Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

"An Indigenous Olympics?"

By Toban Black at Feb 17, 2010


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A post that I put together for the Sociological Images web site

Basically, I compare Olympics marketing imagery and rhetoric with the living conditions and activism of indigenous peoples here in Canada. (The post is about a Canada-wide context, more so than it's about Vancouver and the VAN Organizing Committee per se.)

I invite you to skip the blurb about me, at the start of the post.

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Lisa helped to edit the writing, and Gwen fixed formatting problems that I had left in there.

I also appreciate other help from Laura, Annick, and Steve.

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The post stems from a relatively brief e-mail that I had sent in to Sociological Images back on May 24th, 2009. After writing some thoughts on Flickr posts here and here, I had sent the e-mail to the web site editors to connect the same sorts of native issues to Olympics marketing that already was circulated around here in Canada.

Then, after May, I published a piece about some native activism in Ontario, and I became very involved in pro-native campaigning against the tar sands -- for the sake of wider climate justice.  (I have posted about climate justice issues here.)  (So far, I mainly have been a climate justice activist in a local Mobilization for Climate Justice group; but I also have started to form collaborative connections with people in other areas of the U.S. and Canada.)  And, over the past two weeks, I was very involved in anti-Olympic protest organizing, which I mainly joined because of how the day of action was connected with tar sands issues.

In a "Feminism and Race" Women's Studies grad course that I was in last term, I also worked through some indigenous and climate justice issues.  That course helped a lot with the writing that I did for the Sociological Images post.

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