Blogging

Why is it that Firefox has a debugging add-on that supports Drupal development but we yet have to see a Drupal add-on that supports writing for a Drupal site? It's in times like this I so wish I were a coder.

The problem arises with the myriad of input formats Drupal has just by default (forum, blog, story) that gets complicated when you then throw in the forms for Event and or Calendar, Image, Audio, Video, Storylink, Quotes, Recipes, and all the customized formats possible with the Content Construction Kit (aka, CCK).

And then there's the little detail of taxonomies.

ScribeFire works amazingly well just for the blog, page, story, formats AND only if you have a relatively small amount of categories (in the low hundreds). If you have more than 300 categories, the add-on is incapable of reading them all. Not only that, when it does read the categories it outputs them as selections --it really doesn't allow you to search through all your categories and choose only the ones you need. It neither allows you to add new ones on the fly.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote an "intervention" post for Robert Scoble about his addiction to FriendFeed (and by extension Twitter).

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Robert dutifully responded over at Scobleizer :

Slides of the presentation Chris Rabb and I gave at "Facing Race" on both 2007 and 2008.

I am getting that seasonal antsy feeling. I need to shake things around with my writing and bring more variety. About a month ago I suggested to my peeps David and Michael that I'd love to give each day of the week a theme. I don't necessarily need other contributors to enter the fray --am down with everybody posting whatever they are good at. Yet I am finding that I personally need more structure in order to introduce more variety ... and I hope that makes sense.

Anyhow, here's what I will be experimenting with during the next few weeks :

• Market Monday : Anything and everything having to with economics, finances, sales, marketing... I'll even sneak in some product development if need be.
• Tech Tuesday : All tech all day. I have been trying to get more technology writing in the blog, and this is going to be the day I do that.
• Feature Wednesday : Anything exciting or worthy of a change of our banner will be featured every Wednesday. It's time to bring Barack's mug off the blog and that's going to happen this Wednesday.
• Thirsty Thursday Yes. Booze, coffee, tea, juices, and the food to go with these libations. Anything liquid in bounty or in crisis as in "The Worldwide Water Crisis". I've found out through my blogging for Kenneth Cole there's a HUGE water crisis all around the world and that most of it is not related to global warming but to natural resource poaching by big corporations like Coca-Cola. I am definitely using Thursdays to focus on the water wars happening around the world.

Skippy birthed the idea or at least kept it warm and cozy in his marsupial bag. Jon Swift was the midwife (or was it the other way around) and I am just one of the many godmothers to take care of their baby.

So here's a list of bloggers you ought to know about :

Rox Populi
http://roxpopuli.typepad.com

Jeffrey Feldman's Frameshop
http://frameshopisopen.com

Eric Mueller
http://isthatlegal.com

Media Girl
http://mediagirl.org

American Street
http://reachm.com/amstreet/

ePluribus Media Community
http://epluribusmedia.org

Skippy the bush kangaroo
http://xnerg.blogspot.com/

In Search of Utopia
http://grupo-utopia.com/blog/isou

Terrance Heath's Republic of T
http://republicoft.com

Sister Talk
http://sisterstalk.tblog.com

Unapologetic Mexican
http://theunapologeticmexican.com/elgrito

Matt Ortega
http://mattortega.com

Roberto Lovato's Of America
http://ofamerica.wordpress.com

Kai Chang's Zuky
http://zuky.net

Orange Citizen
http://orangecitizen.com

Migra Matters
http://migramatters.blogspot.com

¡Para Justicia y Libertad!

UPDATE BY LIZA SABATER:
Kos speaks --Steve

*****

The Rude Pundit is responsible for my finally meeting Steve. Lee had just released the CD of his awesome one-man show and he threw a party to mark the event.

At he time I was a homeschooling mother of two and sometime consultant so I had barely any time to drop by. Lee said the magic words : Steve is coming.

O. M. G.

Having the opportunity to meet two of my superheroes in one night was too good to pass up and so I begged and implored the patriarchy at home to release me. As fast as I could, I oiled myself into a pair of jeans and scooted to the West Village.

When I got there once I gave a big hug to Lee I jumped all over Steve and to say he was a bit taken aback but loving it is not to be off the mark. I needed to let him know how much he meant to me as a writer, as an activist and as a blatina. I needed to cram as much in as little a time and thusly went to town.

Believe it or not, he blushed.

Steve was a muscular writer but in person he was could be quite unassuming. "Stop it!" He said it many times and so after the fangirlishness susbsided, we just shot the shit.

At that time neither of us had medical insurance --an issue of which we wrote about occasionally. I knew he had problems with his kidneys but once he told me the litanny of ailments he had and I told him ours, we had a bit of a bitch fest about doctors and money and the whole 'culture of health' in this country. I gave one last hug for good measure, hoping it would not be the last.

The First CK banner image

Lorraine is gone for the summer and I am going to miss her terribly during this hiatus; even though I am also excited that she's on such a creative high that needs to be taken care of NOW. It's the kind of rushes a lot of us creatives get in fits and spurts --and it makes us jelous when others find the key to turning it into a test of endurance. I'd love to have one of those long distance writing moments over my kabillion writing sprints, anytime.

Yet, Lorraine's hiatus got me thinking again of how long I have been at this thing here called culturekitchen.

I went through my records and found out that I got the domain back on December 21st of 2000. Once I put a little page up with the name while I contended with breastfeeding and terrible twos tantrums.

Sometime in the Spring of 2001 I already had put some stuff up --I was working on a couple of website projects at the time and so did it during ebbs of my consulting flow. This, by the way, while I also accepted a job as a technical writer --and yes, I was still breastfeeding.

2001 proved to be a banner year for us here in more ways than one. I quite my job because the cost of going back to work in hard money was far greater than my staying at home with the kids. My body also had not healed from the multiple injuries and ruptures I suffered while giving birth to my little one.

2000 had proven good to us in terms of art funding. Napier had gotten funding from Creative Capital as well as grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA, and other sources as well as privite collectors comissions --not the least in part to the great advice we got from Kathy Brew, the woman who used her position at the Lower Manhattan Culture Council to bring digital and netart to the attention of the New York art scene.

Then the world changed on September 11, 2001.

To pick up on a theme I alluded to last time, let's start with an excerpt from Part 2.

But perhaps the trickiest aspect to prove out of all of the aspects listed up there is “reasonable fear.” American legal requirements are fraught with these ideas and concepts of what a “reasonable” person would do and feel. The reasonable person standard has evolved over time from being a reasonable white male standard to being a more inclusive reasonable American citizen standard. Historically, the reasonable man standard excluded all women and males of color for a very long time. It excluded people with mental disabilities and children. As the needs and the values of each of these groups integrated into the American social fabric, the concept of what is reasonable to an American citizen has changed slightly. Plus, it’s a bit fearful for any marginalized group to realize that mainstream society — the society that feels almost at home when it’s excluding or ridiculing someone on the margins of opportunity — considers itself a beacon of reasonable progress.

Before I go any further, allow me to share the source of the series title because its implications bothered me then. They still bother me now.

Remember this clip?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3RjiVcIlhY

In the first few seconds, Richards tells African-American hecklers that 50 years ago, he and others would have them upside down with a f**king fork up their asses. And the audience laughs, howls, and cheers -- the same audience that files out of the club moments later when he starts calling the hecklers niggers.