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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John Krumm's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnkrumm
Bio: I've been participating with Znet and fellow Znuts since the LBBS days in the early nineties. Currently I live in Southeast Alaska, in Juneau. Lately I've been a sort of family house elf, but I'm a... (More)

All Krumm Blogs

What is your Man Factor?

By John Krumm at Jan 02, 2008


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These days we don't use the term "The Man" very much except in a joking manner, but we all know what it means. Someone at Wikipedia came up with a pretty good summary of the concept:

"The Man" does not usually refer to a specific individual as such, but instead to the government, leaders of large corporations, and other authority figures in general, such as the police.[...]The Man is colloquially defined as the figurative person who controls our world. The Man is also often used as a symbol of racial oppression, as well as the boss of a blue-collar worker, and the enemy of any counterculture.

I've been thinking about this since reading an article by David Pogue of The New York Times on his experience discussing illegal sharing of mp3's with different audiences. Generally, the younger audiences he talked to saw little wrong about sharing copies of commercial recordings online. Older audiences were much more mixed.

I think this is partly because most music from the big labels comes with a very high "man-factor" (quoting myself) and the young are very sensitive to this (plus they have less money, and worry less about getting caught, etc.).

As a high school teacher I was automatically given a boatload of man-factor that I had to deal with, and my students had highly tuned "mantennae."

So what does this all mean for us? Well...it's a stretch, but it seems like any group thinking about social change and coming up with ideas like parecon or a radical society (that's us) has to think about  how much of a "man-factor" most people will give our efforts and organizations. Certainly the right knows about this. If you've read Frank's book "What's the Matter With Kansas" you get a pretty good idea how good the right has been at re-labeling the old and new left as the new Man. At the same time it's pretty obvious that many on the elite right will try to label any effort to change things for the better as elitist. That's the way it goes.

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By Jones, Nathan at Jan 02, 2008 19:22 PM

There\'s a lot to this.  Great work.

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