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

Consumers Unite!

By Michael McGehee at Aug 11, 2008


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Are you feeling some relief at the pump?

Maybe just a little?

Check this out:

The peak of the oil prices was at $147 a barrel in mid-July when the national average cost of gas was $4.00 a gallon.

Now it's $3.82 a gallon.

That is a $0.18 reduction. Now, I have personally seen a larger decrease (from $3.95 to $3.55).

That 18 cents is not even a 5% reduction.

Why do I say "just"?

Because the price of oil is now down to $115 a barrel, which is a 21% reduction!

So if we go off the national average then oil reduced by 21% while the national average for gasoline only reduced by 5%

Even the places that reduced gas prices the most didn't even reduce it by half the percentage as that of the actual cost of oil. The end result will be - wait for it - even larger profits for the oil companies while consumers struggle to get by.

While some oil company apologists like to sink their teeth into OPEC (and I am not saying they deserve a get-out-of-jail free card), it seems the OPEC countries reduced their costs of oil per barrel by four times as much as the domestic oil companies have reduced their costs of gas to us.

It is things like this that ought to have us consumers organizing into consumer councils so as to protect ourselves from such predatory practices.

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