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

Recent Schleiffarth Content

Zblogpost_icon Blog Posts

Nature Article Addresses Parecon

By Armin Schleiffarth at Dec 17, 2007


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Control without hierarchy

Understanding how particular natural systems operate without central control will reveal whether such systems share general properties.
Deborah M. Gordon

Nature 446, 143 (8 March 2007) doi:10.1038/446143a

Because most of the dynamic systems that we design, from machines to governments, are based on hierarchical control, it is difficult to imagine a system in which the parts use only local information and the whole thing directs itself. To explain how biological systems operate without central control — embryos, brains and social-insect colonies are familiar examples — we often fall back on metaphors from our own products, such as blueprints and programmes

For Free Full Text See (to view article you must register - hat tip Nathan) 

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/essays/index.html

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Re: Nature Article Addresses Parecon

By Goodman, Dan at Dec 19, 2007 16:11 PM

It\'s a very interesting topic to speculate about, but hardly anything is really known about it yet. It would be fantastic to discover some underlying principles. Unfortunately, those underlying principles could probably also be used as a form of control as well as for a freer society.

Myself, I\'m interested in the brain (having just started a new career as a theoretical neuroscientist), and you can ask the same sorts of questions there. Do the actions of the brain come about from an \'executive\' module that makes decisions based on what subordinate modules come up with, or is it a sort of democratic bottom up process where the best plan of action emerges from the bottom up? Both are possible. In nature, there\'s no political pressures to do things one way or the other, so it\'s likely that you\'d see both types of system: top down and bottom up.

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Person

Nature Link

By Schleiffarth, Armin at Dec 17, 2007 16:59 PM

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Re: Nature Article Addresses Parecon

By Oyler, Nathan at Dec 17, 2007 12:40 PM

Appreciate it. It\'s a block of text at the moment, so I\'ll do so reformating and read it. Thank you.

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Person

Re: Nature Article Addresses Parecon

By Barfield, Michael at Dec 17, 2007 10:27 AM

Nathan,

I just e-mailed you the text of the article. (It was free for me, since I am on a computer at a university that subscribes to Nature.) I\'m not sure if this is among the kinds of things we could be uploading (since it is copyrighted).

Mike

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By Oyler, Nathan at Dec 17, 2007 09:09 AM

I was interested in reading the article, but it was not free. If there\'s a requirement for logging in please specify.

Thank you.

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