On this note, I think Slashdot is the worst example of this. Somehow the conversation often ends up as simple insults aimed at a country: Americans are stupid/fat/loud, Europeans are commies(!)/backward/a back water/ love a nanny state. It’s depressing.

I think the ‘gun rights’ argument can bring out the worst, the two sides simply can’t see/hear the other sides argument/reason, (Europeans: ‘lite’ gun laws lead to lots of guns lead to more killings. Americans: gun restrictions lead to the bad guys having guns and the good guys not, which is madness).

On a different note completely (but still something linked to this post!), I have seen long queues when American’s vote, sometimes waiting hours. This is somewhat alien to me, as I’ve only lived in the UK. I’ve voted in three different counties, yet I’ve never queued or waited more than 1 minute. I’m also confused by the whole hanging-chad and voting machine problems in the states. When the ‘hanging-chad’ thing happened in Florida back in 2000, it seemed from the comments of the state officials that there was nothing more they can do without making the whole process very slow. Yet in the UK we count by hand, and normally have the result by the end of the day of voting. Now of course the UK is far smaller, but I don’t think this matters, the process operates on a county by county level (well, actually local government areas) no matter how many counties there are.

Any ideas why the queues and problems in this area in the US, are the voting areas larger and perhaps with less voting booths per person?

“If I had a vote, I would not vote for either Obama or McCain because they both promise to keep some of Bush’s tax cuts (McCain more than Obama) in the face of spiraling debt and a compound interest problem.”

I find that generally people do not quite know how to react to a neutral perspective, perhaps because they are used to fighting stronger political allegiances. I continue learning…

I enjoyed reading your article on glue.

Please let me know if you would like to test our our new product, headup (still in private beta). I am sure you’d be thrilled with our semantic content linkage capabilities.

You can reach me at talk (at) semantinet.com

Thanks for this great write up! So thrilled to have you as an early Glue user in the system.

You are summing up exactly the value of Glue - semantics is on the background doing its magic, but the really important thing is new way for people to connect - in the context, without friction.

Alex

So very true what you say.

Actually, despite the love of ‘hot drinks’ in the UK, we behave just about as badly towards tea - if you go into Cafe Nero, or Starbucks, then at least they’ll be using loose, ground coffee to make it - try finding a high street cafe that uses loose tea.

And finally, the thing I really hate - instant coffee. I just don’t think they should be allowed to call it coffee. The problem is when you go and see someone and they offer you coffee - is it rude to check ‘is that instant coffee’?

I agree - the speaker line-up looks really interesting, and you never know I might be able to sneak away from our stand for some of the talks.

Bill

PS You asked before about a beta invite - we decided in the end to keep our beta test reasonably limited and will launch a public version 1 later this month.