Editor's Note: The following is the text of the September 1 edition of Doc Searls' SuitWatch newsletter. Sign up [1] to be a subscriber of this bi-weekly newsletter.

August 31, 2005--I hardly know where to begin. I'm rewriting the rewriting of a post that's a story about one of the biggest events in US history, yet one that's hardly begun.

Katrina.

Here's betting that the name Katrina, falling in popularity since it peaked at #90 in 1980, will hit a new US low in 2005. It was #281 in 2004. (Source: Social Security Administration [2].) Who would name their kid after the hurricane that caused more destruction than any other in US history--one which, among other sins, drowned New Orleans, one of the world's most beloved cities, making refugees of perhaps a million or more people, while killing thousands? From the day after, estimated death tolls have been rising as an exponent, from tens to hundreds to thousands.

I'm no fan of President Bush, but the speech he gave just after 5pm Eastern time on Wednesday, August 31, moved me to the edge of tears. He's our country's leader, whether or not we voted for him; and we needed to see and hear him lead. It's hard not to welcome and appreciate his assurances and his compassion.

Listening to him, I was reminded of my Uncle Chris [3], the best family doctor I've ever known. From the 50s through the 80s, Uncle Chris (Clinton S. Crissman, M.D.) was the town doctor for Graham, NC. One time, in my early 30s, I had a medical scare that put me in the Intensive Care Unit at Durham County General Hospital. I had a lot of friends who were medical professionals, who came in to wish their best and deliver plenty of Science, which I was glad to hear. Uncle Chris came down from Graham, put his big warm hands on my ankles and said "David, your job is to hold down the bed. You just listen to what the doctors and nurses tell you to do, and you'll be all right." (My own nickname is owed in part to an overpopulation of Davids. The name was #6 in 1947 when I was born and peaked at #1 in 1960. It finally fell out of the Top 10 in 1993.)

Those four words, "You'll be all right," had more healing power than anything else I've ever heard. President Bush said much the same kind of thing in his speech. It's a Southern Thing and a Family Thing. It's what you want to hear from your dad after you've hurt yourself or put your butt in a sling. It's an expression of faith maximized by its understatement. It also leverages a dependency to endorse its opposite: independence.

These two qualities--dependence and independence--are at the heart of all growth, of all institutions, of all opportunity, of all pursuit and achievement. We depend on that from which we grow in an independent direction. That's what growing up is about. Same with recovery.

It's a gift with two sides, like a coin. This is what Uncle Chris and Aunt Doris--his remarkable wife, sister of my own remarkable mother [4]--gave their five boys. It's what my parents gave my sister and myself. It's what I gave and continue to give to my own kids, most of whom are now in their 30s and about as independent as they come.

It's also what makes a healthy market ecosystem, whether the category is computing, publishing, retail, transportation or whatever. In each, we are dependent on large vendors, major suppliers of infrastructure and building materials--and in some cases on government, though not too much of it. But more significantly, we are independent of all those institutions.

What impresses me most, watching the whole connected world recover from Katrina, is the growing context of connected independence. Take for example the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog [5], created on Tuesday by Brian Oberkirchs. As I wrote this (Wednesday, August 31), that blog already had become Slidell's newspaper on the Web. Give it a read and try not to be impressed by its mixture of independence--from all other media--and dependence--on the ordinary folks who contribute to and use it and the community they sustain in the absence of homes, businesses and services on which they normally depend. Go to Technorati [6] and do a tag search for the word "missing". There are 225 listings so far. Most of them are as moving as the pictures of missing loved ones on the walls outside the World Trade Center after 9/11/2001.

What you'll be seeing are standards, practices and services that didn't exist three years ago. Those all live today in the World Live Web, which is growing all over the place, almost entirely upwards from the grass roots of technology and individual enterprise.

The Web we knew in 1995 was static: a province of "sites" and "locations" that we "architected", "designed" and "put up" like real estate projects, many of which were always "under construction". The Live Web is filled with voice calls, instant messages, up-to-the minute blogs and podcasts, syndicated news and media files from countless individual sources. None of the Usual Suspects--the phone and cable companies, government, standards organizations or even large vendors such as IBM and Microsoft--invented it, even though to some degree and in many places the Live Web depends on some or all of them.

Technorati, as with most of its competitors, runs on Linux, the LAMP stack and other open-source building materials and practices, some of which, such as tag search and the rel="tag" element, are of its own invention. (Disclosure: I'm on the Technorati advisory board.) Similar innovations are happening at Icerocket [7], Feedster [8], FeedBurner [9], PubSub [10], BlogPulse [11], BlogLines [12] and countless other new and fundamentally independent companies. Big companies such as Google and Yahoo help here and there, but they're not taking the lead. They don't have to.

Even watching CNN [13], Fox and the other TV networks, I'm struck by how much they seem to be coping with the realization that most of the best sources, as well as most of the intelligence about What's Actually Happening, are outside their organizations and those of their competitors. They have to point to blogs such as Brian Oberkirsch's, because that's where the best sources are.

Thus, those on which we depend come to depend on us.

Hard as it is, it's a form of growing up.

By the way, I first heard the term "World Live Web" from my son Allen, who blogs at Wondiring [14]. I've been depending on it ever since.