One of the tasks that seems to persistently find its way to my doorstep is building calendaring systems. Always maddening, incredibly frustrating and never as easy as it seems it should be, building a system that deals with events and dates and times is a rite of passage for many developers. You can always tell …
Read more »Insights
Drinking Liberally in the news
One of the great orgs we actively support, sponsor, and are building a new website for, is Drinking Liberally (DL). I personally host a DL event at the Mayan theatre in Denver every third Wednesday of the month. The NYC Advomatic team attends one of the NYC DLs every week. Well, apparently, we made an …
Read more »The Fish Ladder of Greater Participation
How do you promote deeper participation from your web membership, collect valuable demographics from them, and avoid triggering common negative reactions to data collection? With a clear set of objectives for your web site, and some new ways of structuring features, you can help guide your members to action on behalf of your organization; all …
Read more »How Social Networks Think
I’ve had difficulty explaining my networking concepts without resorting to some exasperated cliche like, “that’s just how I think about it.” Well, turns out that scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health are coming to the conclusion that that’s actually how the brain thinks. Of course that’s how I think about it. It’s literally …
Read more »The Internet as Third Place
Ray Oldenburg is an urban sociologist who writes about the importance of informal public gathering places. In his book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg demonstrates why these gathering places are essential to community and public life. He argues that bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other “third places” (in contrast to the first and second …
Read more »Societal Culture and the Internet’s Clusters
China’s “Netizens” number 130 million – and are growing 30% every year. Second only to the U.S., China is installing Broadband everywhere and internet cafes are the size of K-Marts and as abundant as Starbucks. In 2005, Dr. Guo Liang of the Chinese Acadamy of Social Sciences published a study showing that only two thirds …
Read more »Some Great Pictures from NH
This is a great photo set from Steve Garfield. He was in the blogger meeting with Senator Edwards and walked away impressed. You can read his and other New Englanders posts at a few blogs such as this. Edwards, in an unorthodox move, is not asking you to join a campaign. He is asking you …
Read more »Netmask width conversion
When setting up various services you will often be required to provide a subnet mask for the ip address you are configuring the service for. Sometimes you need to input the mask in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, sometimes in terms of a mask width, or bits, in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ww, where ‘ww’ is the mask width …
Read more »Sweet Commands
I have this knote on my desktop that I use to keep track of commands I use often, but not frequently enough to remember by heart. Its gets fairly long, and is invaluable for me in my daily internet building tasks. I occasionally clean it out, removing things I never use, have found better solutions …
Read more »What works on MySpace
Over here at Future Majority, I answered a question about how one can make MySpace work. I brought up an example of “virtual-to-field back to virtual mobilization.” The hugely unfunny and equally popular comic Dane Cook is the example. The basic point is that the best political tools on the internet have been invented by …
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