Blogs
Bloggers as group-psychotherapists
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/16/2007 - 22:01I’m feeling a bit fragile right now. My eldest daughter goes to college in Virginia. My second daughter will be a freshman at the same college in Virginia in the fall. I know what it is like to have a loved one far away and to worry about them. It is compounded by complications for me at work and at home.
As I tried to work today, I came back to the news. I saw people talking about it on Twitter. I read emails about it on various mailing lists. One pointed me to Psychological First Aid and to Group Psychological First Aid.
Over on John Edwards’ blog, Elizabeth Edwards wrote a wonderful post about Courage and Peace and Mercy and some of my thoughts came together. I like to talk a lot about community; how it takes place on line, its role in politics. It is times like these that we need to pull together as a community. It is times like these that we can pull together and show a little kindness, through communities of bloggers and emailers and online chatters and any and every other way we can reach out to one another.
If you blog, if you send emails, if you touch other people who may be far away from Virginia Tech, but who are related in one way or another, take a moment. Read the Psychological First Aid paper. Don’t try to be a psychologist (unless you are so trained), but think about what you can do to contact and engage people around you in a in a non-intrusive, compassionate, and helpful manner. Think about how you can provide emotional comfort and calmness.
You know, it’s probably a good way to interact with people all the time, and not simply in times of crisis.
Fundraising maps
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/16/2007 - 19:30The Des Moines Register has an interesting article today, looking at how the candidates did in fundraising in Iowa. Romney led the Republicans and Edwards led the Democrats. So, I thought it would be interesting to see how things look in a few other states.
In New Hampshire, Obama edged out Clinton $49,971 to $45,500. Edwards was third at $25,100. In South Carolina, Edwards far outstripped the competition $186,109 to Clinton’s $36,100 and Obama’s $31,810. Richardson and Biden did relatively well there with $22,000 and $13,000 respectively. In Nevada, it was very strongly Clinton, $317,000 to Obama’s $63,530, Edwards $45,500 and Richardson’s $32,650.
Home states when for their native sons and daughter. In New York, Clinton raised $7,034,167. In Illinois, Obama raised $3,756,756. In North Carolina, Edwards raised $1,421,149. In New Mexico, Richardson raised $2,799,017. The only other state that Richardson was the top fundraiser was Arizona where he raised $71,325. Dodd led in Connecticut with $1,006,410. Biden led in Delaware with $279,000. Those were the only two states where Dodd and Biden led.
Using a neat little Web 2.0 tool to mashup states, it was very easy to create maps showing where Obama, Clinton, and Edwards lead.
Obama:
Clinton
Edwards
I’ll leave the interpretation of these maps as an exercise for the readers.
Note about the methodology: I downloaded the files from these candidate from the FEC website. It was a fairly long and tedious process so I didn’t bother with Kucinich or Gravel. I might go back and check them later. Using the Filter Table functionality, I extracted the SA17A records for type IND, which I understand to be the individual donations. I then used a pivot table to break it down on a state by state basis showing what I understand to be the amount available for the primary. I then combined the individual pivot tables into a single table for comparison. My numbers checked out with the Des Moines Register’s numbers, so I know that at least they used a similar methodology.
(Cross posted to Greater Democracy)
The Culture of Cruelty’s Katrina Moment.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/15/2007 - 11:47So, Don Imus got fired this week for racist and sexist comments about some college basketball players. He remains a top search on Technorati and a major topic on the Sunday morning talk shows. Now, everyone is putting their spin on it. People point out that Imus has always said offensive things. Why did we get a backlash this time? Media reform activists have been talking about the role of media consolidation. People have been tying this to the developments in the Duke Lacrosse case. Yet it seems as if there are some other interesting stories to be tied in.
Keith Burris had a column in the Manchester, CT Journal Inquirer where he wrote,
You don’t get to go around calling people whores, even if you, or your fans, think it is funny. It's not civilized. It's rude. It's not nice. But maybe that's the point that’s been missed. More and more in our society, you do. Uncivilized behavior and crude, rude talk, is de rigueur.
I think Burris is on to something important here. March 30th was Stop CyberBullying day. It was a day to focus on fighting back against “uncivilized behavior and crude, rude talk”. I believe that the backlash against America’s Next Top Model is part of this push back.
On Meet the Press, this morning, the discussion about Imus centered around what David Brooks called the “Culture of cruelty” and Gwen Ifill called the “Culture of meanness”
Fiona Flying a Kite
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/14/2007 - 16:19
A maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/14/2007 - 10:03The other day I read that a bunch of my friends were moving from Twitter to Jaiku. I set up my Jaiku page and subscribed to the RSS feed of my Twitter page. I tried sending an SMS, but it never got through. I checked around. I then tried snowballing my contacts, and the only person I found there was Scoble, and he didn’t have any contacts there. So, I’m not currently using Jaiku in any significant manner.
However, it does have the nice feature of bringing in a bunch of different feeds, so I added Orient Lodge, Blip.TV, Flickr. Later, I read about someone trying to tie their Facebook status to their Twitter page, and I poked around a little bit on this. If you go to your Facebook status page, and change profile.php? to minified.php?status& you will get the minified page that has your statuses. From that page you get the RSS feed for your statuses, which you can subscribe to with Jaiku (or any other feedreader).
The next question became, could I subscribe to any of these via Twitter? One person recommended TwitterFeed. This raised a new issue. To sign into TwitterFeed, you need to use OpenID. LiveJournal uses OpenID, and I could have used that. However, TwitterFeed also pointed me to idproxy.net. idproxy.net provides a service where you can use your Yahoo! id as an OpenID. In addition, they have details on how to set up your own site for OpenID, using idproxy as the server. I’ve added that to Orient Lodge, so I can now log into sites using OpenID using Orient Lodge and Yahoo’s authentication.
I logged into LiveJournal, and that worked. I then started to set up ClaimID. I didn’t see ClaimID doing a lot for me, so I’ve left it with only a little information.
Back to TwitterFeed, I added Orient Lodge to my Twitter feed, and every time I add a blog entry on Orient Lodge, it is now showing up nicely on Twitter. I then tried to add the Facebook feed, but that isn’t showing up properly.
