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 Hebble Content

Zblogpost_icon Blog Posts

The Request For Participation

By Paul Hebble at Feb 02, 2009


Change Text Size a- | A+

The latest sustainer missive from the central committee makes a good point. Whenever I'm tempted to post something on Facebook, I look at the ads sandwiched between my friends' updates, targeted with personal information that I shared to network with other users rather than be advertised to, and I ask myself, are these the hallmarks of an effort worth contributing to and building up? Then I think of Bob MacChesney's critique of advertising-based media, and I decide that despite the strengths of "web 2.0" sites in terms of user-to-user communication and user-generated content, there's still a qualitative leap between that and authentic bottom-up media that empowers and is driven by its users rather than merely catering to us only as much as it has to to make money. Also, my mom is on Facebook now.

And then there's ZNet/ZCom. ZNet's approach could allow it to go places and do things that a commercial enterprise never would. Since ZNet doesn't have to justify everything it does in terms of the bottom line, it can potentially be more open with features and functionality rather than hoarding its "intellectual property." The thing that's clearest after reading this RFP, though, is ZNet's ambition; they want to be the user-mobilized-and-mobilizing force that they have the potential to be. All that's required, as the RFP correctly notes, is for users to pick it up and run with it.

So, I will try depositing my random notes and ideas here for a while and poke around to see who else is doing it, and see what turns up. I regret that I will not singlehandedly fulfill Michael Albert's hopes for "an engaged, growing, creative, activist, visionary, insightful and educative online social networking home for thousands, tens of thousands," but maybe I can be a drop in that bucket.

Loading_border