If the quality of the conversation that takes place in the comments to stories you find on the web are any measure of the quality of the content to which they are attached, I would advise you not to read stories posted on CNN or FOX News. Both of these sites serve as outlets for the most sensational and controversial topics of the day and both provide a forum for their readers to provide feedback on the content. CNN’s SoundOFF section allows for the reporting of abusive comments, but thats about it. FOXNews uses Disqus, a much more robust solution, while an outsourced one, and set up so that the comments are not as obviously attached to the story (you have to click “comments” at the bottom of the story). I’m not sure if either of them understand how negatively poor comment quality reflects on the content itself and tarnishes the image of the content provider. In fact, I’m not so sure they know anything more about it than some idiot marketing guy saying “hey, other sites provide a comment feature we have to do it also”.
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Now that smartphones are everywhere and seemingly everyone is hooked into the social web, there are a number of different ways to keep tabs on whats going on at Pennsic in real time even from afar. I’ll keep poking around for new links and updating this post as I come across them.

• Pennsic twitter feed
• “Official” Pennsic twitter feed
• Most recent Pennsic photos posted to Flickr
• Pennsic Independent RSS feed
• Pennsic parties page on Facebook
• Pennsic War on Tribe
• NOAA weather page for Slippery Rock, PA
• Live Weather Channel Radar for Slippery Rock, PA
• Pennsic Party Calendar
• Latest Pennsic Hits on Google
• [edit July, 2011:] Im going to add in this long term weather forecast page because its cool.
• Pennsic 40 party calendar
  

Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you’ll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites. According to reports on computerworld, FOXNews, and Armed with Science [dod.mil], Ryan ran an experiment to see how much sensitive information he could glean through social networking. He created the ficticious persona of “Robin Sage”, a good-looking twenty-something, hacker grad from MIT who claimed to be an intern at Naval Network Command. In the month Ryan ran the experiment he was able to build a considerable number of social networking connections on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with active duty military personnel and officials and through these connections was able to glean military intelligence. The simplest and most obviously dangerous example of leaked information should be of immediate concern to military folks:

For example, one of Robin’s soldier friends posted a photo of his unit on surveillance duties at a mountain outpost in Afghanistan. That inadvertently exposed their location, because the photo contained GeoIP data from the camera.