Wow, I can hardly believe it's been a whole year since I last updated my own page!  I've been so busy working on the sites and of course I like to post on our Hip Forums site where in the past 10 months it's grown to over 10,000 members!

But I haven't completely forgotten Hippyland!  As you may have noticed, Hippyland has just been upgraded to a new dynamic site which allows us to provide so much more interactivity, search capability and many more features which we couldn't do on the old site.

In fact all our websites have gone interactive this year, and in the last month they've all been moved to a new server with much more capacity and speed (I hope you noticed!).  We now do over 40 gigabytes of traffic a month, which is a hell of a lot considering most of it is just text!

Anyway, you can look forward next year to many new, interesting features on Hippyland including my book, Hippies From A to Z, which will appear online for all to see!  We're starting to run out of copies (better order soon!), so I figure rather than reprint it, I could just let everyone read it online and save a bunch of trees and lots of money for everyone!  But if enough people ask for it, I may reprint it anyway!

The New Hippyland
As you can see the new site presents information a bit differently than the old one.  If you can't find what you're seeking, please check out the search function first.  It'll search the whole site to find what you need.  But realize that we haven't got all of the old Hippyland into the new format yet.  That will take months!  So I'm leaving the old stuff up for you via the purple pull-down menu system.

Some of the great new features to come include an interactive Hippy Calendar, an archive of articles and information on the 60s (this project will be ongoing), an interactive review system that will allow our members to post music, book and movie reviews, featured interviews with famous personalities, original works by published authors, and much, much more!

And best of all we are still keeping all this content FREE! (which is a hell of a lot of work to produce and post online).   The past year has seen so many Internet businesses fail or come close to failing.  We too have seen our small revenues sink further and have had to develop new sources and take on outside work to keep these sites alive.

Fortunately, thanks to the support of many Hippylanders, we are sliding by, but our overhead has increased dramatically thanks to the new servers and our continuing hunger for high bandwidth to keep all our visitors (old and new) happy.  So all we ask is that you support the site by shopping in our stores.  That's all!  We get a tiny percentage of those sales, and that keeps these sites goin'.  So if the store where you make a purchase says "Hip" something (or links to Amazon.com),  you are supporting this site.

May Peace come to all & soon!
Skip Stone
December, 2001

We've been hard at work on improving the Hip Planet site and it shows!  At last we have a place for news, stories, poetry, in-depth articles, opinion polls, and more.  The main difference with this new system is that it's dynamic. That means it can be automatically updated without having to change each webpage individually.  This system has an enormous potential as the site grows to let you participate in the site and become active in the Hip Planet community.

Anyone can contribute stories or news to the site.  If you have something interesting to send in, you can use the "submit news" link to send in your story.  If it's accepted it will be published on the site.  You can also contribute your creative works in any form.  Just e-mail us!

When you visit Hip Planet you'll notice we have login option.  This allows you to register your nickname, and prevent others from using it or impersonating you.  You'll also see your name on your contributions instead of "anonymous".  This may be the start of a complete registration system for all our sites including the forums.  So get your nickname registered before someone else takes it!

If you haven't visited our new Poster Store, yet, please check it out.  We had lots of fun selecting the best posters out of 50,000 that we felt would most appeal to our visitors.  There's music, surrealism, pot, landscapes and much more.  They make great gifts and you can also send the posters as greeting cards for free!

We were very surprised at the response to the Old Hippy's Choice Cuts Radio Station!  It's become one of the most popular 60s stations on Live365 (out of 25,000 choices!).  Check it out for a great selection of oldies!  And it's low bandwidth too!

We're not neglecting our other sites, and there are some changes coming to Hippyland including better forum navigation.  Now you can reply to replies or return to the forum with less scrolling around.

I hope you all get to enjoy the new features, and don't forget to let me know what you think!

-Skip

This last year has brought some wonderful changes to Hippyland.  As we grow Hippyland continues to provide great services to our community, and they're all FREE!  We now have FREE WEBSITES for everyone after a deal we negotiated with NorthSky.  You can now get a free 20MB website with your own domain name: mysite.hippy.com!  It comes with e-mail, a site builder, and lots of other easy to use features!  Scroll down this page for more info.

We've upgraded our little java chatrooms to full blown IRC chats with all the features you could want (almost!).  We have operators (ops) on duty most of the time to help you get registered and to deal with problems.  So check out Hippy Chat and get connected with your fellow hippies!

