase one.

I felt out of touch. This does not match the reality I see around me day to day. We bog down in traffic, we cannot find a parking space, we drive on asphalt - perhaps fresh paved, perhaps potholed, sometimes out in the country a ways, but always asphalt (I know there are some young bucks out their thinking about the time they drove daddy’s ford off in a field last summer …) I don’t get it.

And I thought … doesn’t everybody already have a one? There seems to be no shortage of cars. So I looked up some numbers.

US Population - roughly 300 million. Between the ages of 18 and 64 - prime ‘need a car’ years, down to 186 million. And, according to a couple of sources (census, NADA) there are about 136 million cars currently “in operation”. That is not quite one for everybody, but pretty close, one for seven out of ten.

And, new car sales (at registered new car dealers only) have exceed new persons added to the US population annually by about a factor of 8 (16m vs roughly 2M annually) for the past several years.

So, it seems to me that pretty much everyone who needs a car most likely already has one. That would explain the commercials. I guess it is no surprise, but they are not selling cars, not selling something that anyone has a real need for.

They are selling sex, excitement, glamour, self-worth.

The illusion is astonishing, the costs real high and … everyone pretty much already has one.