Thanks again for taking the time to respond to these questions. For some
reason I can't get a response back from the gaming mags to save my life

I'm not sure you'll do well in mainstream American print gaming mags.
We've pretty much never made it into them (maybe once?), though we do
well elsewhere and online.  I'm not sure if it has to do with the
close links between content and ads and so on, or what, since I only
hear the occasional story from the periphery about how it works.

Also, I mentioned to you my eccentric project a while back, Project PM. I
don't know how closely you follow these things, but my friend and project
participant Michael Hastings seems to have just fucked up all kinds of shit
with his new Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, who's now been summoned to
Washington.

Yeah, I first read that on HP and then heard a telephone interview
with him on Rachel Maddow, and of course it has been ongoing after
that.  It seems like a pretty intense scoop, and that he really just
needed to let the guy keep talking.

He also blurbed my book and I'm doing a piece on the background
to all this for Vanity Fair today, so we're going to be in a much better
position to act on our agenda pretty soon with the additional notoriety. If
you're still interested in discussing our project further at some point, let
me know

I read the Africa page a few weeks ago and the last long email you
wrote and had been trying to find time to think and reply
intelligently, but it has been difficult.  I think that since I'm not
involved at a practical level with this sort of activity I'd be sort
of wasting your time asking for basic explanations when you are going
to be way ahead of me on things.

As I understand it, the network would need to be decentralized, so
that people that were interested in, say, cooking or sports, wouldn't
be able to co-opt any shared resources once they got in on the edges
and started linking in all their friends and pushing recipes or match
write-ups down the line. When you said the widget shows items that
have been "pushed forward a certain number of times" it made me think
there was some more centralized counting going on, so that the top
pushed items became more universally available without having to make
the entire journey from one person to another.  At that point, you'd
need to account for side networks latching on that outgrow the
original (including a competing sub-network of the left-out
conservative bloggers, once one gets linked in on the fringe) --
something that I imagine would be a danger if you are trying to write
a novel, high-quality system for passing around important news (which
isn't going to be limited to political news once you have irrelevant
contributors).  I'm behind on Facebook and tweets and that kind of
thing, so I suppose the ways around this might be obvious to people
that are with the times, he he he.  That's my paranoid first reaction,
anyway, based on the experience of my forum getting a little gummed
up.  Maybe if the blogger network were named something that somebody
thinking about cooking or sports didn't want to see every time they
open up the widget, he he he.  Starting with a dozen people, this
obviously isn't going to be a problem right away, but if the
registration/linking system is uncontrolled, you'll eventually get
whoever linked or whatever pushed and any mechanism not respecting the
locality of the direct links could become troubled.

If it doesn't have shared resources though, and whatever side networks
that form are just living off by themselves and not jamming up the
network, then the overall concept would need to distinguish itself
from email buddy lists -- I guess it might be enough to emulate buddy
lists with more purpose and more conveniently to achieve the project
goals of getting information passed around quickly, but in a
completely decentralized system I'm not seeing the crucial difference
and it makes me feel like I'm misunderstanding something about how it
works, unless the project is more about getting these kinds of themed
buddy lists organized in some standardized and easy to use way.

Anyway, I suck at that game. [LCS]

Yeah, I only spent a few month-long sessions with it separated by
periods of inactivity, if I remember, so it never really gelled as a
balanced game.  The continuing fan-written LCS is probably more
winnable without cheap tactics, but it's my understanding that it's
more "gamey" in a way, so I can't really say how it plays or anything
about the atmosphere.

Tarn