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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

583175

Richmond Gardner's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/richmondgardner
Bio: My MySpace entry is what I'm still using as my primay social site, but I finally took the plunge and got a Facebook site as well. What can I say? Growing up in the 1960s, I was the last one to gr... (More)

All Gardner Blogs

Free speech, Iran & the Taliban

By Richmond Gardner at May 25, 2009


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I don't know if I'm exactly disappointed by the Iranian action against Facebook. In order to be disappointed, one has to expect good things. I guess I'm miffed that Iran has failed to come up even to the sorry free speech standards set by G. W. Bush, who had set up "Free Speech Zones" at Republican campaign events, usually allowing protesters to set up only in places that were at a good distance from where they could be seen or heard. Bush's 2004 campaign rallies were often by-invitation-only affairs.

In any event, Iran has decided that as supporters of Reformist candidate Mir Husain Musavi were using Facebook to help conduct a campaign for him, that they would shut off access to Facebook. This is a pretty sorry response that shows a real lack of confidence, demonstrating that the Iranians have an authoritarian fear of free speech.

Bad news for the US, the Taliban in Afghanistan is showing smarts and savvy in the public relations component to their fight against the government of Hamid Karzai. The US dropped a number of bombs in a battle near Farah, Afghanistan, on May 4. On May 20, the American command finally came out with an interim report on the Afghani casualties.

By contrast, the Taliban typically engages in a firefight with US and/or Afghani troops and the US has timed them at being able to get a report on the air with the BBC in 26 minutes after the firefight has concluded. One of the big problems of course, is that the US doesn't want to put out anything false, so that results in some unavoidable delays. The US is trying to do better and to respond more quickly.

In what's a clear case of good news, Pakistan had a few battles with the Taliban in the Swat Valley, but had aroused suspicions as to whether they were really and truly fighting or whether they were conducting a campaign that consisted more of press releases. The Pakistani military took a strategic hilltop overlooking the valley, then invited Aljazeera English to the hilltop to film the fact that, yes indeed, the hilltop was now in their hands.

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