Our very popular forums have grown from a small handful of about five forums to over 35 now!  This reflects the varied interests of our visitors.  And we have more to come very soon!

Our new drop down menus have made all Hippyland's features more visible and accessible. 

We just put up two new radio stations on Live365.com with high quality, non-stop hippie music that you can listen to whenever you're on line. Whether you have a high speed connection or just a 56K modem, you'll enjoy our programming.

This year I published my first book (but not my first publication), Hippies From A to Z to much critical acclaim!  You can purchase this book here of course!

Our web traffic continues to increase.  Over 2 million people have visited Hippyland!  Every month over half a million pages are viewed.  As a result of all this traffic, we've had to make accomodations by reducing the number of graphics on our pages and spreading our pages over more sites.  We now have four domains: Hippy.com, Hipplanet.com, HipMarket.com and HipTravelGuide.com  The first three of these offer FREE WEBSITES!

You're probably wondering what's next!  Well one of our long term goals is to get you visitors active on the site, helping to maintain it and add interesting content.  We're going to start this off with an "Adopt a Webpage' program that will allow you to choose a page which you will be responsible for.  You get to maintain it and add features.  We'll test this program with a few skilled people before we open it up to everyone. 

We also hope to enlist the aid of some good coders who can program some of the more advanced features Hippyland needs as it grows.   One of these would be a system of registration so people can sign in with passwords.  This will enable us to offer more features and allow for our next big project, the "Virtual Democracy".  This will take visitor participation to a new level.  Those who enroll will become Citizens of Hippyland, and will have the power to make decisions about what happens on the site via referendum and voting.  A true Democracy should result.  If you have coding experience and would like to help the site grow, please contact me!

Another big project is to put the entire site including all our archived forums on a CD-ROM along with my book, Hippies From A to Z.  This will be sold separately or bundled with my book.  You'll be able to search through about 100,000 webpages (and my book) about hippies to find what you need, including your own posts!

We hope to offer more multimedia features as new programs and more bandwidth become available. 

We've had to deal with many nuisances this past year including attacks on the site and chatroom by groups of flooders.  As a result we had to start banning certain individuals.  This seems to be the only way to deal with those who would try to disrupt the site and limit the freedom of others to participate.  As we kick and ban people from the site, we must deal with accusations of censorship, usually from those who abuse the freedoms and are unwilling to share the reponsibility of behaving in a civilized fashion.

The problems we had with the old volano chat have been solved with the IRC chats, but unfortunately not everyone has been able to use them (like WebTV users). 

So as you can see it's been a VERY busy year, and we hope to be able to devote another year's work to keep Hippyland up-to-date and hip!  This can only happen with more participation from our community of hippies and continued support of the site by clicking on banners and purchases made from our on-site vendors.  The trickle of cash that comes in helps pay for the site.  Without your continued support, it will be impossible to keep all these services FREE OF CHARGE.  Let's not let that happen!

With a new millennium ahead, let's be positive and focus our energy on the changes we can bring if we act together with purpose!  We can make a difference and re-ignite the movement!

Peace to all!
-Skip

I'm playing your favorite hits from the Beatles, the Doors, CSN&Y, Hendrix, Dead, Airplane, etc.  In addition I've chosen some lesser known bands and some one hit wonders for variety (It's A Beautiful Day, Vanilla Fudge, Mungo Jerry, etc.).   Hope your enjoy!  Let me know if you have any suggestions for music.

IMPORTANT! When you first log on to the station be sure to "choose a player" so that the music will be continuous, otherwise it will stop after the first song!

To listen to the music click here!  It requires a high speed internet connection (ISDN, Cable, DSL, T1 or T3).  If you would like a slower version of this station contact me!  Let me know what speed your modem is.

New Interface coming!
Another thing we are working on is redoing the entire site with a frames interface.  The advantage is that we will only need to maintain one set of pull down menus for the entire site.  In addition if you surf on to other sites from Hippyland, you'll still be able to jump back to your favorite feature or forum with one click. Anyone wishing to help us test this system and give us feedback, please contact me for the URL of the new page.

New Associates
We've been looking hard for vendors that have products that hippies like (it ain't easy!).  You'll notice some new banners around including TestClear (to pass drug tests), 123Posters.com (great poster selection) and numerous others.  We urge you to check out these sites and their products and in so doing help support Hippyland.  If you have products to sell to our community, please contact marketing@hippy.com to find out more.

