All-American Presidential Forums on PBS
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/28/2007 - 08:30Yesterday, I received two interesting tidbits about the All-American Presidential Forums on PBS that will be happening this evening. The first was in a discussion with Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA). It was through the MBA that I received credentials for the Libby Trial. This time, they are working with PBS to credential bloggers to cover the Presidential Forums.
I have mixed feelings about credentialing processes. Too often they can be used to re-enforce a status-quo of who’s in and who’s out. MBA has done a great job of bringing in some of the bloggers that I consider some of the great under-recognized bloggers.
Faye Anderson will be blogging at Anderson@Large. I believe I first met Faye at the Media Giraffe summit back in 2006. She is a bright and engaging blogger, whom I’m pleased to see will be speaking at BlogHer at the end of July.
Another great blogger from New York City that will be there is Liza Sabater. Liza writes at culturekitchen, and The Daily Gotham. It seems like I run into at Liza at every blogging event, and she is always bringing up important questions. I really look forward to her coverage of the forums.
Terrance Heath, of the The Republic of T. is going to be there. I first met Terrance through the Progressive Bloggers Alliance and we were on a panel together in DC a few years ago. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but I still enjoy reading his blog.
Then, there are bloggers that I learned about through MBA. La Shawn Barber and I were supposed to be covering the Libby trial at the same time, and I started reading her blog because of this. We do not agree politically, and despite putting in lines like “Liberals are such crybabies”, she usually writes pretty insightful material.
I think I first stumbled across Kim Pearson through MBA. However, she writes so many interesting things, I may well have first read her writing about Second Life, some sort of media reform activities or something else. I’m glad she’ll be blogging the Presidential forum and I’m also glad to see that, like Faye, she will be speaking at BlogHer.
Another blogger that I really enjoy reading that will be part of the credentialed bloggers is Pam Spaulding. I’ve never met Pam, but I really enjoy reading Pam’s House Blend.
There are several other bloggers that I’ve read here and there but don’t really know or follow. I look finding out more about them. In many ways, I think I might be more interested in hearing from the bloggers who are credentialed than from the candidates themselves. MBA has set up this page to aggregate the feeds of these bloggers. It looks like a page worth watching.
If that is not enough, Michael Forbes Wilcox writes that Governor Deval Patrick will appear in the televised presidential debate. It was Michael and his friend Lori that first introduced me to Gov. Patrick and I echo Gov. Dean’s comment about Gov. Patrick, "Governor Patrick is a rising star in the Democratic Party and an outstanding example of the strong leadership vision and values that our party offers to American people."
While I didn’t think much of Wolf Blitzer hogging the spotlight at the debates in New Hampshire, I do hope that we see a lot of Gov. Patrick during the forums.
So, I’m excited about the forums. I’m excited to see Gov. Patrick. I’m excited to what the bloggers will say. I’m even hopefully that the candidates will have something interesting to say.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 22:42Okay, this isn't really wordless, but...
Once you've watched the video, if you have a little more time, go out and listen to, or read this speech
Helping the voiceless find their voice
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 07:36Yesterday, my daughter brought in the mail. It included a package from the Edwards campaign, a kit for hosting our house party on Wednesday. My wife and I looked at the package with a sense of excitement and nostalgia. Four years ago, we hosted house parties for Gov. Dean’s Presidential campaign. Now, we are doing it for Sen. Edwards.
For those of you who don’t know what a house party is, it is really very simply. You have a bunch of your friends over to your house, let them know why you are supporting a specific candidate and encourage them to contribute to that candidate. In short, it is a simple fundraiser.
I remember when we first talked about hosting a house party. It reflected a profound change in the way we understood politics. Back then, I thought of politics as a game for the rich and well connected. There is no way that regular person like I could host a Presidential Fundraiser.
Well, campaigns have changed. Some of it is due to the Internet and the ability of people to contribute online. Some of it is due to candidates that understand that democracy isn’t a spectator sport, reserved for the rich and well connected.
No, today, we can all be much more involved. We can work together to help change our country. My wife and I learned that from Gov. Dean and so now we’re hosting a house party for John Edwards because we believe that he is the candidate that is doing the most to help the voiceless find their voice, whether it be helping bringing his voice to calling for an end of the war in Iraq, getting people to focus on the needs of the poor, in New Orleans, the whole gulf coast, across our country and across our world, or in many other ways.
If you want to find your voice in the political dialog, if you want to help others find their voice, please attend a house party Wednesday night. If you’re in Stamford, CT, please come to ours. Otherwise, find one near where you live, or host your own.
