Category: People Power

Chris Pirillo just sent a notice via orkut pre-announcing Gnomedex 4.0, which may not be the best conference for “we stopped drinking” geeks. I really wanted to go last year and my schedule didn’t permit. I think my late September is wide open, so chances are I will make it this time.

Wow, danah boyd took me to school (without naming any names, which was kind of her) and I’m learning a difficult lesson. Over at misbehaving.net, she writes in sexist jokes and Orkut invites about a note I sent to the group of people there marked as my “friends.” What happened was that I saw as…

From: “Ben Brown” <member@orkut.com> To: “Christian Crumlish” Subject: Re: is orkut over? Dude, you should really stop with the friends-of-friends messages. I have no idea who you are. This message was sent by Ben Brown to Christian Crumlish.

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving everyone, whether here in the U.S. or not. On this day where so many of us convene with our families and talk about or avoid talking about politics, religion, and sex, I find myself thinking about online dating. A lot of us are scratching our heads as we see venture…

Dr. Anita Blanchard has published a preliminary analysis of a proposition that blogs may be a new form of virtual community, based on a studio of the Julie/Julia Project Salon blog: This research provides an initial look into the complicated topic of blogs as virtual communities. For many readers, the Julie/Julia Project is simply an…

Hossein Derakhshan (better known as ‘hoder’) of Editor: Myself posted an announcement to Blogroots about a new project, iranFilter, writing: iranFilter is a collective weblog in English, focused on news, reports and everything one can find about Iran on the Internet. Although the name can’t be more cliché, honestly, I couldn’t come up with a…

Have you been Scobleized? Tristan Cartony: “I no longer require any news aggregators because I found an all purpose one called Scoble.” Heh, who said I’m not customizable? Want me to watch a feed for you? Let me know. Also, if you don’t see your weblog on the sidebar to the right, let me know…

Tim Bray reports from

I just tweaked up my post about weblog strategies for nonprofits from last Friday (although I still haven’t discussed it with Dave Pollard, as I was planning to do), and submitted my proposal to CompuMentor. I really enjoyed the exercise of thinking through how nonprofits can use weblogs (and syndication, and aggregration) and how a…

I submitted my post about nonprofit weblogging to the Blogger Con: Essays directory and got no response. I thought perhaps it was too late to submit something (last Friday), but I notice there’s a new essay from Oliver Willis added today, so I suppose my essay simply didn’t pass muster. Oh well.

Explaining that a poster session is an informal context at an academic conference in which people who aren’t formally presenting papers can still submit a title and abstract and read something. In Devine’s conception, BloggerCon could invite contributers to a “poster session” of the conference, to be held in cyberspace. Bloggers can introduce themselves to…

Marc Brown pinged us to invite vistors to the Seybold Buzznet Gallery. You can post any photos you take from Seybold (if you’re here) – anonymously, or sign up for an account to post with credit – or to view photos if you like no matter where you are (assuming you have web access and…

In my continuing quest to improve Radio Free Blogistan, invite greater contribution, collaborate with others, syndicate wisely, aggregate elegantly, and leverage the reams of free content being spewed out in RSS form all over the Intersphere by applying my own filters to it, I’ve added some new sidebar sections, using Tima’s invaluable MTrssfeed plug-in. I…

Sacramento Bee columnist has been publishing his California Insider weblog since April, but with the recall craziness, his blogged insights are especially welcome, giving us a glimpse into the chaos that is California’s governance. One of his readers likens webloggers to courtiers, but haven’t journalists always behaved like a gossipy jockeying court, especially capital press…

Howard Dean’s presidential campaign has already distinguished itself by its savvy embrace of the Internet and weblogs (or “chatrooms” as I heard one uncomfortable political pundit refer to them on NPR a few weeks back) and the wellspring of enthusiasm coming from the grassroots. It’s not surprising when you consider that they’ve been taking advice…

So it occurred to me a month or so ago that the best potential use of the Dead Beat website might be to set it up as a Wiki. Wikis are, among other things, highly collaborative websites. See, for example, the Grateful Dead entry in the Wikipedia, a project building an entirely collaborative encyclopedia. Technically,…