Eight years before the blog

One thing about starting my first online journal on my birthday back in 1997 is it makes it pretty easy to keep my blogiversary straight.

Alternatives to Meetup

I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September:

Meetup is a Ghost Town
I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I have received several emails from them asking me to step up as organizer to the groups I once belonged to or organized for “just $19/month”. They are even offering a 30-day money back guarantee. Hmmm. Let me think about it. No!
I suspect some groups are staying because they don’t want to lose members in a transition or spend time setting up a new site for their group that may have fewer features. I hope they will reconsider after Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net launch. Collectively, they are spending thousands of dollars that could be going to much better things.
Whatever they decide, I am confident that new groups will choose to organize their local interest groups on Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net. After they launch, I will be posting information about how you can spread the word about them, so people everywhere can get together to learn, share, organize and support one another in their local communities. With our support early on, these sites are more likely to be able to offer their valuable services to people for many years to come, so stay tuned!

(I posted this with Flock, so I’ll have to add a category later I guess. It wants me to put on tags, but I’m not sure how that translates for this blog.)

Blogging from Flock

This is a test post from Flock. So far, so cool.

The inquiring enquirer asks

When, exactly, did ‘nads become nards?

I've been tagged

Reader Nicolai wrote a comment on the blog telling me that I’ve been tagged (by name) for the first time, adding “how’s that for digital identity?” His comment led me back to a review of this book (in Danish) on his blog.
He kindly translated it into English for me:

The power of many
The story about the 1960 American election tells that JFK and Nixon debated on shows broadcasted on both radio and television. The story also tells that Kennedy lost the debate in the ears of the radio listeners. The convincing winner in the eyes of the voters who followed the debate on television was on the other hand Kennedy. Kennedy read and understood how to use the new media – television. He lnew that the media demands other playing rules than those that work on radio.
According to Christian Crumlish the Internet took on the role as the new media during the in 2003-4. And with a purpose of writing a book about some of the new methods and techniques that people use to create virtual communities Crumlish writes among others things about his participation on the Howard Dean campaign.
In The Power of Many Crumlish writes lively and engagingly about the Dean campaign and how they untraditionally took use of the new opportunities given by the Internet in a political context. Their mission was to get voters. And these voters should generate even more voters.
He also writes about different forms of social networks and relationships across geography and generation. And he writes about weblogs. A phenomenon, that floats through the entire book.

…the strange new word “blog” wasn’t coined until 1999, the buzz didn’t start till 2000, and the first big wave of political bloggers didn’t get traction until late 2001 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. (Crumlish 2004:8)

It is with this phenomenon (the weblog) that the challenges for future democracy will find its strengths. And with Crumlish’ comparisons with the Gutenberg invention of the print press he describes the power that indispensably arises when people are given the opportunity to express themselves. And the Internet technology has opened a new dimension for freedom of expression – it has made it independent of both time and geography.
But it is not all about American election campaigns. Crumlish also airs other tendencies that are possible because of the Internet. Subject such as dating, locality – virtuality, environment, eBay, and pop cultural communities where you jointly can love and listen to The Grateful Dead or read Kurt Vonnegut.
And in continuing the pop cultural talk we are also presented to net marketing/ viral marketing/ WOM. And who other than Seth Godin with his publications on ideavirus among other things is representing this business.
I think Crumlish touches too much in this book. A focus solely on for example the use of the Internet and blogs in the Dean campaign would have been more than worthy of reading. This is also the subject on which Crumlish seems to show the greatest engagement in his writing.
Crumlish still blogs at thepowerofmany.com.
Crumlish, Christian (2004) The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. London: Sybex.

Chris Nolan's 'Spot-On'

I meant to blog about this as soon as I heard, but better late than never. Chris Nolan has rebranded and relaunched her journalistic group weblog (time to update those RSS feeds…). It’s now called Spot-On. The new design is polished and handles the ads much more gracefully.
Chris Nolan is the site’s editor (and still the lead columnist) and the contributing staff has been expanded to include Josh (“Tacitus”) Trevino (who’d already been contributing to ChrisNolan.net – the original Chris Nolan blog), also reporting from San Francisco; Christopher Brauchli, reporting from Boulder; and Deborah Klosky, reporting from San Diego.
A media empire is born.

Go see Cecil next week!

Next Tuesday night (October 18th), Cecil aka Dan aka Cecil will be reading various poems and poem-like shtick at C’era Una Volta, located in the heart of The Island City (aka Alameda).
Says Dan^H^H^HCecil:

They’re even being nice enough to provide free appetizers, for reasons I can’t quite figure out. So maybe I just dreamt that.
Starts at 7. I think it’ll be wrapped by 8:30 or so. John Wright, a good pal of mine and an outstanding musician, will start the night off with some fab guitar.
If it happens to fit in with your schedule, we would love to see ya there. I will say this: if you’re only going to hear me read poetry once in your life, this is probably the best time to do it. Because they’ll have free appetizers.
Unless I dreamt that.
Thanks!
– Dan (aka Cecil [aka Dan] )

Date and time: Tuesday, October 18th, 7 pm
Place: C’era Una Volta
Address: 1332 Park St., Alameda (510.769.4828)
Admission: Free as the day is long. And the day is long.

I gada be me

Chris Pirillo and his Lockergnome cohorts launch yet another social meta crawler-y tag search engine site. This one’s called gada.be. I first looked at it a week or so ago when Chris was showing it around in beta. I guess it’s still in beta. So was that alpha? Pre-launch stealth beta? Whatever.
The main cleverness thing seemed to be its handheld friendliness, from the easy-to-tap url to the way a search is coded as a subhost of the gada.be url. The thing also eats and excretes RSS and OPML, so it’s jiggy like that.
I haven’t really plumbed the depths though, so I’m mostly going on faith here that when Chris puts his energy into something it’s usually fairly cool, at least until the bills come due…. (kidding).
Update: One skeptic currently commenting over on Pirillo’s blog suggests that the page results are going to look and behave like pay-per-click page spammers, because of their unique URLs. The advice is to have a robots.txt file block bots from the search engine results page. This is probably a good idea, assuming the goal isn’t to “have thousands of ‘sites’ with scraped content and text ads.”

Verisign acquires the Weblogs.Com ping server

Confusingly, the news about Verisign buying weblogs.com from Dave Winer hit the wires at about the same time as the news about AOL buying the WeblogsInc.com blog network (referred to in the Times simply as “Weblogs”) from Jason Calacanis. I hope this isn’t Bubble 2.0!
Congratulations to Dave for finding a stable home for an essential piece of the blogosphere’s infrastructure. Having invented it and nurtured its growth, Dave must be a proud papa to see yet another one of his inventions leave the nest.
I don’t personally love Verisign, but at least they’ve got the bandwidth to maintain the service. Apparently they have “declared war on splogs.” It will be interesting to see what directions they take it in.

Yahoo buys Upcoming.org

Congratulations to Andy Baio (and Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin): Waxy.org: Daily Log: Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree
I’m a day late and a dollar short here, but had to note this.
Yahoo is really getting aggressive about their whole Web 2.0 strategy. A lot of the big names are being gathered under one umbrella.
Speaking of Web 2.0, I’m not doing the O’Reilly conference (busy with work, can’t afford it, not comped as press or a contributor, etc.) but I will be at the Web 2.0 Bash (sponsored by del.icio.us, WordPress, wink, Flock, SocialText, Technorati, Odeo, and Flickr) tomorrow night at Swig in San Francisco.
See you there?