I've been lax about posting here in recent weeks due to my inordinately busy schedule. Thesis writing, countdown to baby#2, and moving house have all been on the agenda and I've had little time to devote to blogging. In a way, it's been a very good thing. I've accumulated information, participated in some discoveries about new media use, and social networks. I'll do my best to share these things with you over the coming summer months. Going forward, Communicative Action will be undergoing a transformation of sorts in order to account for the sensibilities I hope to project via this forum.
Several years ago, I ran a website called Ital Stew, dedicated to US Politics and such. It was a heavy duty project, owing mainly to the use of FrontPage to build and update. The advent of Blogger and the ease with which we can all communicate via the web eliminated the need for such cumbersome tools and I've found a nice niche doing various things via blog. Politics at Ital Stew was presented in a pseudo-newspaper form with a front page and several dedicated sections. I enjoyed running that site although no one ever looked at it, and there were few means by which to promote it broadly.
How things have changed in 3 or 4 short years. Politics and new media are a marriage made in heaven in some respects. The ability to operate and transmit across the web to millions of people is facilitated by various means in 2008, and the capacity to build networks of people invested in communication grows by the day. Over the course of those same 3 or 4 years, my interest in media environments has grown to equal or surpass my interest in politics and democracy. As a result, I find myself engaged in writing a thesis on that very subject. This blog, as an evolution of my own interest, will branch out officially to include discussion of media, communication, democracy, politics, and related matters. Truth be told, I've already dabbled in that variety of work here over the last 6 months or so, but the mix will become more balanced, and the variety of work will become broader and more inclusive of the thematic nuances that exist across the spectrum of my interest.
Anyone who's been here before will notice several things immediately. In the right margin (toolbar) I've added a FeedBurner RSS feed to replace the standard Blogger Atom feed. Clicking there will allow you to subscribe to Communicative Action. Below the RSS button is a Share This rotating icon, which allows you to share Communicative Action with your network of friends and associates via e-mail, social networking sites, and blogs. One of these days, I'll figure out how to embed that in each post. Continuing down, you'll see the search widget for Lijit, which allows you to travel across the internet to my various social media pages, including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. It also allows you to search the entire body of sites for whatever you're interested in. Give it a whirl. There's a Technorati widget in the mix here, which allows you to share my blog via Technorati's service, and there's currently a fundraising widget that I made at Change.org, a progressive social network site, for Human Rights Watch. As usual, you'll find various links below all that mess.
During my transition, the site will undergo some construction periodically to make it a well oiled machine. In the meantime, I suggest you subscribe via FeedBurner and jump on Twitter to follow my micro-blogging adventures. Twitter is a preferred medium for quick updates on whatever I'm putting together at the moment. It's also a fascinating form of communication that will be getting bigger by the day. The title of this post is "Twitter and Tweet" to promote this facet of my new media arsenal. There's a Twitter feed in the right margin (toolbar) that updates whenever I do. As a final bit of promotion for this concept, I direct you to 10 Downing Street's micro-blog of the current G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's people are blogging, tweeting, and flickring from Japan and it can all be followed here. The micro-blog that 10 Downing Street is employing for the G8 Summit will be an important model for Communicative Action going forward and I hope to eventually incorporate a flickr feed, YouTube feed, and other means of communication readily available to build a personal media empire. Keep on the lookout.
4 comments:
When considering new media and social networking tools, remember, as a Publisher your sites statistics and revenue remain a primary goal. Along with consideration of functionality is the critical sanctity of Publishers private statistics. We at P.U.B. consider the safety of the information any app or widget(s) may be gathering, unbeknownst to the unwitting Publisher who installs them.
P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!
P.U.B. expects to hear back from Lijit on these financial and private statistics issues from P.U.B’s inquiry we sent to Lijit in mid April 2008. When we get this response from Lijit Networks we will let great Blog Publishers like you know their exact revenue/statistics sharing deal. Currently we are also working with Blog Publishers to track performance hit evaluations of Widgets too.
Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs. Thanks for being a publisher AND a dad!
Barney Moran for P.U.B.
Facilitator, Daddy Boot Camp, Boulder, CO
Mike has been posting at the clueless intern's thread, though, and showing what an idiot he is in the process.
Thanks for your non-idiotic contribution here rknil. Especially since no one knows what intern or thread you're talking about.
Brilliant piece of trollery. Go back to your cave and gnaw on the bones of whatever rodent you caught for dinner....and sweet dreams.
And yes, Robert Knilands, I know it's you in all your universally banned glory. It must feel good to be so widely despised. Being a legendary troll is a great accomplishment to some....some psychotics.
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