Tom around the web this week
Sunday, May 28, 2006 at 2:10PM + The most linked post this week was Dangers of the blogosphere dialogue. Really struck a chord with a lot of people, including:
- The second reference to Tom that I've seen on MySpace (the first was myself ;-).
- In Barnett smacks the blogosphere, RattlerGator talks about how much he likes Tom's thinking (though later this week he disagreed in a couple of comments ;-).
- Frequent commenter Matt McIntosh quoted the post at length in The dark side of the blogosphere.
+ Larry Kudlow has had Tom on his radio and television shows a number of times. He says Tom is 'brilliant' and called the weblog 'wonderful'. He references Tom in this post, which ultimately led to a sidebar link exchange.
+ Critt Jarvis, who originally 'pestered' Tom into starting a weblog and went on to webmaster and partner with him, has a new project: building a big, important game where people can try out ideas and get inspired to do something. It's called Connecting in Conversation. Here's a taste (from this post):
In the context of Connecting in Conversation, the minimum unit of culture is the BCU — Basic Culture Unit. A BCU comprises Security, Rule Sets, Money, Infrastructure, and Resources. The nexus of these aspects provides a container for the way we organize ourselves. We recognize containers as the villages, town, and cities we live in. The aggregate of the places we live may be called a nation-state, or region.
+ Nicholas M. Guariglia has a nice essay which draws heavily on Tom: Thinking Horizontally (Getting Away From Obsolete Logic).
+ Generation Watch (taking major cues from Strauss and Howe) refers to Tom a couple of times as a younger thinker who understands today's complex dynamics and is still optimistic.
Reader Comments (7)
There is a primeval joy in Googling one's name to see what returns upon that magical display. I almost hold my breath each time I enact the ritual. The interesting thing is that when one enters Thomas Barnett into a Google image search, two very different faces appear: 1. Thomas Barnett 2.Thomas Barnett. The ironic thing is that the latter image is an old friend of mine, in fact, the very subculture he has become iconic within, I introduced to him nearly 20 years ago... Yes, the wild, wild, west of cyberspace is an amazing thing! Glad to see you had a good week out there Tom!
"RattlerGator talks about how much he likes Tom's thinking (though later this week he disagreed in a couple of comments ;-)."
You can like someone's thinking and the way they think while still finding things you disagree with. Heck, Tom himself is living proof of that. He likes the thinking of a lot of people he still has disagreement with.
Thanks for the mention of Generation Watch. When I first read PNM I knew there was a way to connect shrinking the Gap with generational theory. Too many people think Strauss and Howe theory implies that we are headed as a society towards some cataclysmic disaster (i.e. Great Depression II/Civil War II/World War IV) when what is really theorized is how generational aging propels social change. It may end up being revolutionary change, but it certainly doesn't have to be disastrous! That is where PNM steps in - it offers hope for a wave of global transformation that, while messy and painful, won't involve a ruin of the global economy and a Great Power war with a ratcheting up of the scale of destruction from the last global conflict.
I really haven't done justice to these ideas on my blog, but this comment is a good start. Just to end as optimistically as possible, here's a web site that shows how the generation rising into young adulthood embraces connectivity in a globalized world - they are naturals for SysAdmin roles.
Hey man, TPMBarnett has been in my "Heros" section on MySpace since I joined:
http://myspace.com/axisofentropy
A "The Show" appearance? OK, now Barnett has arrived.
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/060106.html#
thanks for the zefrank heads-up, Eric.
I can see you found and recorded my article. Thanks.