(UPDATE, March 6: Ugh, no entry from me today - I'm still recovering from last night's birthday party, plus a long conversation with a friend afterwards that lasted 'til the wee hours. Sorry!)

(UPDATE 2: Well, okay, a sneak preview - you can click here and here to hear some of the actual debauchery from last night, if you want. Full writeup tomorrow, of course!)

Okay, so last week I got to talking here about all the new ways you can now send me feedback regarding this site; or, that is, ways so that your thoughts get both to me and to my audience, without me having the ability to censor them, but that still doesn't rely on a traditional commenting system like you see at most blogs, which I can't run here because it's always gotten so overflooded with anonymous hate trollers, anytime I've tried to run one here in the past. And there are a number of ways to do this now (four, in fact); the easiest way, however, is to simply share your opinion at your own blog, bookmarking account or podcast, then either link to here or add the tag 'jasonpettus.' And that's the beauty, of course, of all these new tagging abilities, blog aggregators and the like, as I was mentioning in that original entry; because since all these competing companies now use such open protocols as tagging and RSS, it means that people's opinions can be collected in real time now, without having to rely on a commenting system at a blog anymore to do the same.

And, well, what do you know - not even a week later, and I've accidentally stumbled across a group of hiphop DJs in Canada doing the same exact thing! It all started over at the website of Dave Winer (co-inventor of RSS, podcasting, OPML and more), who I'm just fascinated by and read every single day, because he's so brilliant and such an asshole, just like me. (Well, okay, the 'asshole' part applies to me, not the 'brilliant' part.) Anyway, in the comments there I saw something by a guy named Julien Smith, who runs a hiphop podcast website out of Montreal called InOverYourHead.net, talking about an intriguing experiment he and a small group of other podcasters are trying, having to do with tagging and del.icio.us. And so I clicked over and checked it out, and sure enough they're doing the same exact thing I proposed here last week - that is, they're encouraging their listeners to tag their audio comments with the name of the original podcast, so that anyone who wants to can then go to the proper del.icio.us page to see what everyone has had to say.

Brilliant! And even better, they thought of something I hadn't thought of myself; that it's easily possible to tag audio files on top of everything else, instead of just text entries like I was mentioning here last week. After all, even MP3 files have a unique address on the internet, just like everything else. So I, for example, left a little comment for Julien as well, using my Odeo account; and in Odeo, once you've finished making your recording, the service provides an MP3 version as well that you can download. But if you click on the MP3 link instead of right-clicking, of course, it will open the file in the browser window itself; and that's the URL that I simply sent to my del.icio.us account, along with the appropriate tags ('inoveryourhead' and 'comment' in this case). And that way, it's not the HTML page containing the MP3 that shows up in their comment feed, but the MP3 itself - meaning, for example, that people can subscribe to that feed through iTunes, and have all the audio comments delivered automatically to their iPod.

So anyway, needless to say, it was cool to stumble across these guys who have had the same idea as me at the same time, and definitely cool that they got me thinking about this subject in yet more new ways. There's something really to this idea, I think; this idea that in the future, there won't be any comment pages at blogs at all, but rather people making their comments from their own blog or other online account. In fact, maybe I should coin a phrase for it, before anyone else thinks of doing such a thing. Um, "BOTAR," maybe? That is, you bookmark your comment for the original author to see, then tag it so that it's guaranteed they'll see it, using RSS to deliver it to them in real time. Eh, but BOTAR ain't exactly the sexiest acronym ever devised; I'll have to give this some more thought.

Oh, and by the way, Julien's podcast is excellent, and I highly encourage all of you to check it out. But hey, Julien, why do you call yourself a hiphop podcaster there? Your last episode, for example, was dominated by such indie-rock staples as the Magnetic Fields and The Organ. Not that I'm complaining!

Wow, big trouble a-brewing here in Chicago these days; an alderman has proposed naming an honorary street here after notorious Black Panther member Fred Hampton, and the cops here are about ready to riot. (Gee, a Chicago cop responding to something he doesn't like with violence and intimidation? What a goddamn surprise! Fucking fascists.) Anyway, I'm going to stay out of the entire debate myself, because I don't have much of an opinion on it one way or another; in fact, I think the entire concept of honorary street names is kind of stupid, just basically an excuse for local politicians to easily keep their constituents happy and keep getting re-elected. It does, however, bring up what I think is an extremely fascinating question, one that's going to become more and more of an issue with each passing year - exactly how are we going to look back historically on the 1960s?

On the one hand, for example, a person could argue that the Black Panthers were an incredibly important part of American history, which I agree with - they were instrumental in helping to establish more civil rights, instrumental in bringing the political issues involved out to the general public, and especially the black community. But on the other hand, you could argue that the Black Panthers were a terrorist organization, which I also agree with; and that was the entire point of the Black Panthers existing, in fact, just like the SDS at the same time. So how are we going to choose to look back at all this now, nearly 40 years after the events themselves took place? Are we going to look at such groups like we now do the American Colonists, who took up arms against England to win our independence? They were terrorists, too, let's not forget, and were having the same exact things said about them by the British back then as we're currently saying about terrorists in the Middle East (sometimes down to the very same words and phrasing). Or are we going to look at such groups as evidence of a time gone horribly wrong, when society broke down so much that lawless vigilante groups actually wielded tremendous political power? That goes against everything this country stands for, after all, and really does represent a time when the way that things are supposed to work here went terribly, terribly wrong.

The problem with the '60s is that it's messy, easily the messiest and most complicated period of the entire history of America. You had a society that was falling apart, revolution in the streets, millions of youths who rightly felt that they had no other way of changing things than to literally arm themselves and start killing their fellow citizens. And the messiest part, of course, is that all these things really were necessary - that we really would be living in a deplorable place right now, a place with hardly any civil rights at all, and especially for women and minorities, if these people hadn't done what they did in the '60s. And let's face it - this doesn't make for a very good statue, parade or honorary street, which is how we usually honor important moments in American history here.

So what do you think? What exactly is the best way for us to acknowledge all the things that happened here in the '60s, and to properly honor those things without accidentally glorifying violence and terrorism along the way? Write up your thoughts in your own blog; or link to this entry at del.icio.us and add a comment; or send me an audio comment; or just send me an email; and in all cases, simply either add the tag 'jasonpettus' or link back to this site. I'll be pointing out responses here that I come across over the next couple of days, for anyone who feels like being part of the conversation.

A terrible confession - when I first signed up for the chat accounts I now have, I thought maybe that it would lead to some of these racy little 'cybersex' experiences I've been hearing people talk about for years now, and especially maybe among some of my sexy little anonymous readers out there, beeping me in the middle of the night while they were drunk or whatever. Boy, how wrong I was! In the three weeks that I've now had home chat capabilities, in fact, my real-time conversations have almost exclusively been about trivial little everyday things - chatting with friends and readers when I'm bored, keeping in contact with my parents, etc. Ah, but maybe it's for the best; after all, I've never even tried this so-called "chat cybersex," not even once in all these years, because I've never had a home broadband connection before, and maybe I'd just find the entire thing pointless and uninteresting. Now, that said, if you are drunk in the middle of the night sometime, and feel like sharing some dirty photos of yourself and talking all nasty for awhile, please feel free to drop me a line; I'm dying to know if this whole cybersex thing is worth the hype or not.