Category: Cluetrain (Page 4 of 10)

How I calmed down and learned to like the idea that the Washington State Democrats won’t have a blog anyway

December 10, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Because politically centered blogs are just tunnel vision things anyway.

Ken does a good job pointing out tonight how the state Dems just really don’t get blogs. I have my own reasons for thinking this, mostly due to their RSS feeds being so transparently part of their web consultants site. I mean, if you can’t bother not broadcasting a feed from wa-democrats.org and not blueutopia.org, then its not really worth the facade at all of having your own website for the party.

But, in the end, Ken’s complaint that they should have included a geographically more diverse set of lefty blogs only goes half way.

Instead of reaching out to just political blogs, they should be reaching out to the blogs in their own backyards like Real Dupont, Exit 133, Olyblog, or West Seattle Blog.

This post is sort of my mea culpa to Terry Thompson who weirdly bemoaned blogs as the haven for the politically strident who never listened to anything that got in the way of their political truth.

Yeah, if the state party did a better job building a nice online community, it would be great. The Obama campaign proved that a well thought-out and well aimed online effort could build community and enhance a campaign.

But, what would be even better for a state party and a collection of locally elected Democrats, would be for them to get out on the community blogs and talk with the people who are already there.

Ask them what their priorities are. Write about what you’re doing and what you think is important and let them talk back to you. Lefty blogs will always want to carry your water, but community blogs are going to be the people who are deciding whether they want to vote for you.

Some context on the Jeff Kingsbury Facebook thing

November 5, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Jeff Kingsbury updated his status on Facebook during a city council meeting Monday night. It depends on your opinion on whether what he wrote or whether he wrote it at all matters.

I think updating your status, twittering, or blogging from council chambers is ok. I also think Jeff should have written more (not less) about what he was hearing. In this case, providing fewer details upset some people.

Here’s the original Olyblog post.

Here are the multiple threads at Olyforums (here, here and here). You probably need to be a member at Olyforums to read that last one.

Here’s the Olympian story and the comment thread for it at Haloscan.

In regards to how this even started, the Olyblog post was probably put up by someone who isn’t on Jeff’s Facebook friends list anymore. Facebook is assumed to be a somewhat private forum, and they have some very explicit rules to that regard.

From Gelf:

Q: Is it permissible to share content taken from Facebook?

A: No. Facebook released a statement regarding Caldwell’s actions saying, “Facebook users agree in the sites terms of use and policies that they will not reproduce other user profiles without permission from the user in question and Facebook. Permission was not granted in this case, and Facebook has disabled the offending account.” Caldwell broke the site’s Terms of Service when she reproduced a screenshot of Giuliani’s profile on Slate. Facebook is not looking to take legal action, and Caldwell has expressed no regret over her actions, despite being banned from the site. The question isn’t so much whether or not it is permissible to share personal information taken from Facebook, but whether it is ethical.

And:

Q: When is it OK to share information gained from Facebook?

A: When it’s justified. The status of information placed on Facebook is murky because it is neither entirely public nor private. That being said, if the information is particularly newsworthy, like the MySpace page of the Virginia Tech shooter, then it should be shared.

Sometimes, Facebook can reveal an interesting take on a tired story, like when friends of members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team jokingly called the players “nappy headed hos” on their Facebook walls during the high-pitched Imus controversy. However, the political leanings of a presidential candidate’s estranged teenage daughter should not be making the rounds in the respected news media.
I believe the reason for the coverage, and therefore the blame, comes from the source of the story. Slate is one of the foremost respectable internet publications, and holds itself to journalistic standards typical of print magazines and newspapers, not political blogs. Many sites take cues from the way Slate reports on the internet, and their coverage of this nonevent resounded in the mainstream press. This type of material is posted all the time on many political blogs, particularly Wonkette, which posted a follow-up article with pictures of the underage Giuliani drinking at a party. The reason why these articles are generally unreported in the mainstream press is because they come from the world of blogs, which the mainstream press is still not entirely sure how to deal with. Those unconscious quotation marks, in print or in tone, are readily apparent in news from “the blogosphere.” It is inevitable that the two will grow closer together, as blogs like DailyKos and Gawker have become their own miniature media empires, and respectable news sources now regularly feature blogs on their site. One can only hope that this will result in higher-grade reporting from blogs, and not lower standards of news journalism in the mainstream press.

What happens on facebook doesn’t stay on facebook (city council should be blogging)

November 4, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I was thinking about posting this up last night, but decided that since I really like Jeff Kingsbury as my elected representative, I’d nudge him towards blogging publicly, rather than doing this.

