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

1

Michael Albert's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/malbert
Bio: Michael Albert is a founder and current member of the staff of Z Magazine as well as staff of Z Magazine`s web system: ZCom (www.zmag.org). Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His po... (More)

All Albert Blogs

Ehrenreich Interviews Albert

By Michael Albert at Apr 10, 2004


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Here is the first question and answer from a long recently completed but as yet unpublished interview of Michael Albert by Barbara Ehrenreich. The rest will follow, day by day... Ehrenreich: I have heard that there's been a lot of interest around the world in your new book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, about a new economic system to replace capitalism. Can you tell me a little about what languages it's been translated into and what kind of reactions you've gotten? Albert: Having published about fifteen books and for the other fourteen having had maybe four translations, the experience with Parecon says a lot about changing times. I can't even keep track of what's happening. Arabic, Bengali and Telagu in India, Croatia, Czechoslavakia, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Agencies pursuing Portuguese, and Hebrew. Verso is distributing the book in English in Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, the U.S, Britain, and Canada. And apparently there is strong interest in Chinese, Farsi, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, and Russian. There have been articles, interviews, and reviews in some of these locales well before the book is released. In some cases the decision has been virtually immediate -- we sent the book to Finland in reply to a request for a review copy and just days later they offered a contract. There is great interest in the topic, clearly. In English too, there are encouraging signs, at least of possibilities. So, in the Harvard bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts I did an author's talk and signing. For that week the book had a little display up front in the store and was as a result quite visible. And for that week the book outsold all but two texts in the store, outselling every novel in the place and all other non fiction too. This wasn't because people knew me as a writer or had read reviews of the book, or seen ads. There were none at that time, and in English have been nearly none, since. People just saw the display, saw the title and the jacket comments, read on the flap that the book was about an alternative economy, and bought it. I think this shows that interest in transcending capitalism is high and growing. But of course at the same time around the corner in other stores, and even in that same store in subsequent weeks, sales dropped back down...for want of visibility. Oprah hasn't called. Nor has the NYT Book Review had a cover essay on it. Verso has no money to advertise. And in the U.S., media coverage and ads are how store owners and the broad public find out what books are out there that they ought to consider buying. Hopefully, with the paperback coming out, there will be reviews in English language media.
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