This week Hippyland and our other sites will be featuring FREE WEBSITES for anyone desiring membership in our rapidly growing online community.  I'm hoping this will fire everyone's imagination and creativity.  In addition we will have tools (like the instant messenger) to keep us in touch with each other as never before. 

We will be able to feed off each other's interests and learn to evolve together into a stronger more active community.  In fact the word commune seems appropriate to describe what I'm envisioning.  In theory a commune shelters and provides for the needs of its members with a minimum reliance on the outside.  On a commune each member is dependent upon the others for support not just economically but socially and emotionally.  That is what we can and need to provide each other on this Internet Commune.

Someone wrote me saying that Hippyland already has everything she needs, and she no longer feels it necessary to surf around to find what she's looking for.  That's sort of what we can achieve.  If we all support each other's sites, we can all prosper as a community.  The synergy of ideas and energy can only benefit all who participate.

As I mentioned, these sites are available to any individual, group, organization or business that has something to offer our members.  There will be a choice of sites, as we have several with slightly different foci.  To learn about these options please go to our website sign-up page.  You can also check out our press release.

Like any commune we welcome those with something positive to contribute and who are willing to put energy into the community.  Over time we should be able to increase our presence in the larger community and have a greater influence on society at large.  Let's be a shining example of those values we cherish and make a wonderful difference in our world!

Many of us are aware of the ongoing research and development involving bio-engineered crops, or genetically modified (GM) foods.  It seems the Europeans are much more on top of this subject than Americans.  Indeed, they are taking an active role in deciding the future of their food supply. 

I suppose here in America, most people are willing to eat whatever comes in a nice package, requires little or no preparation, and vaguely tastes like something edible.  I've taken notice of how large a part of today's supermarket is devoted to pre-made meals.  You can pickup something frozen or prepared in the deli department, or of course you can just stop by your favorite drive-thru for a quick meal.  Who cares whether it's nourishing, fattening, loaded with chemical additives and preservatives?  Who has time to think about such things anymore?

I remember when I first got into health foods.  It started when I began reading the food labels in the store.  At first I didn't even know half of what went into the foods I was eating everyday.  Why would a simple can of vegetables need monosodium glutamate and sodium guanylate, much less red dye #2 and bha and bht?  It wasn't long before I was bagging my own bulk foods at my local health food store, rather than fill my body with chemicals I couldn't even pronounce.

Well now we have a whole new range of "modified foods" to contend with.  Many people believe that the scientific/agriculture/industrial complex is moving too fast without enough information on the possible problems these genetically altered foods might create, not just for those who consume them, but also for the environment and for our planet's genetic diversity.

In a surprising move, the U.S. department of Agriculture has actually shifted its long standing devotion to the large corporate farms long enough to consider what might happen if this industry is unrestrained, and has even come up with a plan to save the small American farmer!  The focus of their attention believe it or not, is now on Organic Farming!  Yes, that's right, Organic Farming is now gaining an incredible, heretofore only dreamed of respectability.  In fact the Dept. of Agriculture is finally going to pass a uniform law that will define the term "organic" for the entire country (note: Oregon and California lead the way with organic labeling laws decades ago).

Why this sudden interest?  Well, those who protested the policies of the WTO, especially in Europe deserve a lot of credit.  European awareness has spread to America, but more importantly the WTO is actually passing laws that are forcing our government to take these steps in order to preserve the ability of our Agricultural Megacorporations to sell their products overseas.  Another reason is that sales of organically grown food is growing at 20% a year!

As a side benefit, the new organic labeling laws will enable the small farmer to compete with these huge corporations.  Why?  Because very soon organic produce and meats will be THE ONLY GUARANTEED NON-GM FOODS!  That's right.  If it don't say organic, you're gonna be takin' your chances!  That means we are on the verge of a new agricultural revolution!

I can see it now… You walk into a supermarket and half of it contains this identical produce: One kind of apple, one kind of tomato, one kind of orange.  Each item will "look" perfect.  No blemishes, good color, long shelf life, etc.  Of course when you take it home and eat it, it will taste like every other GM apple or tomato, bland.

