This just in from an activist friend of Indian heritage:
Author: Ruby Sinreich
Move over, Gray Lady
Based on a variety of factors, including the Times’ new paywall and Judith Miller, Jay Rosen (of the brilliant and long-winded PressThink) recently wrote:
The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the last year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position.
Playing with Ning
So I am now the lucky owner of a developer account at Ning! This is supposedly a platform for creation of all kinds of social networking tools. Sounds interesting but so far all of the sites I’ve seen at ning.com are variations on Hot or Not.
Asante (thank you)
Converging thoughts
Sue Polinsky (the conference goddess) took some pictures yesterday including one of me and Brian while I was giving Sue some advice about WordPress themes.
After some confusion, and a Paula Abdul sighting (!), we had a lovely diner with the BlogFather. In spite of the downpour, we enjoyed the cookout at the Hoggards‘ place in the lovely Aycock neighborhood last night, and met or caught up with a few Internet celebrities like Dave Slusher of Evil Genius Chronicles, Matt Gross (former Dean campaign blogger-in-chief), black republican Michael Bowen (a.k.a. Cobb), and Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios).
I’ve been trying to watch for others blogging about ConvergeSouth, a regular text search seems to work better than the convergesouth tag at Technorati.
Creative online advocacy
I just finished facilitating a session on creative online advocacy at the ConvergeSouth Conference in Greensboro.
We had a wonderful discussion touching on how blogs and other online tools are impacting the world. Since I was facilitating, I didn’t get to take notes, but I hope some of the participants will add their thoughts in the comments of this post.
Here are the blogs of the awesome participants from this session:
No Hoder
Ed Cone just announced that Hoder was held up by U.S. immigration for two days and was ultimately not allowed into the country, and therefore will not be here at the ConvergeSouth conference. Ed suggests we visit Hoder’s blog and tell him how much we missed him.
I suggest we visit the Department of Homeland Security and tell them how much they are doing to stifle the free speech and democracy they are supposed to be protecting with their totalitarian policies.
More voices
Currently in the session “Adding more voices to the conversation” at the ConvergeSouth conference.
Our panelists:
- Calvin Williams started Our World Our View for young black voices.
- George Curry is an old-school journalist who just started his own blog.
- Nancy McLaughlin writes the religion blog at the N&R.
- Jennifer Fernandez, writes the education blog at the N&R.
No dice
It looks like the ConvergeSouth Conference is yet another Internet conference without Internet access. 🙁
(This is being posted from my phone.)
Still think blogs can’t change the world?
Hoder‘s blog has already had a profound impact on Iranian politics and global understanding of middle eastern issues. And now he’s podcasting, too!
“During the last two or three years, Iranian blogging has flourished,” says Hadi Ghaemi, a native Iranian who now works for Human Rights Watch in New York City.
“In fact, blogging has become the main medium for information, new, analysis and exchange of information for Iranians, both inside and outside the country.”
– BBC NEWS | Technology | Persian blogging round the globe
Hoder and many, many other blog luminaries will be at the Converge South conference in Greensboro tomorrow and Saturday. Hope to see you there.