ThinkStream

Activism is great, as long as you don’t expect the Federal Government to be the solution to everything.

Jonah Goldberg on Laziness, Inactivity, Progress, & Conservatism on National Review Online: “The ‘Just Don’t’ school holds that most problems solve themselves. If nobody else will solve your problems for you, you will be far more likely to fix your own problems. This is a naturalistic philosophy in that it embraces the natural order of things. No creature — except for man — takes responsibility for the ecosystem it lives in. Sharks eat as much as they can eat. Birds fly where they want to fly. Bears crap in the woods without so much as a ‘by your leave’ from park rangers. Everybody does what they do and the ecosystem achieves balance because of it.”

Robert Cook, a true hero and brother, laid down his life to save a complete stranger, embodying the core values of the fraternity to the last full measure.

Patrick illustrates a point that GOP campaigns consistently refuse to get, time and again: email is not direct mail, and familiarity is more effective than stirring prose. As Patrick points out, the average online reader takes in only 20% of the content of the average email, so if your content isn’t easily scanned, chances are your efforts are for naught. Especially when your 1,000 word missive hits my inbox at 5:30pm on a Friday.

Considering how easy it is supposed to be to integrate social bookmarking into your site, it took way too long to find this — a simple Javascript driven way to add a del.icio.us bookmark link to a regular old web page. Thanks to blifaloo.com.

The operative code here being:

document.write(‘linked text‘);

Luigi Montanez serves up some commentary at techPresident that takes Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus theory and applies it to the online political world.

Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody explains “Cognitive Surplus”.

Shirky posits, among other things, that Gin got humanity through the Industrial Revolution, and that today “Desperate Housewives” fills the same role.

Cognitive Surplus = Free Time

Of course it’s more involved than that, and the ramifications are very important from an online political perspective when you look at the explosion in citizen involvement in politics ala the Obama campaign.

Basically, Shirky is saying that society is growing into interactive social media, and that this change away from one-way push media is going to become the dominant paradigm. Montanez extrapolates that out into a view of short-sided Beltway insiders talking about Obama’s huge political supporter list only in terms of its ability to produce cash.

The real value, as Montanez cuts to, is the social network’s ability to take action:

Political activism is no longer the domain of a few die-hard (and kind of weird) party activists and political junkies. As the Obama campaign has proven, it’s something within the grasp of all Americans, because with the help of social technologies political activism can now be on our own terms.

Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffini, and Soren Dayton team up to produce what will hopefully be the place where GOP online activists can coalesce around winning message, strategy, and technology. Sign up for The Next Right and stay tuned.

The Post examins the Twitter phenomenon in layman’s terms. While I think Twitter itself is more useful and important than the article claims, it’s a good overview. The real value of Twitter is not the service or the communication itself — it’s the people that you follow. If you follow people who have intelligent things to say, be they professional, personal, etc, you can glean value from their communication. Something like instant crowdsourced news/analysis/thoughtstream where you have total control over the crowd.

The conclusion that Twitter will prevent people from living in the moment has been leveled against every new method of communication and recording ever invented and as such is banal.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9569
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

What is worthwhile is difficult to achieve. This Memorial needs to be built, and it needs your commitment.

[ Background on the memorial ]
[ Build the Dream Blog ]

It is time for all of us to show our support by giving money. If we all give just a little we can actually start building this Memorial to Dr. King. The Memorial will not only be a tribute but a vital reminder of how precious civil rights are and how much people had to sacrifice to remind us that all are created equal.

Join my team and let’s see how much we can raise!

Designed by Mr. Kevin Lee Didit

SEO starts with actually being the best resource on your target keyword.

Once you have the relevant content, then you can focus on streamlining your site for being read by robots.

Google PageRank — named for Larry Page. (Bet you didn’t know that.) The toolbar tells you how important this page in relation to other pages like it.

Search engines do not index content in DHTML or AJAX elements. (at all?) (visibility vs. display?)

“Any time the user’s experience and the Spider’s experience diverge, it’s bad.”

Content: Use the inverted pyramid style for writing to get relevancy at the top of the page.

Search engines don’t follow pull down menus? (does that include Suckerfish, all CSS driven?) (need to compensate with sitemap to get the robots moving through all the pages on the site).

Links to your site from other sites that use your keyword are a (or the) primary determiner of page rank.

Reciprocal linking is not as heavily weighted as one way links. Benefit only goes from the linker to the linked.

…had to take off for the airport, I’ll try to find a more comprehensive post on this session or simply link to the presentation online as soon as I can…