Then the other half of the aisle will have just organic produce, all sporting a USDA "Organically Grown" label.  Here you'll see a great variety of produce all grown on small organic farms (you can see this trend today in larger health food stores and co-ops).  It will probably look as good as the GM produce, but it might even be cheaper!  Why? Because the price of the chemicals, the agri-business monopoly, and the long distance shipping costs will make it more expensive than the small farmer who recycles his fertilizer and uses his own seeds and sells locally.  And when you get this wonderful organic food home you'll relish the flavor and the unique qualities of each item.  Plus you'll have peace of mind knowing that:

a) Your food hasn't been tampered with genetically.  It's one less worry for you and your family.
b) Your food wasn't grown with synthetic chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, hormones, etc.
c) You're supporting a local small business at the expense of faceless megalithic corporations who couldn't give a shit about you.
d) You're encouraging others to take up organic farming and helping to keep our genetic heritage diverse.

What makes the new government rules so good is that they clearly define how things should be labeled, and set new, tight standards that should please everyone concerned about what they're eating. 

To earn the USDA organic label, raw foods must be 100% organic.  That means they are grown and manufactured without the use of added hormones, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, or other man-made chemicals.

Processed foods will have to be 95% organic to get the seal.  That is 95% of the ingredients would have to qualify as completely organic.

Other foods can say they are made with organic ingredients if 50% of the ingredients are indeed organic.  They can list up to three of these ingredients.  But of course these won't carry the USDA seal.

Irradiation, genetic modification or the use of sludge will disqualify foods entirely from using the term "organic".  Other foods that have some organic ingredients can only state that in the list of ingredients on the side label, which means they cannot promote their processed product as organic.

This unambiguous set of rules is what is needed today to give consumers a clear choice when buying food.  It separates agribusiness' recklessly designed and exploitive methods of farming from those of the sustainable, ecologically balanced small organic farmer. At last the consumer will decide what's more important: to disregard ecology, the long-term health effects upon consumers, real food flavor, the long term consequences to the environment and to our children of inadequately tested, genetically modified and chemically laden foods or greater profits for multinational corporations. The choice is ours and now we can determine the future of our food and the quality of our lives with every food purchase we make.

Make a difference - BUY ORGANIC!

Hi again!  This week I'm highlighting some of the new features here at Hippyland.  The main change you will start to notice is the involvement of some enthusiastic new people on the site.  One example is Turtle's column Letters From The Road.  He's going to thrill us (we hope) with his adventures while backpacking around the Western Hemisphere.  Other columnists will add their varied perspectives on many subjects to the site. If you're interested in becoming a part of Hippyland's creative team, or just help us out in other ways, visit our Help Wanted Page.

You may have noticed our Young Hippy Pages which we hope will help all the young teenagers coming to the site looking for information about hippies.  We've geared this section to those under 16 years old.  There's now a Teen Chatroom especially for our younger visitors.  I really don't know if this is going to work, but we're giving it a try.  I've always felt that we should all be together regardless of age, so that we can learn from each other.  But many have suggested segregating the younger "wannabes" to keep the dialog at a certain level.  I leave the choice to each individual.  People are still free to visit any section of the site, but the Young Hippy Pages are there to educate and guide our young friends in the way of the hippy.  It should help with those '60s/hippy research assignments every kid seems to get in school these days.  Anyway let me know what you think!

Soon I hope to have up the first in a series of Hippyland Interviews, dialogues with famous hippies.  The first interview will be with an author whose highly original how-to book made the New York Times Bestseller List in 1971.  The interview will discuss her re-release of the same book just in time for Earth Day 2000.  Who is it?  You'll have to wait another week or so to find out!

Book Update: For those of you interested in my book, I wanted to let you know that we have it in stock and ship within 24 hours of receiving your check/m.o.  For those wishing to charge their purchase, Amazon.com and Marlinsbooks.com both have it in stock and also ship within 24 hours.  The book is getting into distribution (slowly) and will soon (next couple of months) appear in bookstores and libraries.  For more info please visit the Hippies From A to Z site.

Welcome to my page! This week I want to tell you about some new features and our great new site, HipMarket.com.

We've taken the HipMarket page off HipPlanet and made it into it's own site, just in time for Christmas shopping.  This is part of our overall strategy to segregate our content according to features.  So good ol' Hippyland is your place for learning about hippies and contacting other hippies and getting involved in the movement.  HipPlanet will continue offering great Free Services including E-Mail, Personals and Classifieds.  We have plans to offer more great features in the near future, so stay tuned!  HipMarket is the place to go to find most anything, including books, music, clothes, food, art and gift items.  We're adding more shops to the listings every week.  Be sure to stop by our Bookstore, Music Store and Video Store to shop for the perfect hippie gift!

