Technology

It's part of the reason why I want to upgrade the site --so I can better integrate it to the services I use like Twitter.

How can you catch what I am writing? Open an account at Twitter.com and once you do that, "follow me" at http://twitter.com/blogdiva.

And with that in mind, who do you think is going to do better job, Barack Obama or John McCain? What do you want to see your candidate do? What do you expect them to do?

I really, really, really smacked down the urge to get an iPhone because it was bound to the detestable ATT; whereas I am already bound to the somewhat detestable TMobile.

Obligatory segway into political commentary : I hate ATT because it's the company that came after the breakup of ITT which was one of the major corporations to finance dictatorships all across Latin America in the 60s and 70s.

Anyhow ...

Am looking at this image and am totally feeling my bossom heave. HAWT!

 BTW : Does the G1's trackball have an outie?

To be honest, I am not so enamored with the actual casing. As one twitterina said, "it looks cheaply made". Yet the price is looking all right : Starting at $179, which by the time you get your data and voice plans in place and pay taxes and fees, it's probably going to run to about $225 initial price with about $40/month in usage fee.

Yes, I am looking at you Jay Rosen

In The Front-Runner’s Fall, Joshua Green claims to have emails documenting the implosion of the Clinton campaign :

"Hillary Clinton’s campaign was undone by a clash of personalities more toxic than anyone imagined. E-mails and memos—published here for the first time—reveal the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown."

I have to ask : How can they publish what is supposed to be private correspondence? Or is there some privacy clause that applies differently to Senators and/or presidential candidates?

Thanks for any and all answering this question.

Yesterday I had a bit of fun at the expense of the Republican noise machines and their efforts to paint themselves already as a loud and marginalized minority in Capitol Hill. I was so caught up on the moment that I didn't blog about it until this morning but Kenneth Quinnell described it as a "Twitter Bomb" and has happy to spread the word :

Twitter Bomb

This wasn't my idea (although I came up with the cool name), I think Liza Sabater was the one who started it, but it's too brilliant to pass up.

Those of you who are on Twitter, send as many tweets as you can over the next few days with #dontgo in them. The conservatives are using this hash mark (like a tag) to spread misinformation about offshore drilling and their latest publicity stunt. What Liza and a few others started doing was to flood that hash with counter-commentary or irrelevant posts. Sort of like a google bomb, this can either disrupt what they're doing or, at the very least, annoy the crap out of them. We can all do this.

Whatever you're posting on twitter, try to fit #dontgo into it. And make sure you include the # sign, which is key.

If you aren't on Twitter, this might be the type of thing to get you into it.

And before I even start to explain, let me break down the lingo for you.

ooVoo.com is a multi-person chat service that has turned the personal and often 1-to-1 idea of video IMing into a social networking event. Anyone with a computer, broadband connection and a web camera, can use ooVoo for real-time video calls with up to six people simultaneously.

So, to kick-off August as the beginning of the end of the US Presidential season (the Democratic Party's convention is at the end of the month, followed by the GOP's convention on the first week of September) ooVoo has convened a convention of their own, My ooVoo Day Political.

NowPublic is one of the fastest growing participatory news networks in the world. Time Magazine voted it last year one of the top 50 websites and The Guardian UK declared it's one of the top 5 most resourceful news sites in the world.

They have come up with a way to measure "news influence" on the web. They insinuated that traffic to one's site and/or blog is not one of the lead indicators, but how the people listed are connected to others (especially other influencers) through social media like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others.

I honestly don't know what to make of this list. I am at the same time amused and disturbed.

I already published at The Daily Gotham how it's weird that Arianna Huffington comes in at #2 because I thought she lived in California, not New York City. Then there's the grand daddy of the New York blogeratti, Nick Denton, coming in at #34.

It is though rather refreshing to see friends and colleagues on that list : Anil Dash, Nancy Scola, Joshua Levy, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung and one of my biggest inspirations as a web designer and developer, Jeffrey Zeldman.

Yet, and I repeat what I already said at our New York site, the most disturbing data point of this list is that I come in at #9.

Yup.

I am, as per NowPublic, one of the "top ten" news influencers in the New York new media market.

I will definitely have more to say about this new metrics system. Suffice it to say that I think it is not only thought provoking but vindicating.

It's cool that someone has been able to measure what I've been up to for the last two years : Building a sphere of influence through networked broadcasting and outside of the metrics of traffic volume or popularity.

As a former student of neo-baroque aesthetics and its network effect in arts, culture and communications, I felt inspired of the potential I saw on the web 12 years ago. It was a potential that I saw unfolding in the Net Art movement. And it was a potential that I saw come to a halt when Big Business, Big Media and Big Politics threw themselves on the net as a way to accelerate their hierarchical and teleological standards of growth and success.

Think of the 3 Bigs thwarting the growth of the net by imposing the growth of the walled web gardens a la Facebook, Daily Kos or The New York Times.

Yet networks are networks and old standards of influence and success will succumb to the net effect; not to the old measures as a result of the false scarcity and uniqueness created by popularity.

So, even though I truly believe this is a flawed index, it is by far the best attempt at measuring influence based on assumptions that are native to the technology and structure of community and communications on the web.

You can find them at http://youtube.com/user/blogdiva

They're not the bestest quality but you can get a good sense of the excellent presentations by the likes of Van Jones, Mark Pesce (who I've already written about), Brian Behlendorf, Craig Newmark and others.

If you don't know who is Mark Pesce and/or have never heard of HyperPolitics, go read the whole lecture on his blog RIGHT NOW!.

Then come back and watch the videos that, albeit incomplete and a bit jerky, really give you a good idea of how incredibly important is Mark's framing of community development as it happens through mobile technology and the web.

I have to admit that I don't go to a lot of technology conferences. It's not that I am not interested, on the contrary, I'd love to be able to attend each and every one of them. The problem is that I am in the situation that many other bloggers (especially women and people of color) are trapped in : We don't make enough money out of blogging to be able to afford a conference budget.

It's not just the airfare and hotel and the conference fee. As a working mother who is self-employed and has 2 children, traveling to conferences is not only absolutely prohibitive if I do so out of pocket. It's the emotionally draining logistics of who's going to take care of my children while am away. Unfortunately, in a city like New York not having family available or a nanny on payroll is a HUGE child-care liability.

So the few conferences I get to go am either paid to go because I am on a panel or I get to go to them because they're local enough (meaning a train ride away).

Outside of RootsCamp NYC (which happened 2 years ago) and this year's PodCamp NYC, there's not much for free or affordable the techie and geeky at heart here in NYC. Well, at least not much new to me because if I were to include some of the stuff happening at Eyebeam, well, yeah, that's geeky enough.

Which is why going to PDF is such a joy.

So Kos uses his blog, just like Michelle Malkin, to parachute on the AP controversy and call himself a hero. In the post not only does he quote an AP article (something I had done earlier that day for fisking purposes), but proceeds to dump on both Rogers Cadenhead, Bob Cox and Ron Coleman for having the temerity to talk with the AP about guidelines :

"The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't)."

This, mind you, after the fact that Rogers had asked for those guidelines. Here's the back story :