To Michael.

love and a cough

As it has been said,
love and a cough
cannot be denied.

          even a small cough

          even a small love


If you have only a small love, love,
I do not mind.


I will lay bare my soul.
I will pass through
          to hear your answer.


Yes.  Yes.  You call back.


Who are we, anyway?
What do we mean?  Or matter?

Are we a we?


I'm not quite sure, and
They don't know, and
We couldn't be sure of it, anyhow.


Your soul dropped down from heaven
       then came tenderness.

It was all the same.

and another thing

Web 2.0 has a bazillion different definitions but the one I like the best (by virtue of not being an entire essay long) is that Web 2.0 is the internet with uploading as well as downloading. Or rather, it denotes websites which, rather than providing information and services, allow the user to contribute his or her own information (text, photos, blog entries, videos, music, links) for others to see. In recognition of this sea change, Time Magazine named "You" Person Of The Year in 2006.

Some Web 2.0 websites (according to this definition) and their founding dates are as follows:

Wikipedia (2001), LiveJournal (1999), Friendster (2002), Twitter (2006), Flickr (2004), Facebook (2004), Knol (2007), MySpace (2003), Digg (2004), Reddit (2005), del.icio.us (2003), YouTube (2005), Everything2 (1999).

Wow. Check us out!

So a lot of prominent Web 2.0 sites are missing from this list, many of them with earlier founding dates, many of them having folded since they were founded. But still, it is fair to say that E2 was one of the very first Web 2.0 sites of any kind, and that E2 was three to five years ahead of its time. Indeed, E2 predates the technologies that have come to be traditionally associated with Web 2.0 (XML, wikis, tagging, RSS, CSS, AJAX, etc.). Knol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol) is E2's only real imitator/competitor, and it's currently in private beta. It took eight years for Knol to appear!

Of course E2 took off like a rocket! The coolest thing on the internet always does! E2 appeared at a time where user-submitted content was a novelty, and where a massive collaborative text database was the most amazing thing of all time. But E2 isn't the wild frontier anymore. It's not unusual. It's mainstream.

Or, to put it a different way:

E2 is no longer cool.

The Love at First Sight, Meet a Girl at Burger King, song.
We first met at Burger King, she was my beauty Queen,
We shared some Freedom Fries, cause nobody ever liked the French.
I knew she liked Modest Mouse when I spilled rootbeer on her favorite T-shirt,
But she didn’t care, whispering in my ear “That’s one more reason I should take this off.”

Chorus:
We moved as fast as fast food, making messes we didn’t care to clean up,
I called her pretty names and she said dirty things,
She licked my finger like a Rockstar,
It was love at first bite.

We didn’t have any money but Jesus feeds the poor with the dollar menu,
I took her to the playground where she could be my princess on a sand castle,
Where she could be my lover on a swing set,
Where we could play the night away.

Chorus:
We moved as fast as fast food, making messes we didn’t care to clean up,
I called her pretty names and she said dirty things,
She licked my finger like a Rockstar,
It was love at first bite.

Her hair was as soft as one an two,
I made her purrr like three and four,
She made me bark like five an six,
That’s how many kids she gave to me, until I got the fix.

Chorus:
We moved as fast as fast food, making messes we didn’t care to clean up,
I called her pretty names and she said dirty things,
She licked my finger like a Rockstar,
It was love at first bite.