To make navigating easier, we've installed pull down menus on the home pages to make finding the features on all our sites effortless.  Unfortunately, we removed the pretty graphics from our homepages to make them faster loading and to save on bandwidth (we use so much!). And we have more changes to come of course!

You've probably seen the notice about the Essay Contest.  I thought it would be a good idea to help promote my new book, Hippies From A to Z, and to get everyone thinking about the hippy movement.  I'm looking forward to finding out what everyone thinks makes hippies so great!  My book answers this question, as it's a major theme of the book.  We're going to post ALL the entries, and I get to make the final decision on the winners.  I encourage everyone to participate, as it will result in an interesting new webpage for the site!

I want to let everyone know (especially those who've ordered the book), that it's presently a little behind schedule due to printer delays.  It should be printed and bound over the next two weeks and I hope to be able to ship the first copies (to those who ordered in advance) by December 10th.

I thank you all for helping make this site so successful.  If you have any suggestions or comments, please e-mail me directly! Skip@hippy.com

Peace to Everyone!
-Skip

Greetings fellow hippies!  Welcome to my first column.  After three years of running the Hippyland website, I've decided to do a regular feature to keep you posted on what's going on with the site and other interesting tidbits.

First, let me tell you a few things about Hippyland that you might not know.  Hippyland is the biggest and most popular hippy site on the Internet.  By far.  We have served over 1,000,000 souls! That's over 2.5 million webpages viewed! We are now dishing up over 12,000 pages a day from over 3,000 unique pages resident on our servers!  I state these figures not to brag (yeah right!), but to point out just how many hippies are out there, and level of interest in hippie culture among the general population, especially students.

To meet the needs of these people we have added many new features to the website, including Free E-mail, Personals and Classifieds(through Hip Planet), Free Greeting Cards, better Chatrooms, opinion polls and quizzes, much more info about hippies, and last but not least our extremely popular Forums.  At last I feel we have a real community here. 

Believe it or not, I still get lots of e-mail asking questions about hippies.  Some of the answers can be found on the site, but most of these questions require in-depth answers. To address those inquiring minds who have been inundating me with questions for three years, I have been busy writing a book about the subject.  It's almost ready to go to press so I can finally announce it to everyone.  It's called, (Get ready, it's a long title...) 

I think this will answer a lot of common questions about hippies, but also put to rest some of the misconceptions and stereotypes people have about us.  If you read the book you will discover all the wonderful things hippies did, and are doing for their fellow man.  I believe we are a litmus test for the health of democratic society, and it appears our society has deteriorated significantly since our last test.  So it's once again time for us to rise up and confront those issues we left untended these last few decades.  This is the theme of my book, and I hope you will find it a good read.  There's much more in the book for those interested in exploring the hippy movement and lifestyle.

If you'd like to learn more about the book, there's a whole website at: http://www.hipplanet.com/books/atozinfo.htm.
You can read the introduction and excerpts from the book.  The book will be available on-line in a variety of formats, as well as paperback.  I encourage you to read it online to save trees, fuel and money!  A portion of the profits from the book will be donated to worthwhile causes.  I plan to have a poll for those who buy the book to decide which causes to donate the proceeds (that is how a true democracy should work!). 

Also part of the profits will be thrown back into Hippyland for further improvements!  I'd like to be able to offer streaming audio, perhaps an Internet Radio station, free websites, even webcasts of special events.  Unfortunately these things require a lot of capitalist money.  Rather than ask for donations (since all the services on Hippyland are free), I'd rather sell the book so everyone feels they're getting something for their money (in case Hippyland isn't enough.). 

By the way, we have more books coming!  The Old Hippy is putting out a book called, 'Ask The Old Hippy' - what else?  It'll be published next.  Then we'll publish 'The Best of Hippyland', a book with only the best submissions, postings, and info that has been posted on the site.  Who knows? - you might be in it! 

So as you can see we keep pretty busy around here.  It's a full time job.  Although we've had to shell out a lot of money to get this site where it is today, the reward has been to see the community grow and the wonderful vibes we get from people like you!

I invite you all to be an active part of this community.  This is your site.  I am just the facilitator.  If you have any suggestions as to how the site can be improved, my e-mailbox is always open, skip@hippy.com

Peace to all!