Last year my family was all together at Hannukah and so of course we made latkes. I took pictures in an attempt to capture my grandmother’s perfect technique. This weekend I got a request from Bill Averbach of The Austim Klezmorim, who wrote a song that is a latke recipe, asking if he could use some of my pictures. I said sure – as long as he gave credit to my family, which he did. Here is the video:
Author: Ruby Sinreich
OP becomes its own worst enemy
I’ve been struggling for a while with issues of free speech in the community of commenters over on OrangePolitics.org. Over the life of the site, there has been a small group of people who are generally screwing it up for the rest of us. Instead of informing and getting to know each other, the site devolves into nasty bickering which no-one wants to read except maybe the 5 people involved in it. I know I don’t want to read it, and that’s not just because half of it seems to be based on the premise that I am an evil dictator who is trying to control your life and ruin your neighborhood.
I often hear from folks who have varying success at ignoring the negative elements and usually just stop reading the site. I try to remind people that you can just read the posts and skip the comments (especially via RSS), but most OP readers don’t value that distinction very much. Lately the tension has gotten worse and some commenters have become increasingly toxic.
So as we are approaching the second major platform change to OP (from WordPress to Drupal), I’m starting to think about how to help the readers feed back into the system and have some collective say about what words and what behavior is or is not valued. It’s already going to be a great improvement that trusted users can have their own blogs on the site. I’m especially interested in Drupal modules that might help with rating content (both posts and comments), although I also accept that some manual moderation will probably be needed, especially in determining what goes on the front page.
Brian says that allowing the community to vote will encourage gaming of the system, and I think he fears that this could put the difficult people even more in charge. While this is certainly possible, I have more confidence in the commenters and especially the (silent) readers to balance this out and result in the right outcome most of time. This isn’t so much a wisdom of the crowd thing as it is a Buddhist thing, at least for me. I need to believe that everyone is essentially good. Otherwise I wouldn’t be working to amplify their voices, help them vote, help them make media, etc.
Continue reading “OP becomes its own worst enemy”
Civic engagement and technology
Thanks to the Triangle Community Foundation for bringing Rob Stuart to town and organizing today’s Civic Engagement and Technology Workshop. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of my old NC nonprofit friends as well as making new ones.
As promised, here are the materials I used in my sessions. First, my seven-minute overview of OrangePolitics. Then my network-centric advocacy presentation, which was referred to in our discussion of social networks. And here is a Second Life slide show that I prepared but didn’t end up using.
Finally, here are some of the social networking sites that I demonstrated. If you sign up for any of them, please look me up and say hello!
http://Facebook.com
http://MySpace.com
http://SecondLife.com (virtual reality)
http://Flickr.com (photos)
http://Twitter.com (mini-blogs)
http://Last.fm (music)
http://YouTube.com (videos)
http://GoodReads.com (books)
Learn more:
Pushing Power to the Edges
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
http://www.netcentriccampaigns.org
https://lotusmedia.org/in/nptech/advocacy
Joe Herzenberg, presente!
Chapel Hill lost one of it’s greatest today. I probably would not be as involved in local politics as I am had it not been for Joe Herzenberg – trailblazer, advocate, friend. http://orangepolitics.org/2007/10/well-miss-you-joe
Interview with PJnet
Watch me squint into the sun and say “um” 20 times a minute in this short interview with Leonard Witt of the Public Journalism Network about blogs and journalism. Short version: the future of journalism = trust. If people can’t trust you, they won’t read/buy you.
Women with feelings: we can’t win
Apparently the mere existence of women’s emotions is perceived negatively. At the end of this article, supposedly-liberal Bill Maher even went on to criticize Ellen DeGeneres for crying on TV because (he says) it makes women look weak and not qualified to be President. WTF!
“Women are not making it up when they say they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” said Stephanie Shields, the psychology professor who conducted the study. “If you don’t express any emotion, you’re seen as not human, like Mr. Spock on ‘Star Trek,'” she said. “But too much crying, or the wrong kind, and you’re labeled as overemotional, out of control, and possibly irrational.”
[…]
“When men express anger they gain status, but when women express anger they lose status,” Yale social psychologist Victoria Brescoll, who conducted three experiments on how people perceive female anger, said in an interview.
– The crying game: male vs female tears – Yahoo! News
I’m so angry I could cry. Damn you, feelings!
Crucial tweets
What do you get when you combine raging wildfires with one of the most wired regions of the country?
- L.A. Fire Department twittering fire updates.
- Dynamic map of Flickr photos of the fire.
- Google evacuation maps.
What other good stuff is going on out there? I’m adding more to this post as I find it.
Perpetual basketball calendar
Can you smell it? Carolina Basketball season is almost here!
I have done my annual slogging through the schedule to create a calendar that I can put into iCal and my phone, and I did it in Google so that you can use it too. There are a few other UNC basketball calendars out there, but none of them have the women’s team. Mine is the only one with both the men and women’s calendars. I add each season to the same calendar, so you only have to subscribe once and will get the dates automatically year after year.
Here are some ways you can subscribe (or you can browse the schedule below): XML, ICAL, HTML, or Google.
Social networks at ConvergeSouth
The bad news: Anil Dash is not going to be able to attend and speak at ConvergeSouth today due to air travel problems. He’s a smart guy and a good speaker and I know he’ll be missed.
The good news: I will be sitting on the Social Networks panel instead of Anil! I don’t think we’ll be using formal presentations, but I will probably base my remarks on my typical network-centric advocacy thoughts. You can see my recent presentation on this from Yearly Kos at https://lotusmedia.org/advocacy-20-the-slideshow
Update: Everyone keeps telling me to add this presentation to SlideShare.net, but I don’t really see the advantage of that over Flickr where a lot more people might see it. However I did upload it to Google, so if that floats your boat: have at it.
10 Questions for presidential candidates
My friends at echPresident are launching a new site today called 10 Questions. The idea is to take the “YouTube debate” that gave regular people a chance to ask questions of the Democratic candidates a few months ago, and make it even more democratic by allowing the community to vote on which questions get asked instead of having them hand-picked by the TV networks.
Here’s my contribution, I did it in a hurry so please pardon the grammatical errors, etc.
Since the site is brand new, there aren’t many videos yet. This is a chance to get seen by the thousands of people who will check out the site today. Post your question at http://10questions.com now!