Muxtape
Muxtapes are all the rage on twitter right now, so I thought I’d make one, too. Muxtape brings the old art of making a mixtape onto the web in an interface that is so simple it might seem confusing at first.
You can get yours at muxtape.com.
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Twitter in Plain English
You’ve seen me mention twitter on this blog, or you’ve noticed twitter updates in my sidebar. Still wondering what it is? Lee LeFever can explain.
This is actually only part of what’s cool about flickr. @lenedgerly points out that the video “misses power of links- Twitter as news & idea source.” You might have to try it for a little while to see what he means.
Donate $10 by 3:30 PM to Earn $50k for Kids in Cambodia
This is from Beth Kanter:
Here’s the deal. We need to be in the top four charities that get the most unique donors in order to win the $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation. Right now we’re number 5, only trailing by 28 donors.
Essentially, I am asking YOU for $10 (USD) to help children in Cambodia. Donate here before the contest ends 1/31 at 3:00 PM EST.
[Video removed because code was messing my blog.]
To learn more check out the rest of Beth’s posts from this campaign.
Check Out Beth’s Blog
Yesterday, I mentioned on Twitter that I gave a presentation at work about using an internal blog for sharing news and announcements.
Before I knew it, non-profit tech consultant Beth Kanter was interviewing me via IM about the presentation and the launch of the internal blog. I gave Beth my slides from my presentation and she put the whole thing together as a blog post called “Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: The ROI Approach.” If you are interested in the subject of using technology for social change, you should check out the rest of Beth’s blog.
Privacy Matters
[This post is the the third in a series (1, 2).]
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I want it all.
I want my data to be free, I want to be in control of it and I want to have control over my privacy as well. Is that too much to ask? The watchdog group Privacy International released their annual report today about privacy around the world and put the US in the lowest category – “endemic surveillance societies.” Can we figure out how we can minimize surveillance while balancing privacy and the incredible opportunities that come from making at least some of our data open?
In the background of Marshall’s overview of contemporary privacy issues are discussions of our “post-privacy era.” Chris Messina, who has been involved in developing standards and technologies for handling personal data on the internet, writes:
My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!)
Still … there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep…
I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly.
The history of the US government’s surveillance of its own citizens says to me that privacy has actually always been an illusion. Old FBI files show the government maintaining decades worth of minutia on people’s affiliations and associations. For example, in close to 1000 pages of FBI documents that I have on the Greater NY Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the early 1960s (when my father was the Executive Director), for practically every person mentioned there are lists of political meetings they were known to have attended and organizations they had been members of, often dating back to the 1940s.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
Out with the New and in with the Old
My new tumblelog has arrived at http://minorjive.net (feed).
A while ago I decided to set up another Wordpress blog as a tumblelog, to keep clippings of web content that I come across on the web. I didn’t like the limited functionality of the popular hosted Tumblr service, so I thought it would be better to have my own setup. I really like the T1 Wordpress theme, designed for tumbleloging, and the QuickPost plugin, which allows you to post on the fly, as you surf. But each Wordpress installation is work to maintain, and I was having trouble finding time to fully customize my setup. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when QuickPost stopped working right. I never got around to diagnosing the problem and I therefore simply stopped posting the the tumblelog. The site devolved into an archive of my twitter posts, which publish to the tumblelog automatically each night.
In the meantime, Tumblr added some of the features I wanted (namely an audio content type and (sort of) tagging), and I started to think that less might be more, especially when less includes less site maintenance work for me. I’m still waiting for tagging to be fully functional, and I’d like to see commenting. But the main thing is that I find myself using and enjoying my Tumblr site.
So again the link:
The tumblelog subscription and site links in the sidebar now point to my Tumblr site. After I recycle the content from the old site that I want to keep, I will retire it from the internet.
(If you’re unclear on the tumblelog concept, try the classic explanation by kottke or the more recent one by Brian Oberkirch.)
Video Blogging
I didn’t know much about video blogging except for zefrank’s The Show, so I found this overview of the history by Steve Garfield quite interesting. It’s also interesting, if you’ve been wondering what seesmic is all about (it seems to be all the rage on twitter). Some may have noticed that I’ve been bitten by the twitter bug; I also liked Steve’s concise characterization of twitter: “where you can participate in conversations in a central spot.”
Hungry Blues Gets a Tumblelog
http://hungryblues.net/tumblin (feed)
What’s a tumblelog? People often cite kottke’s early definition (early as in 2005), in which he says:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness … with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing … really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
With much less time to write on Hungry Blues but a lot of time still spent on the web, I’ve been really drawn to tumblelogging. For the last several weeks, I’ve hesitated to start, however, because I wanted my tumblelog to have a little more functionality than the most readily available tumblelog implentations—tumblr, a free, hosted tumbling platform, and gelato, which aspires to be the Wordpress of tumblelogging software. Mainly I wanted tagging and search, so I can find stuff after I’ve posted it and collect stuff with particular projects or interests in mind.
So here’s what’s under the hood of my tumblelog:
- A separate Wordpress installation.
- Tumblejack theme to give Wordpress that tubmblelog look and feel, with stylized presentation of the 4 main content types (link/text, quote, photo, video). For another WP tumblelog theme definitely check out Matt Herzberger’s MH_Tumbler theme.
- Josh Kenzer’s recently released Quick Post plugin, which allows me to post the different content types and tag them on the fly, as I surf the web, without ever going into the Wordpress back end or a desktop editor.
Aside from a few very small tweaks to the header template, that’s pretty much it.
Now that I’ve got it all up and running I’m totally digging it. I’d sort of like to do something with all that black space to the right of the sleek, narrow tumblelogging column, not sure what though, especially since I want to keep the thing light weight and minimal and not slow it down with a lot of extra blog features. One thing I’d like to see in a future release of Quick Post is the ability to add new tags on the fly, without having to navigate the WP back end.
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