Be careful what you say online, even when you’re surrounded by your friends.

UPDATE: ~~Jeff’s not on my friends list on Facebook anymore. I don’t know why~~. What he did wasn’t all that bad, though I can see why people are getting bent out of shape.

This thingie is an argument for more online communication by Jeff and other electeds, not less.

What is the “hat tip” and why its important

November 3, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Find something on another blog and want to share it on your own? Make sure you do a hat tip:

A hat tip is an acknowledgement to someone (or a website) for bringing something to the blogger’s attention.

Hat tip is also, sometimes, abbreviated as h/t or HT.

In addition to acknowledging someone else’s work (hard or not), the hat tip is a great way to expand your readers blog reading universe. Its a way of telling them, “did you find this post interest? Well, let me tell you about this other blog over here that writes about this stuff all the time!”

Done well, it helps expand the number of relevant blogs around you, increasing your relevancy as well.

Done poorly, it makes you look stupid:

If you find something via another blog or even get an idea from another blogger, you should give the blogger credit. Sometimes this is called a hat tip (or h/t) and sometimes you’ll just say “via” and then link to the blogger. Failing to do this can get you in trouble fast. Bloggers are resourceful, too. You can’t really hide! There once was a woman who liked my own blog so well, she copied it right down to the name and the weekly features! Once I caught her, all my blogger friends jumped all over her! Not a good way to make friends.

And:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but at some point, if a blogger repeatedly refuses to acknowledge the source of his inspiration and it’s obvious (and it will be) where it came from, readers will pick up on it, they will wonder if you have any original ideas of your own and they will begin to think of you as a phony. As in the real world, whispers behind the back occur in the blog world. If someone is guility of using other blogger’s work, the offender may notice his statistics going up, or frequent visits from the same source. That’s because once you’re tagged with this label, people will check in on you frequently to see if this pattern continues. They will take notes and they will tattle on you.

Oly2012 not netroots, for now

September 6, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

You’re doing it wrong (from their email tonight):

Oly2012 is a net-roots organization dedicated to helping decision-makers significantly improve downtown Olympia before 2012 by mobilizing an active network of well-informed citizens.

Things I know about Oly2012 so far:

1. They don’t have a blog, a online bulletin board, or any sort of online exchange (private or public).

2. One of their founding members Pete Stroble does post at Everyday Olympia and Olyforums, but I think that’s a far cry from actually being a netroots organization.

I don’t have a quick definition right now, but being netroots is more than having an email newsletter and posting stuff to your site every once in awhile. They could add a blog, but its more about an online democratic decision making process than simply discussion.

Being at Everyday Olympia and Olyforums is a good start, but its not enough to call the organization netroots.

I need to think about this some more and email Pete. Or something.

OH NOES, he’s steeling our content!

September 6, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

more animals

Yeah, really he’s not.

Olympia Online RSS is a sweet idea.

A bit… uh… janky, but it does the job ok. Its basically a feed aggregator for a handful of blogs in Olympia, a lot like feedtacoma.com, but that website is less on the janky side.

The arrival of Olympia Online RSS is hilarious because of Jason (enpen)’s reaction to a similar effort by Rick over at Olyblog. Read here.

S6 over at Olyforum does a really good job at not really getting it here as well.

The whole thing drives off the RSS course very quickly into Rick and Jason’s personal issues with each other, but Jason’s initial point of “using my rss feed on your site is wrong” is very wrong on its own.

It is not stealing content. There are spam blogs out there that blatantly copy content from rss feeds, but neither what Rick is doing at Olyblog nor Olympia Online RSS are doing that. They’re linking. Automatically linking, but linking in any form is good.

From cluetrain:

Thesis 7: Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy

The ability of the internet to link to additional information – information which might exist beyond the formal hierarchy of organizational structure or published material from such an organization – acts as a means of subverting, or bypassing, formal hierarchies.

Washington State Dems have a blog (2 years, 4 months, and one day later)

August 27, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Ken Camp had a great idea, oh two freaking years ago. That the state party should use the web in a better way, including developing a blog, to expand their reach.

Chair Dwight Pelz’ reaction at the time was pretty stupid:

Invariably some comment will be posted there, and then attributed by someone as being from “an official State Party publication”. A scandal is then born.

Yeah, right, ok. Whatever Dwight.

Now, you’ll be happy to know that the state Dems are blogging.

