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

Islamophobia in the Boston Herald

By Matthew Andrews at Apr 09, 2010


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What ever happened to the noble ideals of journalism?  Newspapers have a critical role to play in our democracy, to provoke critical thinking and provide the information we need to preserve our freedoms. But the opinion page of the April 8th edition of the Boston Herald projects more hate than light.

The ironically mis-named editorial "A Real Climate Change" calls for Massachusetts to join the race to the bottom by cutting taxes for corporations, despite the dire state budget crisis that is threatening good jobs and public services.  Maybe this should not surprise us from a for-profit enterprise like the Boston Herald.  But who pays the piper for the Herald's anti-muslim tune?  The opinion page cartoon criticizes Obama for removing politically charged language, such as "Islamic extremist" from official security strategy documents.  Unfortunately readers of the Herald would never know that this action was in response to criticism following a raid on the Christian-inspired terror-plotting Hutaree militia.  The disparity in language, and attention given, to non-Muslim domestic terrorists is perpetuated by the Herald.

In addition to the cartoon, an opinion piece by Cal Thomas brazenly criticizes Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for being a disobedient "puppet" (his own word).  He justifies this criticism with the tally of US deaths and injuries.  The fact that many times more Afghans have died, been injured or displaced in a war they did not choose does not earn them any democratic right to independence in Thomas's evaluation.

Finally, Thomas repeats the discredited Bush-era lie that the Taliban were implicated in 9/11.  Even in the opinion pages, we should expect accurate factual information.  On the other hand, perhaps understanding the difference between Al Qaeda and the Taliban is too much to expect from a paper that cheerleads for hysteria over "Islamic extremists."

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