The origins of the holiday: According to the History Channel, "Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1... Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred." Read more...

Check out these links to read the open-source "wikipedia" on Halloween and the Mexican El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)! (Good stuff)

Iranian opposition blog: Mo'time member newser is an Iranian activist and journalist, and is the owner of iran.motime.com (in Farsi). For those of us who do not read Farsi, it is worth a visit the blog anyway. It is heartening to see people organizing to win their own freedom (and using the blog as an effective communications platform), the text script is quite beautiful and there are some photographs. too. And newser probably wouldn't mind reading comments of solidarity in all the languages of mo'time!

There is another Iranian blog on mo'time, in English, which is dedicated to assisting the effort to free Dr. Seyed Hashem Aghajari, an imprisoned intellectual and activist.

the swarm intelligence of bloggers: Those of you not immediately frightened away by the ants are probably perplexed about the connection between insect behavior and our penchant for blogging and exploring the Net. I would like to present you with three fascinating articles on the subject. The first is a great overview of the Internet in general and describes how we all became ants building a nest we can't even see, by Joe Gregorio.

"Did you ever drop a bit of food on the ground outside and return to later find it swarming with ants, all following a single narrow trail back to their nest? Why do they settle on just one path? How do they find the food and get everyone to use that same path? The answer is stigmery." Read "Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web".

give your blog a new look: You are just a few clicks away from trying a new look for your blog. It's really fast and easy to change templates, the 1-2-3 instructions are clearly described in the manual. (The new ones are the first 4 templates listed on the choosing page. We'll be adding more variations on this theme in the next few days, so check back.)

-- a group blog dedicated to template design: I've noticed quite a few of you have created some mighty nice templates for yourselves. Yet others, who don't have the skills to work in HTML/CSS, are restricted to the pre-fabricated ones. So, don't you think our template library could use some freshening up? I do.