Archive - 2007
August 4th
NCSL Pre Game, Continued
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/04/2007 - 11:51This evening, I shall be heading up to Boston to blog the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Like any such blogging outing, I like to spend a little bit of time ahead of time getting my bearings. This entry will provide a little insight into my thoughts going up.
When Gov. Dean ended his 2004 Presidential bid, he encouraged his supporters to run for office. It was probably the first time that I gave any serious consideration to state legislatures. Kim decided to run for State Rep., and I was surprised to find that 85% of people don’t know who their State Reps are. People asked Kim if she would have to move to Washington if she were elected State Representative.
Over the following years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, especially through Democracy for America, that are very interested in State Legislatures. Many important legislative decisions are made at the State level, and State Legislatures are a great farm team for the U.S. Congress. It is shocking how many State Legislative races go uncontested.
Years before all of this, I was at a financial services conference where Eliot Spitzer, who was Attorney General in New York at the time, spoke about the importance of state government in response to pressures from federalists. As the federalists get more issues pushed down to the state level, state legislatures become even more important.
It was through a group of liberal bloggers focused on regional issues that I first got the idea of attending the NCSL annual meeting. As I searched around, I found that Bill Hobbs from the Media Bloggers Association attended last years NCSL annual meeting as a blogger and I was glad to see focus interested in the role of blogs in our media ecology covering the event.
I’ve spent some time reading through press releases, the schedule for NCSL, contacting various State Legislators and activist groups and slowly the narrative I’m expecting begins to emerge.
Back when I was in high school, I went to a symposium at Williams College where Lester Thurow was a keynote speaker. He spoke about how as the basic needs of people could be met by fewer workers, more and more time would be spent arguing about how wealth would be distributed. That idea has stuck with me. When Kim was running, I remember Gov. Dean commenting about how much of the time in State Government ends up being about the allocation of resources.
Grover Norquist is often quoted as wanting to get government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” It has been suggested that he should have borrowed Bush’s Mission Accomplished sign to put up over New Orleans.
One of the methods to shrink the Federal Government has been to push programs off on to the States, but not fund them. In response, lawmakers at the NCSL annual meeting will on the schooner Roseway on Sunday afternoon for a modern Boston Tea Party.
State lawmakers will show their displeasure with the growing number of unfunded mandates and cost shifts passed along to the states by the federal government.
I expect to hear a lot of talk about cost effectiveness of various proposed programs. I sure hope that is the case. However, I do have some doubts.
As I read through the program, I find NCSL gratefully acknowledging ‘the National Grid/KeySpan for the continental breakfast’, ‘AT&T for breakfast ‘, ‘LexisNexis for lunch’, ‘Propylon for dinner’, ‘Wyeth Pharmaceuticals for this reception.’, ‘Zipporah Films for this session’, and ‘AstraZeneca for this tour’.
Concurrent with this, I received an email on a different list about eGovernment. These are from my activists friends who seem primarily driven by a love of technology or a desire to make the government more open. I hold both of these positions, yet what needs to be talked about is how eGovernment could make various government services more cost effective. I hope I’ll see a little bit of that too.
Beyond that, I will be looking at various initiatives on education and childcare, broadband, supporting local agriculture and other rural initiatives. I will be looking closely at how well different state legislatures understand the importance of the emerging regional political blogs. I will be looking at if any state legislatures are taking advantage of blogs, citizen journalism, and even high school journalism to get their message out and further their agendas.
It should be a fun few days. If you have thoughts on the annual meeting, or issues you would like me to pursue, please leave me a message and I’ll see what I can do. Then, stop back and lets see what really happens at the NCSL annual meeting.
August 3rd
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.
August 2nd
Housekeeping
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 11:55Yesterday, I rearranged the blocks on the right side of my site. I’ve added a block for ‘Cambodian Bloggers’. Beth Kanter is trying to raise money to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit. It will take place August 30-31. She has been invited to provide a keynote, train the trainers and help bring a stronger connection between Cambodia bloggers and those of us here in the United States and around the world.
I’ve known Beth for quite a while from the non-profit blogging circles and have great respect for the work she does. If a bunch of us all chip in, it would be great; money well spent.
I also moved the Lijit Widget from my general group of social network widgets up near the top. They provide a neat interface to Google so you can search on all your sites, both directly and within your social network. They provide nice little icons pointing to the different social networks your in, and a cloud for searches that have been done.
Lijit is still very early stage. There have been a few bugs setting it up, but their customer support has been great and I hope to see a lot of neat features coming in the future. Like RapLeaf, which does provides reputation related information, I believe their social network aggregation is one of the really important emerging trends, and I’ll be writing more about this soon.
In other website related stuff, quantcast has now gathered enough information to start giving me additional details about my audience. The graph shows the ups and downs of the week. They are currently saying that I get around 2000 unique monthly visits, or which around 1400 are from within the United States. Of that, around three quarters are people passing by, yet the regulars make up about half of the actual page views.
A lot of the traffic I’ve been getting has been Trackback Spam. I worry about the amount of strain the filtering of the spam places on the server, so I’ve ended up completely shutting down trackback on the site. The blog posts that have been getting the most traffic recently have been my posts about Falcon Ridge. I posted a comment about it in Livejournal and Facebook. I expected that Facebook would drive more traffic, but interestingly enough, much more of the traffic has come from Livejournal.
My post about The Motherhood got a fair amount of traffic, some from The Motherhood itself, others from Salon, where my wife wrote about it and on Been There, a blog by Emily and Cooper from The Motherhood. It terms of the interconnectivity, that sites like Lijit and Rapleaf are starting to explore, I found it interesting that Emily and Cooper were also both early contributors to Beth’s fundraising appeal to go to Cambodia.
Yet the post that has been getting the most traffic over the past few days has been my post about Zachary Cohn. I do hope that people reading the post stop and think a little bit about pool safety, the importance of product liability lawsuits, and getting more politically involved. Even more so, I hope that readers stop and read a few of my other blog posts. Yet the whole thing feels a little bit uncomfortable. It feels a little bit like people rubbernecking at a celebrity car crash. I sure hope that isn’t a major reason for the traffic.
Beyond the website housekeeping, the legal issues around the selling of our house continue to escalate. I do believe there is a place for litigation, but it should be avoided wherever possible. Kim, however, sees the actions as impacting Fiona’s education and is starting to talk about wanting not only fairness, but vengeance. I am hoping we will find a peaceful resolution soon enough. Until then, since we are looking at litigation, I’m going to remain mostly quite on this.
Some of Kim’s anger is perhaps fueled by the flareup of her lyme disease; yet another stressor. The final stressor I want to talk about is my mother’s surgery. On Tuesday, she had knee surgery. I spoke with her yesterday. She was groggy from the painkillers and from the lack of sleep. She wants to get home as soon as possible, but it does sound like the surgery went well and she is mostly getting the care she needs.
Any of you with a religious bent, are encouraged to lift up prayers for my mother, for Kim and, I guess, for all of us right about now.
