From my tech blog, two posts with lots of links about tech, blogging, social networking, tools, and other sites and blogs I discovered while at Gnomedex.

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Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities.

Sounds like the neocons, just like they did with Iraq, have been making shit up so they can invade.

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’”

A retired American diplomat, who has experience in the Gulf, confirmed that the Qatari government is “very scared of what America will do” in Iran, and “scared to death” about what Iran would do in response. Iran’s message to the oil-producing Gulf states, the retired diplomat said, has been that it will respond, and “you are on the wrong side of history.”

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Philip Kaplan of Pud, AdBrite, and FuckedCompany said for the first time ever, Coke sales were down over the previous year because they weren’t reaching the kids on MySpace and predicted a huge influx of ad money to the Net. (This may not neccessarily be a good thing!)

Chris Messina and Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. Small can be good.”Perhaps we can succeed without a giant liquidity event. Eight 100 lb. orangutangs can be just as good as one 800 lb. gorilla. You can do well by serving small niches.

Dave Winer. The travel agency used to be completely centralized, and it was nearly impossible to check what the weather forecast where you were going was, much less what hotels were in the area. You had to use a travel agent. The Net changed all of that forever.

Much talk about social networking sites, how they should be more open, like what PeopleAggregator has just now started doing. There were echoes here of what I see as the problem with the DailyKos/netroots approach. These tools are wonderful and powerful. But they need to create groups and actions in the real world too, not just in cyberspace.

Most everyone seemed at least sympathetic and often quite supportive of my antiwar views and blog - even more so than last year. I didn’t push it, wrong forum for that. However more than a few took my Polizeros business card and we’ll be contacting each other.

More over the next few days on this. My brain is full and needs time to process all this new information as well as the friends I made!

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Blake reveals the secret Firefox project goals, Firefox being the free Mozilla-based browser that has been downloaded over 200 million times. It’s better, faster, more secure than IE, plus there are hundreds of add-ons. Get it.

He spoke about how they built the buzz for it by using SpreadFireFox, and with focused campaigns on campuses, etc.

Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer beamed in from Arcturus, accusing FireFox of being Microsoft-like. Sometimes these two, who seemingly delight in being grumpy old men, have quite valid criticisms. This was not one of those times.

Brian Livingston brought it back to earth, congratulating Firefox on creating an amazing browser, hoping maybe they could create an OS too. This would force Microsoft to improve Windows, and not do things like install spyware in it, like they just got caught doing with Windows Genuine Advantage.

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