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

Photo-11

Cindy Milstein's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/cindymilstein
Bio: Cindy Milstein is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies — focused on projects such as the new Lexicon pamphlet series, the IAS/A... (More)

All Milstein Blogs

Fragility & Heartbreak, Michigan, Night 26

By Cindy Milstein at Sep 12, 2012


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I keep meaning to write something about the abrupt halt to my "Dispatches from Maple Spring" posts -- written during the best summer of my life in the rebellious, romantic city of Montreal. In fact, I have two unfinished stories languishing in my Wordpress box and several pieces I've been meaning to write. Hopefully I'll have the energy, focus, and stomach for writing again soon about the Quebec student strike and other related politics, but also, first, about the surreal turn in my own life.

The short version, for now, is: both my parents got seriously sick at the same time, but my dad profoundly so. I stayed up all night in Montreal some 3.5 weeks ago to decide what to do. It hurt more than I can express to leave Montreal, suddenly, unexpectedly, just before the monthly big demonstration and especially the elections, and without saying good-bye, although little did I know that I'd not be returning any time soon. It felt wrong to stay. So as the sun was coming up over the streets of the Mile-End neighborhood that I'd come to so love and feel at home in, I stood at an intersection, quiet and gorgeous in the early morning light, and wept. I then headed to the airport, flew to my folks' hometown in Michigan, and went directly to an intensive care unit that has become home for the past few weeks.

In one of many ironies these days, my last post's title -- "Fragility & Heartbreak" -- has hit home way too personally, I'm afraid. And the uncertainty and sorrow aren't going away any time soon. That's the fragility. The heartbreak is another matter: when life is neither life nor death, and the fork in the road that will clarify which direction things will go is still only conceptual, with nary a signpost in sight.

Today, in another irony, and perhaps the impulse for this short post, the collaborative book project I've worked on for over 1.5 years -- with Erik Ruin as artist and me as writer for our picture-essays, and Josh MacPhee as designer and "foreword" author -- and was so excited about seeing, finally arrived at PM Press. At one of the most dystopian moments of my life, maybe even the most dystopian one so far, my Paths toward Utopia is in print. I don't much feel like celebrating.

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