....So I've received a few critical emails about the Rex Webb video that I posted online yesterday. Judging by the downloads, it was generally pretty well received, but I thought that in the interests of fairness I should address the criticism directly.

Firstly, I want to thank you, my audience. The reason is that none of the criticisms were directed at me personally, although a couple did question my judgement. You can probably guess the typical complaints, "Webb's device is hanging from a string", or "Webb's manipulating it somehow -- compare the device levitating with his body movements".....hmmm.

First of all, please keep in mind that you, the reader, have me at a bit of a disadvantage for the time being. The reason is simple: I'm busy back-loading content onto the website, and since I am organizing it by date, most of it doesn't hit the main page. (BTW -- this is an excellent reason to check the categories when you visit the site for new information). Basically, only our newest stories are on the main page unless they're "feature stories", so everything up until today won't displace the existing stories.....not to say that I won't write new stuff, just that it'll seem disorganized for a little while.

Secondly, the Rex Webb clip goes to the heart of providing a positive forum for indy-experimenters. This is partly tied to the Art Bell school of coverage, and partly tied to the lifecycle of a news organization, so I'll elaborate a bit on each:

1. Lessons from Art Bell: The approach that Art uses for covering breakthrough stories has been to err on the side of being too liberal in his coverage. I don't mean this politically -- I mean in terms of the "anything goes" approach that people either love or hate, depending on the show's topic. Don't get me wrong -- we certainly do 'filter' our news content, but at the same time I don't want to apply the same insanely rigorous standards to this that the major news bureaus do. Why?...the answer is simple. Art Bell may have had some spectacular misses in his day, but he also had some spectacular successes that the mainstream media completely missed.

Gravity research is a topsy-turvy subject: it's located at the intersection of several microcultures: physics, science-fiction, aerospace engineering, ufo-ology, and alt-science in general. In order to effectively cover all of these topics, American Antigravity has to serve and incredibly diverse audience, which means that not everybody is going to like everything that we publish.

My personal belief is a sales-approach to breakthroughs: I'm not demanding that you believe Webb's video-clip is authentic, but I am hoping to sell you on the idea that he's doing real work. This sales approach is really a soft-sell, since I prefer a "take it or leave it" approach in my own beliefs. After all, I could probably argue with people until they agreed with me, but they'd walk away with their own beliefs anyways.....if forcing beliefs on people worked, then you'd stick with mainstream science and not visit our site in the first place.

Selling an idea keeps us honest -- and it's a good metaphor for a gentlemanly approach to science that I think has been lost lately. If you walk into a store and the sales-pitch doesn't strike your fancy, most of the time you'll just look at something else, right? That works for me...and it's a great alternative to the increasingly-sarcastic postings we see on Slashdot, where the users compete to out-do each other in put-downs and criticism.

Speaking of criticism, you may notice that we "don't go negative". The crticism simply isn't constructive: it leads to a focus on negatives, and not on the positive aspects of breakthrough science. Let's face it -- gravity research isn't always pretty, but it is always exciting: let's focus on what works, and how we can do things better.

2. News-Bureau Life-Cycles: The second component to any organization, website, or newsgroup is the inherent life-cycle dynamic. Maybe I'll write a bit more about this later, but suffice it to say that American Antigravity is still around after 3-years, and we're bigger and better than ever, while most of the newsgroups and smaller websites have run the course of their lifecycle and remain basically burned out online-hulks. I believe that this lifecycle includes major news organizations as well.

Any small venue has to start out by finding it's audience, and finding it's core subject material. However, the audience is usually picked up before the core coverage is established, which means that the audience then complains that the maturing news-bureau "never publishes anything good", or that "they only publish on one subject".

Think I'm kidding? Think "Wired Magazine" or "Popular Science". These were great magazines, but over time fell into a comfortability zone where they knew that by providing coverage on a couple of core subjects, they could maintain a steady audience. Steady, true -- but also bored, and ultimately lacking in the real breaking stories happening elsewhere.

Wired Magazine was doing breakthrough reporting on stories like "virtual reality" back when the common person had little clue what it was --and covering concepts like electric cars before they were fashionable. It's their comfort-zone, which is why they're still covering these, even when the shelf-life for solar-cell stories expired about 5 years ago.

Popular Science changed when they were purchased by whatever conglomerate currently owns their trading-stock. At one point in time, they were covering some of the most radical stories out there, but nowdays you'll probably just get more "top-ten hard-drive review" articles.

The way to avoid this pitfall is to stay outside of that comfortability zone. Heck, in our case, it would be easy to focus on STAIF & the military, since they bring enough name-recognition to keep most crtics at bay. However, it would ultimately cut us off from the real breakthroughs, which arrive at unpredictable times and from often the strangest of sources.

Rex Webb's work is an emerging story, which means that the only way to really find out what's going on is to stay tuned, keep an open mind, and let him showcase his ideas when he feels comfortable doing so. In all honesty, we don't really have much of a choice, because pushing an already nervous inventor to share details of his work before they're ready is the reason that Marcus doesn't post in public anymore...

Conclusion: At the end of the day, my goal is provide a healthy mixture of cutting-edge technologies online. Some of these come from recognized experts, and others appear at random from unknown sources. However, at one point or another every technology we currently use was an unknown factor, so the best approach is to find stories that you're comfortable with as a focus, and simply to keep an open mind on the rest.

One final note: I've found my opinion change on several stories that I initially thought to be bogus, which eventually led me to the realization that having an open mind is the only way to really approach new technologies. We often try to compare outlandish claims to ideas that we already know, and as we learn more we often find that it validates the unbelievable or invalidates even the most mundane of assumptions.

Stay tuned...