So much of the web is built on the idea that anyone can say anything, and it’s up to the viewer and the collecitve media to promote or dismiss it. Which has made for a very interesting political discourse on the web, ranging from mainstream to fringe, and a lot of very effective communities like Daily Kos. Video immediately made the overall pie fight that much more fun, but I hadn’t realized how much of a platform YouTube has become for overt political expression and dialogue.

Then i read about a controversial video campaigning against Harold Ford, Jr., who was a classmate and friend of mine at Penn. The article didn’t have a link, but a search on YouTube revealed the original (linked above) and plenty of others.

It’s a virtual town square out there - both a great way for candidates and their supporters to get their messages out, and a fantastic platform for creative ways of messaging (both good and bad). As always, buyer beware!

I’ve been meeting a lot of early-stage founders and companies lately - something I love to do.  Yesterday, someone pitched me his company, which had identified an interesting and valuable market problem and clearly had some interesting relationshiops, but had no customers, no users, no technology, no proof of concept, and no mockups to show.  Their BD lead was a research analyst, and they were in need of significant advice on “what languages and stuff to use” for their platform.  He was hoping for an investment of some kind (money, engineers, etc.) from Yahoo!

As supportive as I am of marketplace innovation, I was suddenly reminded of a something I’d dashed down in my Treo but forgotten until then.  Said by Farhad Mohit, the inimitable founder of Shopzilla, over beers at DEMO:

“There is no way around suffering like a pig.”

Congratulations to the Brooklyn Dodgers of Los Angeles for a great season. Ringing up 88 wins and a tie for the NL West title was more than many expected in what started out as a rebuilding year.

Many thanks to the team (espcially Nomar and standout rookie Russell Martin), my friends close to the team, and the blue-blooded folks who cheered along with me from the first exhibition game through the playoff-berth clinch and the very last out at home.  You know who you are - see you in the Spring!

Once in a while, the Upcoming robot drops a reminder on you that lights the night up like a light bulb. So it was with Billy Bragg’s show at the Fonda last night - I was on my way somewhere else but decided to drop by and was “miracled” by the bouncer when I asked if the show was sold out. I wandered in just in time to get a beer, work my way up to the footlights, and watch the curtain rise on a shuffling working-class griot who would get my vote for a Macarthur “genius” grant if they gave them to foreigners (and if I had a vote).

Billy Bragg has been an integral part of my soundtrack for years, especially since living in England. “There is no real substitue for a bull struck squarely and firmly”, indeed. I just fell years ago for his ability to connect the emotional and the political, and I’ve been a believer ever since. He’s passionate about his beliefs, and those beliefs — in the common denomitators that connect humans to one another, and that our political systems and the people atop them too often lose sight of that - radiate from his jangly, soulful pop songs. There’s also something about his permanently unrequited adolescence & imperfection that appeals to me.

Last night he played unacommpanied electric guitar for the whole set (until the encore, when he switched to acoustic), doing bang-up takes on a number of my favorites like “Greetings to the New Brunette”, “A Lover Sings”, “World Turned Upside Down”, etc., as well as a couple of his terrific Woody Guthrie covers and a Leadbelly song. He sounded fantastic.

Equally enjoyable were his rants about everything from starbucks to a hamster eating a biscuit on youtube - and he was by turns serious as well, telling us about his book and sharing a powerful view on the importance of singer-songwriters in bringing together like-spirited people (I’ve written about this before) to recharge our collective batteries. I guess it’s social networking the old-fashioned way - though he did invite us all to join his Myspace, and changed a favorite lyric of mine to “If you’ve got a website / I wanna be on it”.

If you don’t know Billy, go buy some.

Congratulations, Emily, Diane, and Audrey, who won the Hack Day contest with a wearable that photblogs on the fly and leverages Yahoo’s Flickr and ZoneTag (see the TechCrunch writeup).  Congratulations are deserved by everyone else who participated and brought so much creative enthusiasm to the event - i was especially impressed by the people I met who came from far away at great inconvenience and expense, as well as those who hacked right on through the Beck concert; they were really living and breathing the spirit of the event.
I want to say a huge thank you to the Yahoo! organizers who made this happen, Chad and the YDN team, along with all the volunteer staff.  The impact of this on Yahoo! itself is huge, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me psyched to work here.  Thank you.