Oh look the President is at Camp David showing us he is thinking hard about Iraq. No wait! He’s making a surprise trip to Bagdad to show us the power of a Rove-ian Photo-Op ™. Do you feel better yet about the hundreds of thousands dead from Bush’s oil policy? I’ll be surprsed if this moves the polls a single point – if at all.
Maybe it’s because I just read American Gods, but the President is starting to remind me of Loki the trickster god.
In my continuing series of turning advice e-mails into blog posts. I recently received this request:
I’m working on setting up a local-politics site for my area of the world. I was wondering if you had any words of wisdom on launching a local-politics site. What challenges have you encountered? What good/bad decisions have you made along the way? What kind of time/money is involved in running the site? Is this at least a break-even venture for you, money-wise? Any other suggestions or insights you may be able to offer would be great. Thanks in advance.
My reply:
Continue reading “So you wanna start a local politics blog”
In a sign of N-TEN‘s ongoing lack of web savvy, this announcement was all over e-mail yesterday but not online anywhere… until now:
From Lynn Labieniec, Chair of the N-TEN Board:
On behalf of the N-TEN Board, I am very pleased to announce that Katrin Verclas will be our new Executive Director. Katrin will start on June 1st for a smooth transition before Joe Baker, our current Executive Director, leaves at the end of June.
The letter continues after the jump: Continue reading “Big news for Katrin Verclas and N-TEN!”
It seems like after every conference I come away with a handful of business cards and the intention to follow up with lots of new people and possibilities. However, my intention does not always translate into action. Although I still hope to contact these folks and/or blog about about all the cool things they are doing, for now I am going to do a brain dump to document (and lazily ping) everyone.
I just got home after a very long day of inter-coastal travel. I will post a longer thing tommorrow about the rest of the awesome people I met at NetSquared.
So I was recruited to lead a Making it Happen: Tips & Tricks session at NetSquared. I called it: how to be more cause-based, aka network-centric advocacy, aka bottom-up, aka cluetrain advocacy, aka user-centered, aka movement building. Basically I gave a little intro to the above topic and discussed it with anyone who wanted to stop by. People asked a lot of good questions and together we came up with a lot of great ideas for how to empower the supporters of our issues and help them lead our movements for change.
Thanks to everyone for chatting with me:
Continue reading “Thanks for making it happen with me”
Here’s a great opportunity to do professional online activism for a great cause:
NetSquared was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in years. I kept having experiences that were so interesting I wanted to blog about them but the coolness didn’t stop and I was torn between doing cool stuff and blogging about it. (Yes I am a geek!)
There were just as many cool people as at other conferences, but less chaff. One of the most radical transformations for me: I have now joined the world of Second Life. Gotta go have some experiences…
Tim Bishop (aka Geodog) took some great Notes from the Activism session at NetSquared on Tuesday. I think our session “Activism: when emailing your congressperson doesn’t quite feel like enough…” went well, but after attending “Gender and the social web: new tools, same…stuff?” I think it could have been organized much better to have more audience particiption better conversation.
Susan Mernit, who led the gender session, had each speaker give a brief intro to the topic and then threw some focused questions out to the entire room. It was a really interesting and insightful conversation, but it seems Lisa Stone is still measuring the success of BlogHer by it’s acceptance by the male-dominated blogerati!
Here are my notes and conversation (typos and all) from the gender session in the hallway. I have edited out the comments that were simultaneous form other sessions…
This morning’s NetSquared panel is three white guys in suits talking about their corporate Business Model Revolution. They even said “monetize” – the death knell of any panel as far I’m concerned. Finally I’ll get a chance to catch up on my e-mail. (I also want post some notes from yesterday, but some of them have to get extracted from the ‘hallway’ archive.)
Last night at the NetSquared reception I met Tantek Celik, who is the Chief Technologist at Technorati – in other words, a leading global thinker in the field of how blogs can talk to each other and to the world. We had a spirited discussion about gender online and whether there are still “barriers to entry” for women in the blogosphere. Happily we both came to the conclusion that there is sexism IRL which repeats itself online, but that new techologies are making it easier for women and minority groups (of which women are not one, of course) to gain more power, credibility, platforms for speaking out, etc.
Tantek mentioned that he has worked a lot on microformats, which he thinks are gaining popularity without support by the typical “a-list” bloggers. I haven’t followed the spread, although I have been interested in microformats since I learned about them last year. I mentioned to Tantek that I was sporting my microformats t-shirt when I was splashed across a full page in the Independent’s recent article about political blogging. I showed him the picture on the Indy’s website which he enjoyed very much.
Tantek also introduced me to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks who I promptly bothered about a persistent tagging problem I’ve been having here. Within an hour, Kevin wrote me to say he had fixed it! So the true purpose of this entire blog entry is to see whether my tagged blog entries are showing up correctly over at Technorati. And the answer is…
