Get yer red, hot schedule

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March Madness is in full swing, and after suffering through someone else’s not-very-well updated men’s calendar (which didn’t include tournament games!) and making my own schedule to publish the UNC women’s basketball schedule, I have finally got it all together in one place.

Introducing Ruby’s Unofficial Basketball Calendar. Never miss a game again!

This includes both the men’s and women’s teams and includes the regular season, general tournament dates, and specific times for tournament games (when they become available). You can view it on the web, subscribe to via RSS, put in your Outlook or iCal, or add it directly to your Google calendar.

Each game title is preceded by a “[M]” or “[W]” depending on which team is playing, and the TV broadcast info is included in the event description. Please try it out and let me know what you think.

And please watch the women’s games – the very last that seniors Ivory Latta and Camille Little will be playing as students at Carolina. You don’t want to miss it when we go all the way to the NCAA Championship!

Irrepressible content

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Another great online strategy from Amnesty International: to counter growing censorship and repression of Internet speech, they have created http://Irrepressible.info where you can sign a pledge for Internet freedom and get your own badge to dynamically display censored content on your own blog.

Por ejemplo:

They also have a public API! (They do lose points for having a typo in the code for the badge above. Good thing I know how to spell “fragments” and fixed it myself.)

NC State 70 – Duke 65

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It’s unusual for me to root for NC State, they’re Carolina‘s #2 rival. But our chief rival and bogeyman is Duke. In today’s ACC semi-final, NC State (#4) beat the undefeated Duke. I love this for so many reasons:

  1. As a true Carolina fan, it’s always nice to see Duke lose. (The Waner sisters and their ponytails are especially bile-inducing for me.)
  2. State played really well in spite of several injuries and three bad foul calls against Gillian Goring who fouled out. And it’s great to see the success of NC State coach Kay Yow who fought back breast cancer to re-take the helm of her team mid-way through this season.
  3. If Carolina wins the other semi-final (starting right now) I’d rather have us play State, with whom we are one and one this year, than Duke, who beat us twice and who was undefeated this year until today.

Woo hoo. Go Wolfpack and GO HEELS!

Change is here

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http://Change.org is a wonderful new social networking site for activists and organizations. It allows you to write about what “changes” (or issues) you support and sign on to other people’s changes. It also connects those issues with the nonprofits that are working on them, and encourages users to rate the organizations, blog about changes, and make pledges of both money and action.

The site basically combines the best of web 2.0 technology with the best of your conscience. All it needs is a critical mass of users, and it’s well on the way, having only launched a month ago, and now branching out to international activists.

Their newest fun feature: widgets! Here’s mine:

powered by Change.org

I hope to see you there.

Fun and powerful new tool

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Also posted at Netcentric Campaigns.

This looks like fun.  IBM has launched an experimental site called Many Eyes, which allows users to upload data sets and create lovely visualizations of their own or other people's data.

For example, select from existing data "Average Gas Price by Median State Income for 1- and 2-earners" and then choose a "US state" visualization, and viola!  They even have a handy "blog this" function to make it easy to insert the resulting graphic into a blog.  Like so: 

Available visualization types include U.S. and world geographic maps, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, bubble charts, a variety of graphs, and my favorite the network diagram.  This is the kind of site that can absorb a whole weekend, I need to be careful… 🙂

Thanks to Bruce Hoppe for the link.

Categories icon Tech

Obama gaining black support

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It sounds like African Americans are starting to get to know Barack Obama, and they like what they see.

In polls taken in December and January, Democratic African-Americans favored Clinton over Obama by a 60-20 margin. Now Obama leads Clinton among African-Americans by a margin of 44-33 percent. That shift has brought Obama’s overall support among Democrats up to 24 percent, from 17 percent in January. John Edwards holds steady at 12 percent.

– War Room – Salon.com, 2/28/07

Blogging from the top down

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Salon has a very interesting article today by Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise on why she turned down the job that Amanda Marcotte briefly held with the Edwards campaign. She also addresses what she thinks is a major flaw in their online strategy: by making bloggers “official” you remove most of the value of their independent, outsider voices.

The Edwards campaign wants decentralized people-powered politics. Ironically, by hiring well-known bloggers to manage a destination Web site, it was actually centralizing and micromanaging. Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate’s netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage.

– Why I refused to blog for Edwards – Salon.com, 2/26/07

My candidate is Good!

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This entry was also posted at techPresident.com.

I tend to be more interested in “how the web is using them” than “how the candidates are using the web” in techPresident’s mission. So of course I’m fascinated by the John Edwards Is Good website. I like the ambiguity of this slogan. Does it mean Edwards is good… looking, for America, at billiards? It could be any of the above.

When I saw first these 80’s-inspired t-shirts popping up during the 2004 campaign, I took them for nothing more than a smarmy remark on Edwards’ looks from some overly-clever college students. However, it seems that this meme has blossomed into a full-on campaign. While the goal was previously to market the shirt and take pictures of people wearing it in funny places, now the site seems to be semi-seriously promoting the election of John Edwards.

One the things that I found most powerful about Dean for America was how they allowed any interest group to really adopt the candidate and make him their own. Left-handed Rhode Island gun-owning cat lovers for Dean – right on! This is a great way for potential supporters to build community and feel that their interests are represented. Apparently this particular toungue-in-cheek version started with Mark Warner is Good (RIP), and has also spawned Obama is Good which sports all of the same features as John Edwards is Good (JEIG).

The sites have their own Facebook groups (of course), and links to MySpace, etc. They also have serialized, unauthorized biographies of their candidates, but the Obama is Good (OIG) site seems more earnest, while JEIG has a lot of humorous, fictional content and silly pictures. One my favorite features is a comparison of which is better, John or Elizabeth Edwards? (I’m partial toward the latter.)

I couldn’t find an equivalent Hillary is Good site, but it’s just a matter of time. Are there any similar independent and unorthodox campaigns for other candidates?