Democracy In Distress: Other

Showing posts with label Other. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Farewell, Snip.it (& thanks!)

So, Snip.it was bought by Yahoo and is being shut down. They've put together a "Hall of Fame" of contributors and I was named as one of the top contributors in the "Politics & World" category...

From an email I received from their Content Director:

I want to personally thank you for all your amazing contributions to the product, both in your snips and in your feedback to us. I’ve been continually impressed by all the interesting, unique content you’ve unearthed, as well as your thoughtful commentary on it. The quality of your contributions made the site an absolute joy to browse.
To honor all of your support and contributions, we’ve included you in our Snip.it Hall of Fame, a place to celebrate our top snippers. We’ve included your Twitter handle, so people can continue to follow your insights.

https://snip.it/awards

We've also created a Snip.it Hall of Fame, where we’re honoring some of the top contributors to the Snip.it community. We’ve included their Twitter handles so you can continue to stay connected and follow their insights.

I joined Snip.it while it was still in beta and have posted to it more days than not since then. They’ve been cool, it’s a great service, and their staff has been very supportive. From nearly the beginning, they featured my content, which I was pretty proud of, and I seem to have attracted quite a few followers there.

Supposedly, they will be reinventing themselves with Yahoo. I hope so. They were a great service.

https://snip.it/

We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it's vision to a larger scale at Yahoo!. While we can't share the specifics of what we'll be building, we are excited about the opportunity to take social news to new, exciting heights at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! team is passionate about inspiring and entertaining the world’s daily habits, and certainly sharing news and information is something we all do every day. The vision and energy at the company is contagious, and we’re so excited to be part of all that is to come.

So now, I just need to figure out what to do with the links I’ve saved there. There are a couple ways to download them for future use, and I’ll be taking a look at how to get these back out there, when I have a little time…

I just deleted the Snip It button from my browser. That makes me sad.

Unfortunately, in life, with both the good and the bad, “This, too, shall pass…”

My Collections: HTML Links

Snip.it: All My Base Belong To You - HTML Links
Snip.it: Democracy In Distress - HTML Links
Snip.it: Favorites
Snip.it: Retrovirus Lab - HTML Links
Snip.it: Rubble - HTML Links
Snip.it: Suburban Eschatology Part Two - HTML Links

Yahoo Is In Talks To Buy A Site We Actually Use, Snip.It

Snip.It is a social site that resembles a mash up of Pinterest's collections and Instapaper's ability to save links for consumption later.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-acquires-snipit-2013-1#ixzz2IoskdMnR

Yahoo Poised to Acquire Content Curation Site Snip.it - Liz Gannes - News - AllThingsD:

Snip.it was founded by Ramy Adeeb, who was formerly a principal at Khosla Ventures, and has funding from Khosla, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.
Yahoo is paying “mid teens” of millions of dollars for the company, according to a source.

…

Kara Swisher yesterday described Yahoo’s new approach to content:

While one might argue that Google is already the Google of content, the plan is to make Yahoo more relevant by tailoring it to the individual and make the site a “trusted destination to get them to where they want to go and keep going back.”
Thus, the thinking goes, while Google is the place people come to search for links, Yahoo then becomes the place users come to find content. That means more partnership deals from third-party sources, with an additional social component layer and synced across a number of devices and platforms, especially video.

from tag Litt

from tag New

(more..)

Sunday, December 09, 2012

One Day On Earth: 12.12.12… So it begins

Pretty much the same post I threw up in late October about NaNoWriMo 2012.

Between working on this project and finishing the NaNoWriMo novel (I did get over 50,000 words in during November to “win” the event), I won’t be posting much on the blogs until 2013.

I wanted to do something quick and easy for One Day since the more complex idea a friend and I had will be impossible, since I am in Sacramento and not Portland, but things happen and after doing some planning and discovering that there is a theme for this years event, my idea for this year will be pretty complicated to edit.

Of course, I won’t be filming until Wednesday 12.12.12, but before then there is some prep work, and after there is going to be a whole bunch of editing. And a whole bunch of writing on the novel. And a whole bunch of major life stuff.

So the blogs will remain on hold for the time being.

