Archive - Aug 3, 2007
What are we teaching our children?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 20:14As United States citizens, we hold dear the right to vote and the promise of free and open elections. If we do not hold ourselves to these standards, and the standards of freedom of information, the U.S. Constitution and the Connecticut Constitution, what are we teaching our children?
Last night during his keynote speech at YearlyKos, Gov. Dean spoke about the importance of reaching out to the youth. As people get into the habit of voting, they stay in the habit. This afternoon, I listened to a panel about problems with voting suppression. So, when I found the above quote, it caught my attention.
However, the quote wasn’t from an article about voting machines or requirements for photo ids. It was from a Freedom of Information (FOI) complaint filed in Burlington, CT.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Avery Doninger. She was class secretary at Lewis S. Mills High School, but was not allowed to run for reelection because she had referred to the school superintendent as a “douchbag” in a blog post. Her mother is now suing the school.
The Cool Justice Report quotes a student at the school as saying,
"On the day of elections everyone (I mean everyone) wrote in the girls name next to 'Secretary' and circled it. At the end of the day when they had to tell us who won they said that the elections were so close that they were going to give kids who weren't there a chance to vote the next day. The girl who won only had like 7 votes because everyone voted for the girl who wasn't running."
Based on this, he is trying to get a copy of the ballots and there is a lot of legal wrangling back and forth. This was the context for the quote above.
Well, Andy is asking the right question. What are we teaching our children? Perhaps the folks at Lewis S. Mills High School are teaching the right message, after all, in a convoluted manner. They are teaching our children the importance of constant vigilance in defending things that keeps our country strong, like freedom of speech and free and open elections.
I wish all of the students luck in this most important lesson.
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Bridging a digital divide
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 14:26When I hear ‘Digital Divide’, I typically think impoverished inner city youth. I think of impoverished single moms struggling to get by. I do not typically think about the elderly. Yet this is a thought that has been building in my mind.
In the spring, my daughters volunteered at a local nursing home. Mostly, they spoke with the residents, played trivia, played a little bit of piano for them, the things that volunteers have been doing for years at nursing homes, just as I did when I was their age.
However, my perspective on this has changed, in part because of the developments of this past week. You see, on Tuesday, my mother had knee surgery. She is still recovering in the hospital, but will go to a nursing home for the next phase of her recovery in a few days.
At the end of June, Mairead, Miranda and I went up to visit my mother.
We talked about her using a computer to see pictures and videos of the family that I put online. She had an old laptop around and I fixed it up a little bit. However, she has essential tremors and being able to type or move a mouse is very difficult for her. The tremors also cause her to stutter, so speech recognition wouldn’t work well either.
After our visit, I posted pictures on Flickr. Later, my brother visited and showed her the pictures online. She greatly enjoyed them and hopes to find ways of seeing other family pictures online.
When Kim’s grandfather was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, they made a scrapbook of pictures from his life. As the disease wore on, he had more and more difficulties recognizing the pictures, but for a long time, they were a touchstone for him.
For a Wordless Wednesday recently, I scanned in a childhood photo which my mother and brother greatly appreciated.
Yes, we could print out photos and mail them, but too often we don’t get to that. For that matter, too often many of us do not manage to make it to the nursing homes to visit our parents. In my case, it will be difficult. It is a several hours drive, and it is even longer for my sister.
But, I do write about my life here. I post pictures on Flickr. If someone can help my mother access them, it will bridge a different digital divide, it will bridge a generational divide, and it will bring great happiness to many people.
So, if you live in Williamstown, MA and are willing to stop by at Sweetbrook Nursing home over the next few weeks, find my mother and show her recent pictures and read her some recent blog posts. If you have elderly relatives in Stamford, CT, let me know. I will visit them and help them access your content online. Most importantly, let’s reach out to one another to help elderly people that have difficulty accessing the internet find content put up by their families and friends.
Oh, and if someone does help my mother, here’s a pictures of Reilly I think she would like
How do you surf?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 09:58SEO experts spend a lot of time talking about getting incoming links to your website and boosting your Google Page Rank, your Technorati authority and similar measures of links. Searching my logs, the largest single source of referrers is Google searches, and this is clearly important. However, as I noted from Quantcast, half of my traffic is from ‘regulars’, people that come back again and again.
Since my focus is more on community and relationships, I’m more interested in these regular readers than the casual browsers. It got me thinking about how to get casual browsers to become regular readers and how to get regular readers to become even more frequent readers.
Some people push their RSS or Atom feeds as a way to get people to read more regularly. I’ve taken to usually putting my whole entry on the front page, and in my RSS feed so that people can more easily read the whole entry. Yet, I would really prefer people to come to my site and get the whole experience as opposed to seeing the post in the context of whichever feedreader they are using. I want people to see the widgets. I want them to see what else I’m interested in, what is going on in my broader community.
That is part of what I like about MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, and the other community widgets. They encourage you visit each blog.
All of this leads me back to my discussion about social network aggregating. I would like a good aggregator to pull together my posts on various different sites. Usually, for larger posts I do that manually by posting at remote sites and cross posting at Orient Lodge. For Microblogging, I have Twitter subscribed to Facebook as well as Orient Lodge, and I have Jaiku subscribed to many of my feeds.
For bookmarks, I would really like some sort of tool to aggregate, sort, sift and rate the different sites I’m interested in. For aggregation, I would like to pull in all my communities from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and BumpZee. I would like to pull in sites that I’ve tagged with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I would like to pull in the feeds I’ve subscribed to with BlogLines and Google Reader.
For each source, I would like to see the sites I’ve subscribed to, tagged, or joined. For each site, I would like to see the where I’ve bookmarked them from, what tags or categories I’ve used, and how I rate them. Ideally, I would like to be able to increase or decrease the rating with a single click. I would like to be able to navigate from one site to the next easily. Right now, it takes two clicks to get from one MyBlogLog site or BumpZee site to the next. It takes three clicks on BlogCatalog.
I would like to add Geotagging into this so I could select sites based on their location, and I would like to add the RSS components so I could visit only sites that have been updated recently. Of course there would also need to be an option to make the lists public or private, or if ‘friends’ capability were added, to make the lists available only to friends.
Using Ruby on Rails, I whipped up a fairly quick prototype. Version 0.1 doesn’t include any RSS or OPML parsing to load data from other systems. As far as I know the MyBlogLog API isn’t available yet, so it doesn’t load from there. However, it was very quick and easy to pull together.
I’ve deliberated about whether or not to share this as a blog post, or to try to find someway to monetize the idea, after all, I do need to find some real cashflow soon. However, as I noted, the coding is pretty simple, and I suspect that there are plenty of people having similar ideas. So, instead of trying to be all NDA and everything, I’m posting the idea here. Perhaps others are interested in the idea and we can refine it further. If you’re interested, let me know your ideas.
