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

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Brian Small's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/pingrin
Bio:   I'd like to win social change, realized that from reading Noam Chomsky books, finding Znet and plowing through Michael Albert's appeals for the last ten years or so. I had never really thoug... (More)

All Small Blogs

Tea Party Flitting

By Brian Small at Dec 09, 2010


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Michael Albert's debate-provoking post about facebook ending civilization and landing all of us in hell brought to mind Matt Taibbi and Sarah Palin. On-line excerpts of Taibbi's Griftopia point out the political convenience that brains wired for (inordinate?) 'flitting' might present for fraudulent financial operatives and their preferred political representatives. I like Taibbi's down and dirty style but also hope it doesn't detract from his substance. Some of what he's saying seems to be right up there with Nobel-Prize winning John Kenneth Galbraith.

 Taibbi in Griftopia(2010)  "Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. "

Galbraith in The New Industrial State(1958) "Economic systems tend to converge on the large, bureaucratic industrial system. There shape is thus more determined by technology and organisation than by ideology. The traditional and pedagogically convenient view of America as a free market capitalist economy dominated by small firms with little capital is a poor representative of a substantial part of the economy. "

Sarah Palin's attention span and Twitter. "Twitter seems to have been invented expressly for the former Alaska governor, a public figure whose prodigious need for attention is matched only by her microscopic attention span." Sounds like Social Network Site psychology.

And more from the Griftopia excerpt on Wall Street fraud finding attention deficits favorable. "So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does—because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism....The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor..." Taibbi was also on Uprising Radio transmitting the same idea that understanding the financial meltdown and necessary policies requires an 'intellectual committment' not seen in Tea Party candidates but possible regardless of background.
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