- What kinds of information the NSA is collecting about your communications - it's not paranoia if they're really after you. And they have really cool PDAs to do it with.
- The Feminist Review - bloggers calling patriarchy as they see it
- Geni - free Web 2.0 enabled online genealogy software
- The Onion nails it again: You know what's stupid? Everything I don't understand - "God, all the people, places, and things I haven't made the least bit of effort to comprehend should just die already."
- Get up to $15,000 for a project in your hometown - I love seeing this kind of use of the web.
- Some E-Cards - for when you care enough to hit send
Category: ramblings
I spend a lot of time on this blog and elsewhere encouraging people to avoid ceding too much power over their lives to the individuals who would claim it for the wrong reasons (or in many cases, claim it at all), or to institutions and organizations that may not truly have our best interests in mind. But despite my own wariness of those things and of participating in a superstar celebrity culture, it's still pretty hard to ignore the excitement and intrigue that follows around a former President of the United States. This is amplified when he appears in a place quite unexpected, like Richmond Indiana.
Continue reading "Bill Clinton Visits Richmond, Indiana"
At the office today, a few of us were discussing Twitter, the website that lets people broadcast mini-updates about their life, thoughts, whereabouts and other news in chunks of 140 characters or less, all the time. People do it through their cell phones and desktop computers, and they do it from home, the car, the airplane, the airplane skyway, the airport lobby, the baggage claim, press conferences, government meetings, trade shows, beaches, you name it. Barack Obama uses Twitter. So does CNN, so does Wil Wheaton. There are YouTube videos explaining how Twitter works. There are how-to articles on how to get more people watching your Twitter updates.
The one question I have is...
Continue reading "Right now I'm blogging about Twitter"
Daniel Quinn's book If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways is a short read, but it's not necessarily an easy one to digest, and it leaves more challenges and questions on the table than it takes off. But for anyone interested in having effective engagement with fellow humans about how to make the world a better place, I definitely recommend having it in your toolbox.
Quinn, who I've mentioned here a few times, is an author who has spent much of his life writing books that try to show readers a different way of looking at the world and the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. In Write Sideways, Quinn essentially tries to answer the question, "once you have seen the world from a different perspective, how do you help other people see that same new perspective in a way that's meaningful and lasting for them?"
Continue reading "Daniel Quinn's Write Sideways"
If you read political thrillers or action novels for their ability to transport you away from the concerns of current events into a fantasy that seems realistic but is purely fictional, then Steve Alten's book The Shell Game is probably not for you. And I wouldn't blame you; most folks probably don't want anxieties about their real lives and the future of our society to be a central part of the escapist action and adventure reading that we do on the beach. But after I heard that the book takes on the realities of peak oil, government corruption, American foreign policy and the political futures of today's Presidential candidates, and weaves them all into a 466 page novel, I couldn't help but be intrigued by it. Here's my review, some spoilers if you read on.
Continue reading "Steve Alten's The Shell Game"
Perhaps one of my biggest concerns about working in the Internet industry and website development in particular is my participation in a cultural shift whereby people are now not only just able but clearly expected to look for and find online the information they need to live their lives. Where as it used to be the case that referring someone to your website was a way to complement information you were already giving them, or was just one method of contacting you, the display of a web address is now often the only way that many businesses and organizations make their products and services available. The unfortunate reality is that this is no longer confined to promoting the luxuries and accessories of an upper- or middle-class lifestyle, and it's part of a larger trend of an increasing dependence on highly complex infrastructure to perform basic tasks, fulfill basic human needs.
Continue reading "For More Information, Visit Us on the Web"
Happening to me too much lately:
The "I'm too busy with the dog show to blog for real so I'll grow them a linkfarm" edition:
- Popping Culture Blog by Michelle Manchir: Michelle's journalistic efforts at the Palladium-Item are some of the more refreshingly comprehensive and useful to come along in a while, and her blog entries are turning out to be similarly insightful.
- Peter Suber of Earlham College Gets Win for Open-Access at Harvard: Peter was a professor of mine at Earlham, and is one of the most interesting and intelligent people I know. He's been working hard at making scholarly articles available for free online, and this news is certainly a great milestone for that effort.
- WayNet.org allows organizations without 501(c)3 status to apply for fee-waived membership: Now you don't need to have a letter from The Man if you're a low-budget not-for-profit organization wanting to join this Wayne County community network association.
- The Palladium-Item is revising its forum posting policy so that it holds its online users to some of the same standards as its letter writers in the print edition. And yet despite some heroic efforts, as I predicted in 2005, the forum remains something of a drowning pool where trolls go to feed.
- Check out my Summersault Weblog entry on adding a free chat room to your website. Any questions? Come ask me in the chat room at live-richmond.com.
- I am searching for the medical term for "an irrational fear of velociraptors" - anyone?
Jason Truitt, Online Editor of the Palladium-Item newspaper here in Richmond, recently asked what readers are looking for when they ask for more "local news." My response:
For me, a good local news story is one that reflects the things that are happening and the experiences people are having in and around our city and county. For it truly to reflect a local point of view, the story should include the perspectives, thoughts and emotions of local people, and preferably be written by someone who has a local context for (even, dare I say, a personal investment in) why those things might matter.
Continue reading "What constitutes good local news coverage?"
As I was preparing to graduate from college, I had already decided that I would be staying in the same town (Richmond) for the foreseeable future, and so I was a spectator to the strange but customary phenomenon of having all of my friends from the past four years pack up and prepare to leave town. In many cases they were good friends - loved ones with whom I had experienced some of the most challenging and growing years of my life so far. They knew me, and I knew them, and we had found a rhythm together in that bubble of academia. In other cases, they were people who I hadn't really had time to fully know despite wanting to, and watched whatever sense of possibility that existed there fade away as they went. At the time I had a feeling in my gut that it just wasn't right, wasn't natural to spend so much time building community with others only to see it scattered to the wind of change blown forth by the fairly arbitrary milestone of graduation day.
Since them I've come to wonder with even more bewilderment why we so often leave the communities that love us. We spend so much of our lives trying to find our identities, trying to establish who we are in a given context, trying to find people we can connect to, bond with, lean on. Why do we then also seem to be able to so quickly give those things up because of a job change, a shift in our passions, a thought of journeying across the state, the region, the country, the world to find what we're looking for?
Continue reading "Why do we leave the communities that love us?"