November 29, 2004
I'm having a CivicSpace/Drupal orgy and I'm loving it
by Liza Sabater
Nothing like an orgy to start the week on a happy note. OK, so it does not include Viggo Mortensen in the flesh --or for that matter any other object of my lustmonkey fancies. BAH! There's no need for them fleshy when I've got the blue-drop guy to twiddle my blogdiva fancies.
Playing with the CivicSpace implementation of Drupal is the kind of techno-bloggy-geeky mental masturbathon that I just have not had the time to enjoy in a while --and I've been at it all Turkey weekend long. Let's just say I'm having a blast. Can you say "technobaster"?
Since the infamous Blogtercation of 2004, I've been looking at all kinds of open-source blogging software. I've installed and played with b2evolution, Textpattern, and WordPress.
I've even installed locally the mother of all open-source content management systems, Plone. Unfortunately I had to pass on it due to incompatibility with the technology at my new host, TextDrive. And yes, I looked and perused longingly at Drupal, but at the time it did not make the cut. It seemed too complicated for what I wanted. Still, thanks to the changes in licensing at MovableType, development on version 4.5 of Drupal was advanced, and by the specs, it looked promising. So I waited.
We were anyway in the middle of the elections and I knew I was not going to do any major technology twiddling until after November 2nd. I just did not expect the twiddling to start soon after, on November 3rd, but it did. With Kerry losing the elections and democrat and progressive citizens asking , "What's next?", I have not had too much to wallow in the horror of a dominionist controlled US government. On the contrary, got all fired up.
So the barely alpha version of culturekitchen.net is up. I'm doing this all alone and things are not moving as fast as I would like them to, but the bare-bones of are there and ready for you to try out.
Yep, Y-O-U. YOU.
One of the major questions I was asked post-November 2nd was, "Where do I go?" Heavy hitters like Eschaton, TalkLeft, and Daily Kos are known everywhere. But there are thousands of progressive bloggers out there doing their own thing with not much exposure. Then Rebecca McKinnon posted RConversation: Blogging for change, a request for creating an RSS list of non-profit organizations and the idea hit me --why not do the same for the progressive bloggers?
Why not categorize all the progressive bloggers out there and have one place where to find them all? So people new to the blogosphere could go to one place from where to start their journey across the "blue" blogosphere. Sure, a blog roll might do, maybe just going to Feedster and running a query might be another alternative. The little problem with that logic is, if you are new to the blogosphere, you would not necessarily go first to Feedster or Bloglines because you wouldn't even know what an RSS feed is.
And so the reason for my using CivicSpace.
I am not going to outline here all the features that come with the system. That will be the topic of future posts. CivicSpace was created by the Howard Dean campaign in order to help coordinate "the troops" online and off. Especially off. So you can coordinate projects, events, and volunteers by grouping people into online communities as well as geographic ones. Yes! CivicSpace was created to use the "always on" availability of the internet to organize reality-based people into or around brick-and-mortar communities.
That's why the grassroots work for the Dean campaign was impressive. That the outcome was anything but; well, that's a topic to seriously discuss later.
So the idea is to turn culturekitchen into an open-space where offline progressives can find their online counterparts and become part of the personal media as social-networking revolution that is creatively transforming our culture.
Hmm. Do you think this should be the site's mission?
Suffice it to say that the aggregator is not only up, but if you sign-in and join the culturekitchen.network, you can:
- start cook up some webfeed goodness by adding and categorizing your feed or list of feeds
- nibble away all the feed samplings by using the system to re-blog.
Those are just the beginning and end. In between, would you like to send that post immediately to del.icio.us? Don't worry, that's already covered. Would you like to subscribe to the comments of your reblog? No problem. Email the page? Gotcha. Rate the post and keep it on the front page longer? Yep, can do.
Let's just say that the potential for making this one of the biggest and busiest blogfucking orgies in the history of the blogosphere is HUGE. My blogdiva loins just swell with delight at the thought of just using those features. And that's just for the aggregator/reblog.
So mozy on down to the culturekitchen.net. Once you login, I'll have to approve your membership and assign you a role you'll be ready to go.
Any questions? Just holler.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Activism, Blogs, CivicSpace, Culture, Culture War, Design, DevLog, Drupal, Grassroots, Howard Dean, Liberalism, Open Source, P2P, Politics, Social Networks, Social Software, Technology
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