I’ve been pretty busy the past few days and fighting a sore throat on top of that, so I’m way behind in my emails and commenting on various things that have come up, so this will be a bit of a catchall post.

First off, I’ve been tagging more sites recently with Mento. Mento then sends them to del.icio.us and magnolia. My delicious tags automatically show up over on my Wordpress and blogspot blogs. The magnolia links show up daily in posts on this blog. So, people who regularly read my blog will have seen some of these links already. Yet, some of them should be commented upon themselves.

Virtual Rally is an interesting use of a very simple two dimensional world, where you really can’t do much of anything, as a means of getting people to express their concern about oil taxes in the Philippines. Last time I checked, it had received less than four hundred virtual protestors, and some of them are people from the United States creating people simply to test the software. Is it because lowering oil taxes in the Philippines isn’t that compelling an issue? That the site isn’t that compelling a site? Or something else? It seems like a simple thing that could be set up for some fun political action here.

Then, there is the Sharkrunners game put up by the discovery channel for Shark week. I haven’t played the game yet, but my brother-in-law is fascinated by sharks so I need to point out the game to him.

In terms of Twitter, there is an interesting video that is up on the Red Cross Chat blog talking about using Twitter during an emergency. It isn’t a great video. The guy seems to think that Twitter is used mostly by kids and the content usually isn’t very important. Needless to say, I disagree with the characterization of the Twitter users and their content.

However, he makes an important point about sending text messages being much more efficient on an overburdened cellphone network when there is an emergency. He talks about how the RedCross (which is on Twitter) is using Twitter to gather information about people that are safe and well in an emergency. However, his instructions aren’t all that great. He suggests texting ‘follow safe and well’ to Twitter. Actually, the Twitter account is safeandwell. I don’t know if putting in the spaces between the words will cause a problem.

Yet what is more important is that you don’t want to follow safe and well. In the case of an emergency you want to send a direct message to safeandwell On the safeandwell Twitter page, they ask that you send a direct message in the format ‘d safeandwell FIRSTNAME LASTNAME #### STREET CITY STATE ZIP CELLPHONE and a brief note about how you are. This gets automatically entered into a database that Red Cross keeps to help people find out how their family, friends and neighbors are in the case of an emergency.

Using Twitter to let people know how you are might be useful if you are in Denver for the convention and get swept up in any mass arrests. The CBS affiliate in Denver has an article about 'Gitmo On The Platte', a warehouse owned by the City of Denver where people taken into custody will be held. When I read about this, my mind goes back to the Republican Convention in New York City in 2004. Back then, it was Gitmo on the Hudson, and the city detained thousands of people without regard to due process or habeas corpus. Bill Katovsky has an article on Huffington Post about what has gone on with Gitmo on the Hudson. It will be interesting to see what happens in Denver.

In other convention news, people are starting to share convention calendars. SquareState.net has these events around DNC Convention. Rootswire has this calendar of convention events. Meanwhile, all my friends who are going are busy trying to figure out which events to attend.

Common Cause has a Symposium on Media and Democracy happening on the 26th from 10 to 4 PM.

CSPAN is teaming up with New Media Strategies to bring their Convention Hub which will launch shortly before the conventions. It will include real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08, as a bunch of other tools.

Also, in preparation for the convention and the ensuing battles, Jerome Corsi, author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, has his latest book out, ‘The Obama Nation’. You can read about his ‘opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign’ in the New York Times. The DNC is preparing for such attacks and are encouraging people to sign up for the Rapid Response Team.

Meanwhile, I continue to read The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield which I’m finding quite enjoyable and informative. I’ll write more about this later.

It’s a lot of random stuff, but I wanted to highlight it before I started digging through more of my inbox.