Just posted an album of photos on Flickr from our trip to visit my family in Austin. We had a great time. Austin is a really lovely city, although it was unseasonably cold.
Here are some highlights…
Grandma Vickie making latkes for Hanukkah
Continue reading “The Rakoffs do Austin”
Brian and I recorded a short video response to John Edwards’ YouTube campaign announcement. It was super-easy to do right from the web camera built into my laptop. Now that I am no longer a video blogging virgin, perhaps I’ll try it again some time.
Here’s one of my recent favorite John Edwards quotations (from his video blog entry “The Plane Truth“):
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. But I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.
If he’s serious about being true to himself before being true to the TV cameras, well, my boots will be a little lighter, but more importantly I could really feel good about working for that campaign.
Wow. If I didn’t have a standing meeting on Tuesdays, I would be seriously tempted to take this class. Tim Tyson is one of the most passionate and essential historians of race relations in the South, and we are blessed to have him with us here in North Carolina.
THE SOUTH IN BLACK AND WHITE
Southern History, Culture, and Politics in the 20th CenturyA Course for NCCU, DUKE, UNC Students
& the GENERAL PUBLICJanuary 16 – April 24, 2007
Tuesdays 7:00 – 9:30 PMLOCATION: Hayti Heritage Center
Led by North Carolina’s own TIM TYSON (Blood Done Sign My Name), senior scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies, the course will furnish a wide front porch on Southern history. Weekly lecture, interviews, live music, poetry, dramatic performances, film clips, and opportunities for discussion.
– Duke Center for Documentary Studies: The South in Black and White
One of the many reasons that it’s so smart for the Edwards campaign to utilize existing social networking web sites is that they can all collectively handle the load that his personal web site apparently cannot.
The campaign already has groups on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube as well as his own One Corps site. Which is good because his own blog is not even functioning right now:
After the jump is his campaign announcement on YouTube:
Continue reading “Sharing the burden”
I fully understand why JohnEdwards.com is not exactly the most responsive web site at this moment. 😉 But I am a bit concerned about his advertised “live blogging at 11 am CST” (in 2 minutes) when I see this message:
Please stand by…
The One America Committee Blog is down momentarily for a code upgrade. We will be back up in just a few minutes. Thank you for your patience.
By the way, I’ve joined “One Corps.”
Uberblogger Robert Scoble is traveling with the John Edwards campaign, but he’s “keeping [the blog] relatively politics free” and is “not going to write a lot about John Edwards.” Huh?
Anyway, this is the interesting part:
I’m wearing my ConvergeSouth shirt in honor of Sue Polinsky, who really is responsible for getting us in a position for me to get here.
First stop of the morning … New Orleans’ neighborhood « Scobleizer
W00t! Shoutout to Greensboro’s Converge South, and to conference diva Sue Polinsky. I can see the network forming before my eyes.
But wouldn’t it have made more sense for a blogger like Ed Cone (who has some credibility talking about politics and an interested audience) to be with him? I guess Edwards is trying to reach geeks, not Democrats. Fair enough.
IMdB won’t accept this review (not enough words!), so here is my brief recommendation of the film “When Do We Eat?”
Just watched this with my Jewish family (and goy husband) and we *all* had a great time. This is a visually beautiful comedy that really gets at the complexity of American Judaism and American families in general.
Like Little Miss Sunshine, it’s dark and twisted, and ultimately reveals the humanity in all of us.
I can’t wait for the sequel: “When do we light the candles?” 😉
Cross-posted from OrangePolitics.
I just read this article by my friend Micah Sifry about Elizabeth Edwards. He says she is the “only person who I think we can genuinely say is participating in the blogosphere, as opposed to just using it.” One of his supporting examples is Eliabeth’s visit to OP to answer some questions I had raised about the location of their new home and the status of their voter registration.
As usual, she responded openly and directly. As I wrote to Micah, Elizabeth is so smart and fierce and charming it’s scary. Further proof was seen in her graceful handling of that clown Chris Matthews on live TV recently. I sometimes have complaints about her husband’s policies (the same I have of almost every Democrat), but as a person I only admire her more the more I get to know her. I wish nothing but the best to the entire Edwards family.
Cross-posted from NetcentricCampaigns.org.
![[TIME cover]](http://img.timeinc.net/time/images/covers/1101061225_120.jpg "[TIME cover]")
After blogging about who I thought should be Time's "person of the Year," I was a little disappointed with their announcement that "you" (in other words: everyone) was the winner. It felt like a cop-out. But the fact is, it's also true.
It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
It's nice to see that the mainstream media is beginning to accept that not only have they been forced to release their strangle-hold on information, but that this transformation may be a good thing. This is exactly what network-centric advocacy is all about. The Internet has been a vital key in creating the infrastructure to allow groups of people to effectively collaborate around their own individual priorities.
The Time article is actually quite good, and they also highlight 15 people who typify "you." One of the examples is Lane Hudson, who I had the pleasure of meeting at RootsCampDC a few weeks ago. Lane's StopSexualPredators blog single handedly forced the Mark Foley isue into the blogosphere and then the media and then, finally, to Capitol Hill. Not only did Rep. Foley resign his seat, exposing the repugnant behavior of the Republican chair of the House Congressional Missing and Exploited Children Caucus was a major blow to the right's "family values" image and gave the Democrats much-needed momentum in their campaign to take back Congress.
Lane was fired from his job at the Human Rights Campaign when his role was revealed, and he's got a new blog called News for the Left. Let's show the power of the network to reward leadership like his and give him a hand.
Wow. Two really excellent, black, political hip hop acts, Mr. Lif (who I like a lot) and The Coup (who I love), were recently in a nearly fatal bus crash that destroyed most of their equipment and many of their belongings.
Boots Riley tells the story first-hand on The Coup’s myspace blog. You can help by sending a PayPal donation to thecoupbuscrash@gmail.com, which I just did.
We lost everything in that crash and fire. We were packed to live and do shows on that bus for a month. Most of us had every stitch of clothing we owned on there. We lost clothes, computers, recording equipment, cameras, IDs, phones, keys to cars and homes. We lost cash.We lost all our damn instruments and equipment to perform with. We were and are happy to walk away with our lives. But now we’re home. Most of the band touring with The Coup has kids, rent that won’t quit, bills, and holiday expenses coming.
– The Crash, 12/8/06
Thanks to Dav for the heads up.