Odd Coupling: For the Love of this Internet

I know it's best
to keep these things professional,
but I've begun to crush
under the graceful strokes
of your sixty words
per minute.

You'd be amazed
how much I've learned from the simple
arrangements and careless
chats of your lives lived
so transparently
in front of me.

You may not feel
as intimately tied; that's okay.
All I'm asking is,
you'll stay, and sustain me
with your momentary
presents.

---

It's Day 23 of NaPoWriMo and there's only one week left to the Challenge. The prompt from ReadWritePoem is unlikely couples, pairing a voice and an action that don't usually go together. For mine I created a love poem from the Internet itself, and who could resist such a come-on?

Social networking or shameless self promotion?

There's always a delicate balance we in the blogosphere try to maintain as we sign up for new promotional services. Looking deeply into our hearts, we attempt to determine the purity of our motives in joining this feverish quest for the holy grail of increased traffic.

Are we acting out of vanity; jumping up and down like a small child in need of attention, shouting "Look at me! Look at me!" at the top of our virtual voice to the 'Net world? Or are we trying to connect in every way possible, not just to be heard but to listen and converse; combining our experiences with others' to build a new community with many faces but a one-world awareness of the need for understanding and compassion?

Of course it's probably a mix of the two, as we never fully outgrow our child-like yearning for approval. As long as that perpetual insecurity leads however clumsily to the latter desired end, I think it's worth spreading our blog essences into the ether. So it is that I've signed up for the new service BlogRush, which is now conveniently displayed in my side bar so you can view the sage thoughts of some other sites.

Showing RP Bloggers what real Cyber War is ...

I know that certain members of the Rogers Park blogging community think their posts hold enough sway with the public to bring down the high and mighty, but they've got nothing on the Internet warriors who took down Estonia's web presence.

Estonian authorities are claiming to be the victims of a 1 million computer strong, coordinated "denial of service" attack that's caused millions of dollars in damage. Estonia at first blamed rival Russia, but now it has backed off the initial allegations that the attacks had been traced to servers there. Many still suspect a link to the dispute between the two nations over the removal of WW II memorials.

In comparison to such virulent web-based attacks, our little RP blogging community's forays into back stabbing, character assassination, and rumor mongering seem pretty tame. As the Internet gains more and more prominence in the global economy, such attempts to cripple web-based commerce could become more common. Welcome to the age of Cyber War.

For more on the situation in Estonia, here are excerpts from and a link to an article in The Guardian:

Web attackers used a million computers, says Estonia
Ian Traynor in Brussels
Friday May 18, 2007

Estonia said yesterday that at least 1m computers had been used to launch an unprecedented wave of cyber-attacks on the small Baltic state over the past few weeks and indicated the damage inflicted had run into tens of millions of euros.

Despite earlier explicit accusations that Russia was behind the offensive, however, officials in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, backed away from accusing the Kremlin directly. The outbreak of the attack, with hundreds of thousands of hits bombarding Estonian websites in order to jam them and make them unusable, coincided three weeks ago with the climax of an ugly dispute between Moscow and Tallinn over a Soviet second world war memorial in the Estonian capital.

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