Technology
Entries related to technology.
Post Broadcast Revolutions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/21/2006 - 07:42(Originally published at Greater Democracy)
“The Revolution will not be televised”. Gil Scott-Heron told us so. Joe Trippi repeated it, but CTBlogger, Spazeboy and Scarce, among others are doing it anyway.
“The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox”. No, it will be brought to you by Kinko’s and YouTube, by Sony and Microsoft. They will sell you Lenin’s rope.
“The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon”. It will show you pictures of Bush and Lieberman.
“The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.” However, clips from each of them are likely to appear in the mashup.
“The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.” It will be recorded by all of us. It will be animated in flash. It will be mashed up, spread by emails and downloaded to video Ipods.
Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right. Maybe the medium is the message. When I was young, I had “thirteen channels of shit on the TV to chose from”. In other countries, where there was one state run television, the TV studios were the first thing to be taken over during a coup.
Now, we have YouTube, Google Video, and plethora of other tools for distributing video. We have Flash, Movie Maker and iMovies to make our content.
The seeds of the revolution is everyone becoming able create and distribute their own content. We saw the beginning of this with blogs. Now, we are seeing it with online videos.
Technology Playday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/20/2006 - 17:53Fiona threw up last night. Both Kim and I are dragging, so I’m going to focus on some simple fun stuff for a little bit.
Last night, I was asked if I could come up with a map mashup of the different training locations for the Ned Lamont petition drive. I ended up using map builder, which is pretty nice. The first map I produced was this which shows the twelve different locations where we have trainings scheduled.
The second map I produced was this. I took a list of over 600 donations made to the Lamont campaign from people in Connecticut during the first quarter. Map builder geocoded them and added them all to a map. To me, it looks like it follows pretty closely the population density of Connecticut.
Today, I went for something a little less strenuous and created my first page in Google Pages. Very simple and easy to set up pages, but so far it doesn’t seem to have any neat Web 2.0 type functionality.
Next, I played with Google Calendar a little bit more. Anyone who wants to check out my calendar can check this. I tested loading a calendar from Drupal. It seems to work, but needs more testing.
Now, if only I can combine some Google Maps and Google Calendars into a Google page, things will really come together.
Tech Soup: Online Social Networks event
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/19/2006 - 10:19Tech Soup is having an Online Event on “Using Social Networking Applications for your nonprofit org”. They listed several social networks, and I’ve added the following comment about the online social networks I’m part of. I’m posting it here as well, because a lot of you have asked me from time to time about my thoughts on different online social networks.
Here is a brief run down of the online social networks that I use:
New Organizing Institute
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/26/2006 - 14:18Sunday afternoon. I am at a friend’s house in Washington DC. Yesterday, I did a training at the New Organizing Institute. This is “a unique grassroots training and research program created by experienced online organizers and technology professionals in politics in conjunction with MoveOn.org”.
Over 700 people applied to be part of their first training. They accepted 40 whom they split up into six teams. Each team will build a campaign for a fictitious candidate. I trained one team in setting up a campaign website using CivicSpace. For those who don’t know, one of my various ventures is to set up low end campaign websites through SmartCampaigns.
Monday’s Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/30/2006 - 11:29Unread emails: 221. Unread blog posts: 5226. If you knock out the 4600 from the Progressive Blog Alliance, it isn’t quite so daunting. Health: Marginal. Fiona has been fighting a cold and I’m run down and a little congested.
Recent webpages that have caught my eye:
http://www.afsc.org/iraq/cray-video.htm Naomi sent an email about this video. Check it out.
http://newshare.typepad.com/greylocknews/2006/01/nandi_plunketts.html Nandi Plunkett is a junior at Mount Greylock, where I went to high school.
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