It is a wonderful feeling to realize how much difference we all can have.
(Cross posted at John Edwards' blog)
Looking at rankings, linking and other statistics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/25/2007 - 20:51Two weeks ago, I joined into a viral tags boosting experiment. Essentially, it was a way to boost your Technorati authority and ranking, and potentially also your Google page rank. At the time my Technorati authority was somewhere around 170. Much of that was because of being part of the Progressive Bloggers Alliance, which has mostly fallen apart, other than linking to one another.
This latest experiment boosted my Technorati authority up to around 350. Essentially, this is a way of looking at how many people are linking into the site. However, that doesn’t really have that big an effect. What really matters is how many people read your site, or, depending on the advertising system you are working with, click on links in your site to external sites. During the last two weeks, traffic has actually decreased 15 to 20%.
There are a lot of ways that you can measure traffic. My site uses Drupal the access log shows an average of 4000 hits a day from an average of 1000 different IP addresses a day. However, I am sure that includes many spambots, various sites reading my RSS feeds and who knows what all else.
One site that many people use to track traffic is Alexa. Alexa gathers data from many sources, including an addon to Internet Explorer. I use that addon which helps boost my rating there. Another way is to link to your site using Alexa redirection, e.g. http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.orient-lodge.com. I don’t like the second approach. I want people to be finding my site in searches and not have it hidden in some redirection.
So, by simply using the tool bar, Orient Lodge is ranked fairly highly on Alexa. As a matter of fact, it is ranked higher than Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign sites.
Let this be our song, no one stands alone
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/24/2007 - 19:51Today, Trinity Emmanuel Church in Stamford, CT dedicated a Garden Labyrinth ‘to the glory of God and in loving memory of Malcolm Wechsler’. The Right Reverend James Curry officiated.
Trinity Emmanuel has gone through tough times. Stamford had two small Episcopal churches, Trinity and Emmanuel, which merged into Trinity Emmanuel. Last fall, Malcolm Wechsler, who had been their organist passed away. During my journey, I’ve attended Trinity Emmanuel from time to time, along with many of the other Episcopal churches in the area.
This spring, The Reverend Kate Heichler started as Priest in Charge at Trinity Emmanuel. Kate and I go way back. In the early 80s, we both attended Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan. It was a special time for many of us. Wednesday nights we would gather for prayer groups. On summer weekends, many of us would travel to Ocean Grove together. We would swim and sunbath on the beach during the day and in the evenings sit on the porch of The Kings Inn and sing folk music. Few of us had any idea what our lives would bring.
I met my first wife at Grace. We were married there. Our eldest daughter was baptized there. We moved to Stamford, CT and stayed in touch with our friends from Grace, but over the years drifted away. By the time my wife and I separated, we had lost touch with most of our friends from Grace.
Kim and I met and started dating. Kim’s mother was fighting cancer and on Kim’s birthday her mother went to be with God. The priest from Kim’s church, Christ Church Bethany, came over to sit with us as we grieved. On Sunday morning, Kim and I rallied and made it to Christ Church.
It was a strange day for me. Everyone there had been supporting Kim for so long during her mother’s illness, and they all joined in the mourning as they met me for the first time. It was a strange day for Kate Heichler as well. It was her first day as Seminarian at Christ Church and everyone was meeting her for the first time as well. We looked at each other asked each other, what are you doing here?
I guess that is the question that we all need to ask ourselves from time to time, what are we doing here?
Now, Kate is Priest in Charge at Trinity Emmanuel. She is helping the community at Trinity Emmanuel on the next phase of its journey, as she starts the next phase of her own journey. Kim and I are worshipping at Trinity Emmanuel as we wait to find where the next phase of our journey will lead us. Like the early days at The Kings Inn, Kate is getting us to sing folk songs again.
At the end of the service, we sang a song, “Draw the circle wide”. Part of the chorus goes, “Let this be our song, no one stands alone”. Perhaps this ties together so many of these stories. It is something Kate, Kim, myself, and hopefully many others have learned in our personal journeys. It is something that churches like Grace Church, Christ Church and Trinity Emmanuel need to understand, especially during these days of conflict in the Anglican Communion. And, it is something that we especially need more of in our political discourse. We need leaders that are committed to making sure that no one stands alone, when they come home from Iraq, when the attend schools burdened with an unfunded ‘No Child Left Behind’ slogan, as they try to get sufficient health care, as they look to see their city rebuilt after a hurricane, or after so many things in our lives that make us feel alone.
