community application of technology for public benefit
Hossein Derakhshan (a.k.a. Hoder) is already effectively exiled from his Iranian homeland for his truth-telling blog that challenges censorship and totalitarianism (including that of the U.S.). He is still the most-read blogger in Iran (being locked out of the U.S. although he’s a Canadian citizen) and has led a grassroots media revolution there.
Continue reading “Support citizen journalism and peacemaking”
This is so cool! This artist Dan Jumaman from Visual Ink is drawing the presenters’ comments as they speak.
UPDATE: Here are some much better pictures of these illustrations.
Holy crap, del.icio.us is down! And this after the shocking news that they got bought by Yahoo a few weeks ago. I think something similar happened after Yahoo bought Flickr, didn’t it?
What’s up with Yahoo getting all web 2.0 anyway…?
I just made a contribution to Planned Parenthood’s photo petition against Target’s refusal to guarantee that their pharmasicts will fill all prescriptions for birth control (inluding emergency contraception.
There are already hundreds of other great pictures in this campaign that was inspired by the fabulous (and still growing) SorryEverybody.com. You can browse them at http://www.saveroe.com/target/photos
What I really love about campigns like this is how expressive individuals can be in a visual medium, and how diverse and creative their presentations are. In the target photos, there are some with pictures of kids, pets, christmas trees, married people, body parts, cartoons, friends, and so on. Each person is really able to send a very personal, and therefore very meaningful message.
For a work-related project I recently started compiling a reading list for someone looking to learn about network-centric advocacy. I thought I’d post it here and see if you readers have any additions to suggest. (Also, if you’re still trying to figure out what I do for living, read the first one, it’s a quick intro by my boss to what we do consulting on.)
Also if you’re interested in such things, I have started aggregating blogs on this topic at NetCentric Campaigns.
WordPress.com is now offerring free, hosted, WordPress* blogs with no ads! They had been gradually meteing out blogs to folks who asked, but now they are feeling better about their ability to scale so bring it on!
There’s no excuse – start blogging today!
* WordPress is the blogging platform I use for both lotusmedia.org and OrangePolitics.org. I highly recommend it.
Thanks to Matt for the announcement.
Don Marti has created some code that makes a blog entry into a letter to Congress. Anyone want to make this for WordPress? Justin, Corey?
Network-centric advocacy in action:
Young rioters are using blog messages to incite violence and cellphones to organize attacks in guerrilla-like tactics they have copied from anti-globalisation protesters, security experts say.
– Reuters: French youths turn to Web, cellphones to plan riots
The French government says they haven’t the resources to keep up with the all the blogs discussing the riots, not to mention SMS messages on cell phones. Even though what they are organizing is unfortunately violent, it’s a great illustration of how ineffective a bloated top-down institution is against a distributed social network.
Having worked at home for 5 years and now beginning my third job as a telecommuter, I have acquired some opinions about how this is best arranged. My new boss asked for some tips and I thought I might as well share them with the world. Here is my guide to effective and enjoyable telecommuting…
You may recall that I was laid off by Planned Parenthood last summer, started consulting again, and then took a new job with Aspiration back in September. Well, sooner than I had planned, it’s now time for a new chapter.