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

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Curtis Cooper's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/curtiscooper
Bio: My hometown is Baltimore, USA.  After working as an attorney for two small law firms, first in West Virginia and then in Baltimore, I opened a solo law office in April, 2007.&nb... (More)

All Cooper Blogs

Country Song vs. Reality TV

By Curtis Cooper at Nov 19, 2010


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     Every so often, a popular country song offers an insightful, populist critique of the status quo.  James Wesley's current hit, "Real," written by Neal Lee Coty and Jimmy Melton, is such a tune:

Five-hundred channels and there ain't much on tonight
Except reality shows about some folk's so-called lives
A pretty girl cries 'cause she don't get a rose
But she'll find love next year on her own show

And they call that real

...

Real, like a job you lose 'cause it moves to Mexico
Like a mama and a baby with no safe place to go
Like a little dream-house with a big old foreclosed sign
Like a flag-draped coffin and a twenty-one gun goodbye

     In early 2009, I wrote a Zblog about another populist country anthem, "Shuttin' Detroit Down," performed by John Rich.  Subsequently, I was disappointed to learn that Rich toured with John McCain during his presidential campaign, although that was before the song came out. 

     I do not know anything about James Wesley's politics, or those of the songwriters, but both "Shuttin' Detroit Down" and "Real" tap into some popular sentiments among an audience which many leftists presume to be right wing through and through.  "Real" offers hope for finding more common ground between leftists and country music listeners on media and economic issues.

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