Liminal states

One of our topics Saturday’s conference call (notes here) was how to make contact with our allies in congress.  Jean from Green Bay mentioned that she and a couple of other people were going to go to one of Senator Russ Feingold’s upcoming Listening Meeting in Wisconsin.

The first opportunity is this Saturday on Valentine’s day (February 14) at a Listening Meeting in Chilton, events in Madison and potentially Milwaukee on March 1, a cable advertising opportunity in Green Bay on March 4, and more.  To keep track of it all, we’re going to use a wiki page as the planning hub for this.

Here’s the current versions of our goals for the project:

• get a better understanding of the situation in Congress and Senator Feingold’s strategy
• get Sen Feingold to make a video on “what it means to get FISA right”
• introduce ourselves to Senator Feingold and get a working relationship in place
• pilot techniques that we can use as part of a 50-state strategy
• get blog and media attention, at least at the local and state level, and hopefully nationally as well

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please digg, retweet, and follow on twitter

Update, 2:30 PM: please also digg and retweet the Nordstrom action alert

Update 4:30 PM: Jen Nedeau’s Can social media save the day? has more

Last Friday’s #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt.  Here’s the data.

Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting.  While it’s hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter.  The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday

Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels — and had a measurable impact on digg results.  According to retweetist popular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there’s clearly significant upside here.  And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.

Like I say, great results for a first attempt.

So let’s try it again!  Please digg and retweet.

And please also digg at least one of the first posts (1, 2, 3, 4).  While it’s too late to get any of them on to digg’s front page, this is still a very useful way of tracking how far this discussion has spread.  Thanks!

To follow along on Twitter, using the new improved magic incantation.*

Additional discussion, and a little more data, below the fold.

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DRAFT, CURRENTLY BEING REVISED SUBSTANTIALLY.   New recommendations here.  Thanks all for the feedback!

Final version to appear in The Exception.

Collaboratively authored with Tracy Viselli.

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DRAFT!  Revised version published on Reno and its Discontents.

Thanks all for the feedback.

And please, digg it!

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Last night’s #topprog Tweetup, discussing the next steps for the new progressive Twitter hashtag, had some excellent discussions.   Chris Cardinal (aka @cacardinal) has set up a skeleton web page on topprog.org and did a great job facilitating the tweetup; he’ll be writing up a summary later today.   Somehow, though, I wound up with an action item — writing up a couple of quick scenarios for ways to use #topprog.   How’d that happen?!?!?  Looks like my meeting skills are rusty!

Still it’s a good thing to focus on.  Twitter hashtags are extremely flexible, and there are zillions of things we could do with them.  What are some of the sweet spots?  And how do we use #topprog to accomplish them?

I’ll kick things off with a couple that seem important: action alerts and events.  Suggestions and feedback  are very welcome: in the comments here, or tweeted to #topprog if it’s 140 characters or less 🙂

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Draft.  Work in progress — feedback welcome!

The revised version will (hopefully) be posted on The Seminal

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Richard Wray, in Facebook aims to market its user data bank to businesses on guardian.co.uk:

Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.

No, ya think?

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, sporting a tie, demoed it at Davos.  (No report on whether any attendees brought up privacy issues.)  Mark also shmoozed with Robert Scoble about Facebook’s “intense” year, and defended Facebook’s arbitrary and secretive banning policy:

He also said that his system looks for “outlying” behavior. He said if you behave like an average user you should never trigger the algorithms that will get you kicked off.

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Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

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It still bugs me that Steve Elliot’s Get FISA Right: Last Chance To Vote Against Domestic Spying was buried by pro-surveillance diggers after I foolishly twittered it to the #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) channel.  So when I got Alan Rosenblatt’s email about a new #topprog hashtag, my immediate response was that we should think about how to use it for information diffusion including posts that might be worth digging.  Not that I’m competitive or anything ….

Of course as Twitter Vote Report and the Motrin Moms have shown, Twitter hashtags are potentially useful for far more than that.  From the Get FISA Right perspective, for example, it’s another great way of broadcasting our dailyish update — and the same’s true for every other grassroots campaign out there.

One especially intriguing aspect of this to me is that Twitter is a far less male-dominated environment than digg, email and the blogosphere — and indeed the early posts to #topprog include @WomenWhoTech, @nerdette, @PunditMom, @myrnathemynx and many others.  So it’s a great chance for a key piece of progressive infrastructure where feminists and womanists — and women in general — can participate on a fairer basis.

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I’ll be offline for the next week or so, back visiting my Mom in Folly Beach, South Carolina.  Oh, I might go by a Starbucks at some point, but for the most part, don’t expect to see me ’round these parts.  You’ll have to make do with the Folly Surf Cam,

Try to keep the net running without me!

From Pyramind’s announcement:

Beat University is a non-profit partnership between San Francisco institutions Pyramind, LoveFest and Supperclub to raise money for the only dedicated electronic music scholarship fund in the entire U.S. The quarterly series of electro, house, and trance parties at top dance venue Supperclub will donate all of its proceeds to help up-and-coming electronic music producers fund their education at Pyramind, the city’s leading digital audio and music production training facility.

Supperclub’s a great venue, and the DJs didn’t disappoint.  In the main room, Digital Paradigm had the floor packed by the time I got there at 11:30, Frost Raven followed on with a psytrance set, and Liam Shy rocked as always, with a lot of unreleased stuff.  Unsurprisingly it was a very young crowd, and interestingly almost nobody was drinking.  The vibe was happy and casual.  Good stuff!

5000, but only 1400 announced now … meaning everybody gets to twist in fear over the next 18 months.  As MiniMSFT says:

Personally, I feel like we’ve taken the Sword of Damocles and rammed it through a bunch of pink slips and now we intend to dangle that above the head of Microsoft for the next year and a half. All the way through the end of FY10, folks. “Cut once, cut deep.” Or, you know, don’t. If you have insight to this counter-intuitive plan, please share.

The earlier thread on Mini is also good reading.

Meanwhile, Google defied expectations with strong results — as did Apple and IBM.

jon

PS: There’s a Facebook group Help Microsoft Friends Find a Job (and no doubt others).