Recently in R21 Site Functions Category

Just changed the url of this blog from r21online.com to r21.org -- saving you a full 6 characters!

After well over 5 years of blogging my site finally has a new look! Thanks much to the phenomenal Jesse Gardner of Plasticmind Design for finally infusing this blog with some style. The whole idea of this blog is that we are living in a modern Renaissance -- with momentous advancements in art, science, technology, and personal expression -- and so I wanted a design that would incorporate themes of both ages, and yet provide a fairly neutral canvas for my publishing. The site is built completely in the new Movable Type 4 and Jesse is an expert for anyone who wants the best. Check out his portfolio. He has a great one-on-one working style for highly customized web design that really works. Thanks Jesse!

So my blogging has been a little, eh, light of late. Will get back to penetrating insights sometime soon... In the meantime, my personal blogging is now on Vox.

For those wondering why the blogging has been light over the past months it's because we've been cranking away here at Rojo. (For those that want an invite, email with "REQUEST INVITE" in the subject line.) I've been gratified by the press we've received recently--all pre-launch!

I also blog at the RojoBlog for Rojo related items. And for those who want to read my political rants (spare yourselves!) they can now be found at the Lead21 blog, which is a group blog (so not everything there is mine). This blog, R21, will try to get back to its original mission, expressed in my first post on May 2002, to "track the newest ideas and hear from the most innovative thinkers." That is, it will try to be a blog about innovation--and admittedly much of that may be in the area I'm focusing on now -- the blogosphere and feedspace -- and how these things are changing media specifically and life in general.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here is some of the latest from R21:

Jason Pontin, former editor of Red Herring and a frequent R21 contributor, likes to accuse me of being reflexively pro-business and anti-government. The reflexive charge is mildly irritating since it implies a lack of thought, though reflexes are useful when they are based on principles. So what about the principles? I’m not sure the first charge is really an insult—if the choice is between pro- or anti-business then guilty as charged. But of course the charge is really that I favor business interests to the extreme over other societal interests. The anti-government charge is also on the face of it absurd—I am not an anarchist. But again, the real charge is that I oppose government regulation in nearly all of its manifestations.

I raise this issue because, in fact, the pro-business/anti-government separation is a false dichotomy. In fact, one of the biggest problems, in my view, is how business—usually big business—uses government to its advantage.

The weekly summary of R21. As always, you can subscribe or unsubscribe to R21 by sending an email to or respectively.

THE CORPULENT CLASS
First, in case you missed it on the McLaughlin Group this weekend, Southwest has a shocking new business strategy: “We sell seats, and if you consume more than one seat, you have to buy more than one seat,” according to Southwest Spokeswoman Beth Harbin. Sounds devilishly clever, but is it discriminatory against people of size? “If the person takes up more than one seat, that’s not the problem of the person, that’s the problem of the seat,” counters Miriam Berg, President, Council on Size & Weight Discrimination. Seats are getting narrower, plump protestors pronounce, in a brazen, calculated attempt by greedy airlines to squeeze, financially and otherwise, their clientele. Will personal responsibility ever come back into fashion in this country? Fat chance.

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