Who turned off the Ads?

Is it just me? Or is it a concerted attack on the advertising infrastructure that feeds Internet Capitalism? I have been catching up on news and strangely every page I pull up, the ad servers (typically third party companies) are down... So I get the page but no ad content! For Wired its the server view.atdmt.com that is not responding and for techdirt its ads.adsonar.com. NetworkingPipeline's ads from the server pbid.pro-market.net seem to be failing as well as from the venerable ad.doubleclick.net...

Surely I am not the only one to have noticed?

Jerry Brown at Silicon Forum

Jerry Brown at Silicon Forum,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

It was quite interesting to hear Jerry Brown sounding quite conservative as he spoke about the work he has done to turn around Oakland, CA today at the Silicon Forum's monthly luncheon. Afterwards I asked him what the Mayor's office is doing to plan for the future given that California expects the population of the state to double by 2050. Nothing, he said. No one is thinking about the future, we are too busy solving today's problems... Seems like that is where today's problems come from.

Visual Thesaurus

I don't know how I ever lived without the Visual Thesaurus. Go use it (there is a demo mode) and you'll be instantly hooked as well. Type in a word and there is a visual constellation of related terms surrounding your word. Click on any of those other words and it becomes the center of the conceptual map, with new terms growing around it. Is this the first application of Ray Kurzweil's visual "mind mapping" tools? Or was it independently developed? Check out The Brain for an open ended version of the visual thesaurus, into which you can pour your own conceptual relationships...