From Dave Winer:

The schmoozing at this conference has been excellent. World class.
I have seen this happen before, at the beginning of booming markets. Like the Apple II. We had this kind of collegiality at the when the Macintosh market was just about to boom, in 1986. You could feel it in the offices of Wired on Third St in SF in 1995.
You can’t bottle the feeling, and it doesn’t last very long, maybe a year or two. But in these periods, when people are relaxed and excited and confident, you can really get stuff done. We’ll remember Gnomedex 2005 for that for many years to come. [Scripting News]

People I schmoozed with are - putting RSS feeds on cell phones, comic strips too. Mergng news aggregators with social networks so if your friends all read something then it assumes you want to read it to. Working on smart filtering so we only get want we want to get with the noise filtered out. These are just a few examples. There are hundreds more.

2-3 years from now - oh, those two broke guys with that little startup I met at Gnomedex 5.0, now their company is 500 people… I’m already working on ways that the Left can use all of to mobilize, propagandize, build demonstrations, and reach a much larger audience. More later!

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US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

Didn’t they loudly proclaim just a few weeks back that everyone was treated oh so nicely at Gitmo?

Italy seeks ‘CIA kidnap agents’ 

Italian authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 people they claim are agents “linked to the CIA”.

The suspects are accused of abducting an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for interrogation.

AKA kidnapping and torture.

And it’s all for naught. Bush vows he’s ‘not giving up’ in Iraq. Translation: The US has lost but can’t admit it yet.

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Dave and Adam pose for gnomerazzi as Secret Service looks away.

Dave Winer opened Gnomedex with a keynote speech, Adam Curry closes it today with another keynote. Yesterday Adam noted he and Dave worked for four years on getting the enclosure field in RSS to work so files could be podcasted. He said they would excitedly announce on their blogs that wow, we just made it transfer a 100 MB file and the response was … crickets.
Not any more. Now mass media outlets are podcasting, with more coming.
Winer is a brilliant programmer and conceptualizer who can be abrasive, a role he appears to relish, even if he has the scars to prove it. Curry is a natural front man, enthusiastic and highly intelligent. They have fundamental differences on what podcasting should be, differences put aside at least temporarily so this conference could be everything it could be.
Winer is concerned commercialization will kill podcasting. Curry says bring on the commercialization, in fact, I’ll help put ads into your podcasts, if you want them, and hey, everyone was afraid commercialization would kill the Net and today the Net is far bigger than anyone ever thought it would be ten years ago. His keynote today should be illuminating.

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