I guess in the two intervening years, blogging has become a lot less scary to some folks.

I wish the Democratic Party in Washington State was more like Chad Lupkes

July 23, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I don’t think I’ve ever met Chad in person, but I feel his wake a lot down here in Olympia, and I’m pretty late in saying that I appreciate his efforts.

In a way I wish there were more people like Chad, but there already are hundreds of people in the state party that do what he does.

Washington Democratic Chairs is a much better website than our state party website. Much more focussed on being creative and giving tools to citizens than doing whatever the state party website does.

Just an example, here you can find a shape file and a kmz file for precincts for most counties in Washington.

Lakewood is lucky to have Neary

June 23, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Good lord.

I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t that Walter Neary was typing and blogging that first ticked off the public commenters at a Lakewood City Council meeting last month, it was that he disagreed with them at the time that the city could do anything at all about the Clover Park School District. The city and school district being seperate governments and all.

But, they complained that he was blogging when he should have been paying attention to what they were saying so they got pissed.

Most telling for me is that on his original post there are only two comments.

Look Lakewood, you’re lucky to have a city-councilman that takes this so seriously that he blogs about it. First, learn some basic civics. Second, blog back at Neary.

That he was blogging what you were talking about tells me that he was actually taking you very seriously, he found what you were saying interesting and that he thought other people should hear about it.

TVW embed tool is live

June 21, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Its official, TVW has added customized embedding for all of their internet content. This includes (as I realized this morning how important this would be) the audio content. I would estimate 70 percent of the really good stuff (state legislative committee work) is audio only.

Via email from Greg Lane:

We’re pleased to announce TVW has added a new embedding tool to all programming found on our website tvw.org.

This new tool allows any event from TVW’s archives to be embedded into websites and blogs, and includes the ability to highlight a portion of the footage, but in a way that honors the balanced, unedited, gavel-to-gavel nature of TVW programming.

The new embedding tool is readily accessible just below the player window of every TVW video and audio event available at tvw.org.

Our goal is to be the most effective resource as possible for citizens to view the Legislature, state government and state public policy debate. We look forward to your comments, questions and suggestions, as well as working with you to improve our services.

Sincerely,

Greg Lane, President
360-725-3999
greg@tvw.org

What is “embedding”?

Embedding is the ability to place a video or other object in html code in order to display it on a webpage. TVW will now allow you to “embed” a TVW video or audio event on another website or blog while TVW’s servers securely stream that content to your web visitors.

Embedding instructions

Embedding TVW video on your website is simple and very similar to YouTube’s embed function. With a little knowledge of html you can quickly get TVW’s video playing on your website or blog.
To embed an event from tvw.org:

* Click in the text field under the video player area or click “Embed”. This will select all of the code needed to copy into your site or blogs html editor.
* Use the “Right mouse click” and chose “Copy.” This will copy the text to your computers clipboard.
* “Paste” this code into your websites html code or your bog’s html editor.

(For specific hosted blog spheres and how to embed video code, please consult the appropriate help section of your blog site or contact your webmaster.)

Advanced embedding options

TVW’s advanced virtual-clip feature is unique to the web. This feature allows you to choose a “Start” and “Stop” time, essentially creating a virtual clip of a TVW event. This, however, does not edit the actual event – it allows a user to continue playing from the point the clip ends and review the event in its entirety right from your webpage or blog.

To use the advanced features, click the “Use Advanced Embed” button and set the start and stop times. These times must be in a HH:MM:SS format. You can also set the width dimensions of the video. The dimensions feature can only be set in conjunction with using the virtual-clip feature. To simply embed the video without a virtual-clip, click the “reset” or “Use Standard Embed” buttons. This will clear any advanced embed features.

For further questions about TVW’s embedding feature, contact support@tvw.org.

Here are a few lessons learned from this little adventure:

1. Even though I care about something and have cared for a bit, just me caring about something doesn’t mean something will actually get done. I started thinking and blogging about TVW and social media over a year ago, but it wasn’t until a more prominent blogger crossed swords with them did this ball get moving.

2. Small organizations with good people can do great work.

3. Mark Gardener, who jumped on this issue early (here and here), apparently trying to pick Goldy on the issue, looks like a total ass. Still. What really bothers me about his writing on this was that he was so quick to make it into a “oh wow, this is really going to hurt those Dems” thing when there were so many issues here to mull over about how this could be bad for blogger, citizens and democracy in general.

Oh well, don’t want to look too far outside the blinder, eh Mark?