Reply #21: Thanks for all the thanks! [View All]

I just bought "House of Bush, House of Saud" yesterday. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. But I just checked the acknowledgments, and sure enough he gives the website a nice plug. :) Eric Alterman also gave the site a nice plug in his new book, apparently.

I just got back a couple hours ago from the 9/11 skeptic conference held in SF this weekend. I gotta say I was really impressed. A couple of the speakers were duds, and I didn't agree with everything said, but overall I thought it was really well put together with very little overlap from speaker to speaker.

I met a couple of DUers there but was dissappointed more didn't show. Maybe at the next event, hopefully.

A major overhaul of the website is just about done. In addition to a new update, we're going to have a whole new look, and a switch over to a database format. The latter doesn't change anything outwardly, but allows a lot more functionality with searches and the like. Look for it in the next couple of days (knock on wood).

One last thing I want to say. I don't think I'm different from anyone else at DU in any meaningful way. It's not like I have a bunch of degress or training that makes me an expert, and I'm not an expert. I'm just a guy reading the news and summarizing and organizing it. What that tells me is that anybody here can make a difference. Actually, there are lots of DUers making a difference, for instance that person a couple weeks back who found an important press conference text relating to the Plame affair and got the mainstream media to report on it. Anybody here can do that. And the fact that Rush Limbaugh has been ragging on DU shows what an impact this site as a whole is making - he wouldn't be attacking it if it wasn't important.

The more we work together, the greater the impact we can have. If anyone wants to know "what can I do to help," there's a zillion things my website could use help with, and I'm sure that's true for lots of other web researchers out there. If the mainstream media isn't going to do a proper job in getting the news out, we'll just have to do it ourselves on the web and with protests and the like in the streets.