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

The Dew Breaker

By Brian Small at Jul 05, 2009


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I read The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat last night. It was like a personalized detour into Haiti after starting to follow along the Eduardo Galeano tour of the Open Veins of Latin America. Danticat's book had diversity and redemption, of a sad sort. You ended up seeing everyone, even the torturer I suppose as victims of circumstance, of systemic violence. The tattoed and muscled Charlie saved by countryside peasants made for a Humpty Dumpty story with a happy end, a succesful putting-back-together. It made you feel a glimmer of hope for some of the media-highlighted  'gang members' sent back to El Salvador. There was even a lesbian.(Dangerous Rainbow)

I didn't notice much politics, other than the hated second-generation President flying off to France with his wife, and Emmanuel Costant being in New York('living happily in Queens' brought into detailed, imaginative life). Oh and the radio coverage of police violence and reference to Abner Louima. I like the book and maybe looking for more explicit politics was asking too much. Then again they do talk (in Voltaire's French!) about Europe eating sugar with Haitian blood in it and detesting colonial titles. I kept thinking of US foreign policy as I read it but I wonder how much a typical Gringo reader, without a subscription to FAIR, a Znet membership and a bunch of Chomsky books, would come to think of our backyard and the Monroe Doctrine?

As a companion to Open Veins of Latin America it should be pretty good. The plastic slip covers of one sweet, traumatized old lady brought to mind Junot Diaz's relatives from Drown. The kind solidarity, efforts at cordiality both in cheap basement apartments, and in prison were heart-warming - everything was sad but beautiful. Maybe the diverse characters, the empathy for the pain, and the story itself are politics enough. Though I guess it could use some nice Haiti Solidarity links at the end, something like that....

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