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 impression in Denver. The Denver Weekly Alternative Newspaper, Westword, has put Denver DL in their annual "Best of Denver" issue.
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 while collecting the information you need without turning off supporters with scary data-collection forms.
Thank you all for coming. Here are some brochures. Now please leave.
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 how I think...
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 places of home and work), are central to local democracy and community vitality.
By exploring how these places work and what roles they serve, Oldenburg offers a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves.
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, Guo Liang of the Chinese Acadamy of Social Sciences published a study showing that only two thirds (and dropping) of Net users had email accounts, and of them, only a third check their email on a daily basis. Forty-two percent of Netizens did not use a search engine. Seventy-five percent had never made an online purchase.
Instead of replacing encyclopedias, newspapers, storefronts, travel agencies, yearbooks, and the U.S. Postal Service, Chinese people --both addicts and non-addicts-- were flocking to Video Gaming virtual worlds and million person-chat rooms. This is not the business-oriented Web of the West.
Guo's study explained that the Chinese internet user's online presence had very little in common with their real lives; they went online to escape. What and why?
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 to join a movement.
The point is, if you open up your system to potential supporters, give them the tools that they need to organize, you reap the benefits.
Thanks to services like Flickr that offer open APIs and open source projects like Drupal, now these photos can go viral.
Can you imagine if everyone who took pictures at all 6 of Senator Edwards' events this week could easily add to the online chorus of folks whose pictures are a testament to powerful call to action that John Edwards made around the country?
We can. Advomatic builds on truly open source systems to harness this wave by magnification not centralization.
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 (also called a CIDR mask). This conversion is something I always have to refresh my memory on and am often frustrated because I always forget the very simple relationship between these two ways to express a netmask value.
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 for, or I just remember now without a reference to prompt me. I decided this time I should share some of these items so that others may reap the benefits of my collecting. Enjoy!
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 people who have done field work on campaigns. These online tools have been invented to help power and steer existing physical campaign infrastructure.
Culture grows and spreads through environments organically. It evolves. When culture spreads via built environments, its evolution can be intelligently designed.
Consider this example: What I know of as Lindy Hop, that athletic, exuberant, acrobatic dance, was essentially invented at the Savoy Ballroom in 1935 by Frankie Manning.
Like so many things at the time, national interest in Lindy was piqued thanks to footage from a Lindy Hop competition getting included in Paramount, Pathe, and Universal movie newsreels. We're talking a reach way bigger than YouTube. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
What is the culture of MySpace? Youth culture in the town where I went to high school was dominated by the 'hegemonic' jocks and their arch rivals, the 'transgressive' burnouts. The closer my town's burnouts were to the adult-prescribed action, the worse they felt about themselves. The further away from the mainstream they could get, the greater their self-respect. Whether that meant nonparticipation, obliteration through drugs, sitting on the loadingdock steps of a poolhall, it was a matter of psychic survival.
With MySpace, the jocks, burnouts, preps, and theatre geeks are all in the same space. For most teens, MySpace is simply a part of everyday life. I guess Rupert Murdoch would be Mister Vernon. They are there because their friends are there and they are there to hang out with those friends and get validated. Of course, its ubiquitousness does not mean that everyone thinks that it's cool. Many young adults complain that the site is lame, noting that they have better things to do. Yet, even they have an account which they check regularly because it's the only way to keep in touch with many peers. The millennial generation doesn't email.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker in 1999 called "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg." In it, he tangentially explains how it's been mathematically proven that Kevin Bacon is NOT the most connected actor, that distinction goes to Burgess Meredith (Rocky's trainer).
Why? For value, the 70 year length of Meredith's career was overshadowed by the extraordinary range of productions Meredith acted in -- from Oscar winners to B-movie shlock, to commercials, to theatre, to character work on TV, he's worked with them all.
What Meredith was to movies, Lois Weisberg is to Chicago. Gladwell dubs her a 'connector' - she knows everybody (including Meredith), she introduced Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov, just by chance, you know, whatevs.
The Netroots came under the microscope last weekend as the Vertical Media descended upon Vegas to observe YearlyKos (Whose website Advomatic hosted flawlessly BTW, y'all are welcome).
Even Big Russ II, the political junkies favorite pusher, wanted to know what the netroots meant for mid-terms '06 and '08, so he gathered his peeps and round-tabled YKos on Meet The Press. Tim Russert even had Kos, who was awesome, via satellite from Sin City.
The New Yorker had an article recently about a consultant who monitors blogs and messageboards for her client. She keeps her eyes peeled for keywords, "flame-ups", coded messages, and signs of attacks. It's something like the Tactical Messaging Department of Advomatic.
Only her client is the United States of America and she does her work for National Security:
Rita, who was born in Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic spends hours each day monitoring the password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics and trade tips. source
She describes her compulsive observations of these communities an addiction. The CIA calls it a breakthrough. "Occasionally, a chat-room member will announce that he is turning in his user name and password and going to Iraq to become a martyr, a shaheed."
Then Rita Katz takes action:
How delicious! Advomatic helping train more people for the Drupal revolution.
What do y'all think about Aaron W's description of the new Advomatic friendster style product discussed in the video? I think it is money-in-the-bank. (Thanks Josh! )
I, Franz Hartl, just joined Team Advomatic. My first blog is about two things:
First, a complaint about Advomatic. While I have received an Advomatic Ipod, I have NOT received my Advomatic Gas Station shirt. Need I remind y'all why I left Team Zissou? I got the Speedo but never the red cap.
Secondly, I lust after Drupal. Seriously. I lust. In the wake of Drupal 4.7, the people in the know know that the CMS (Content Management System) game is now over. And for the people who don't know? Ping us, and allow us to learn you something.
Advomatic is sponsoring the second local bugfix meetup in San Francisco. We will be working hard to get Drupal 4.7 out the door. Details are posted on Drupal.org.
We will meet at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco from 1 to 6pm to tackle the issue queue. Stop by for a few hours to review, test, and create patches. Working in the same space will allow us to collaborate on issues. A good overview of how to help is at the Jan. 19 bugfix post.
Goal:
To define features in Drupal that are missing to effectively run a campaign/community site, develop an implementation roadmap with input from the core Drupal developement community, and create the technology in a focused development session. This effort will be sponsored by Drupal development firms and other interested parties. All products resulting from the effort will be contributed back to the Drupal community.
Scope:
The area of feature development centers around how to improve user management (registered or not), user related actions (volunteering, email list signups, donations), and metrics relating to these areas.
The fine folks over at Drupal.org, the Content Management System that we use to build all our client's websites, are fundraising for a new server. Without them, we really wouldn't exist, so we're matching up to $500 for every dollar that is donated to the cause.
The guys over at Civicspace are also matching up to $950. At this rate, Drupal is going to have a gigantic server farm to take over the world with. Global Domination. Good times.
