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

Aceofhearts X3's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/aceofheartsx3
Bio: http://aceofheartsx3.blogspot.com/ (More)

All X3 Blogs

Recent X3 Content

Zblogpost_icon Blog Posts

Wow. This website is terrible.

By Aceofhearts X3 at Jul 31, 2008


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http://aceofheartsx3.blogspot.com/

Well, my biography is burried in my account info.  I changed my biography (after finding it) to include a link to my blog, and it still hasn't shown up on by biography page.  And that's just the beginning.

I made a featured box, because there wasn't a place in the left-side navigation menu that would let me make a blog post.  I still don't know where that featured box ended up, nor what one is.  Eventually I found a link to "quick blog post", so we'll see if this works at all.

I can't add anything to "My Favorite Pages", so I can View/Edit my non-existent favorites, which I presume means links, but I can't add any.

As a user of this website, now a sustainer, and as a Certified Usability Analyst, I wonder if ANY usability testing was ever done on this site.  How can you expect anyone to pay to use this site when it is so unusable!?  I have been trying to pay to become a sustainer for MONTHS, but only now is it taking my credit card.  I actually had to use a different one, because appearently Zcom doesn't take Visa from one of my banks, but will take Visa from my other bank.

So lets see where this posts when I hit save.  I sure as hell don't know at this point.

Ah, posting this requires that I choose from main categories, none of which apply to this post.  Lovely.

669813

By Dickey, Charles at Aug 01, 2008 16:42 PM

Heh.  Welcome to ZCom. 

I find the categories quite ridiculous.  I don\'t write about Parecon or parapolity--I\'m not sure what that last one is, and I have only the most general understanding of Parecon, which is about all that I want.  I usually just pick the most general categories to place my stuff under: Ecology, Economy, Resources, Anarchy, Inspiration, yadda yadda.

I think the purpose of this site--and this is not something that was spelled out very well for us before we joined as sustainers--is to organize people who might share certain ideological leanings, like socialism and anarchism, and allow them to kind of have their own little space, but also be a bit of a captive audience to the political and economic sentiments of the developers of ZCom, who certainly have a specific agenda and vision, especially about "participatory economics," or Parecon.

So if you, like me, came here because you thought it would be a good platform for your writing or because you thought that diverse viewpoints might be represented, you may be disappointed.  There seems to be a certain amount of groupthink, is what I\'m saying, with certain people as visionaries and heroes.  Yay for another hierarchy.

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