Yes, this is being reposted everywhere…

One Day on Earth - Film on 12.12.12 from One Day on Earth on Vimeo.

One Day On Earth - 11-11-11 - Gresham and Portland, Oregon (720p) from A. F. Litt on Vimeo.

http://www.onedayonearth.org

from tag NaNoWriMo

from tag Earth

(more..)

Friday, December 16, 2011

What is Anonymous? (It is not the Occupation…)

Some videos going around on Facebook and other places recently originate from Anonymous, and I am sure that many believe, because of their topical relevance, that they are from people within the Occupation Movement.

While I am sure that there are many members of Anonymous that are also participating in the Occupation Movement, it is a separate entity.

Both groups, however, like to don the Guy Fawkes masks…

I spotted this first clip via Mashable.

from tag Other

Democracy In Distress: Suburban Eschatology Part Two - September 12th, 2010: 30 Mosques, 30 Days

from tag Interwebs

from tag Facebook

(more..)

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Suburban Eschatology Part Two - September 12th, 2010: 30 Mosques, 30 Days

Originally posted on: Suburban Eschatology Part Two - September 12th, 2010:

30 Mosques : 30 Days Blog - 30mosques.com/
CNN (Great Videos) - www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/10/ramadan.roadtrip.folo/index.html

I found out about this through CNN.com. The videos there are very good. At this point I have only started going through the actual blog, but what I have read is funny, entertaining, and informative. A good antidote to a lot of the anti-Muslim crap out there right now.

What really strikes me about this, though, is that it definitely makes me feel better about America right now. A couple months ago I watched a couple of PBS travel shows on Iran. In these shows, almost every Iranian, especially the younger college students, all talked about how much they liked the United States and Americans in general. They saw the good in our country and were able to separate it from the often anti-U.S. rhetoric spewed by factions within their government.

I compared this to what I perceive as the prevailing attitudes towards Iranians and Muslims in the U.S. these days, and I doubted that Iranians in America would find such goodwill echoed so consistently by our citizens. I cannot picture some middle-American telling a film crew from Tehran about how much he loved Iran, or even students at some liberal U.S. college campus returning the sentiments of these Iranian kids. Probably the best to hope for with the latter would be a bunch of peaceniks saying that no one deserves to be blown up in a war. Here, most see Iran as the enemy, many see Islam as the enemy, and we seem to have a much more difficult time separating the people from the government than most of the Iranians interviewed in these shows. This is not to say that there are not scary factions within the Iranian government, but the same can be said for ours.

The ability to see the differences between the U.S. government and the American people also, to me, suggests that Iranians know a lot more about the United States than we do about Iran. Of course, it is easier for them to learn about us, since we dominate global culture in a way Persia hasn't in millennia. But still, when a country dominates our news as much as Iran has over the last few decades, it seems like we would know more about the people and the culture than we do. But most people don't, and even for those of us who are interested, there are few opportunities for us to learn.

These days, even when there are opportunities to learn more about Islam, one must be very careful about the sources. Yesterday, a local church here in Gresham offered an all day seminar on Islam, and if I was able to, I would have loved to have attended this. But I was concerned and curious. Was this a real, academic look at Islam, or was it hours of bull shit about how Islam wants to take over America and to convert and kill all the Christians? I don't know, but my guess is that it could have gone either way, especially since this event was hosted on September 11th. Is the date because of 9/11, or because it is Eid, the celebration wrapping up Ramadan, or both? Of course such sentiments do exist in the extreme edges of Islam, but, to counter, I offer up Ann Coulter and her spiritual kin. My question is, these days, do most Americans resemble these Iranians that were interviewed, or do they resemble the Rev. Terry Jones, who proposed, and thankfully called off, "International Burn a Quran Day"?

What strikes me the most about the 30 Mosques guys, though, is that their experience was much more like those PBS guys in Iran than I would have imagined. They were generally met with goodwill and good wishes wherever they went, judging from the CNN interviews. While Americans do not, generally, wear their racism on their sleeves, I was still pleasantly surprised by this. Of course, neither of these guys are Iranian and they are U.S. citizens, so the comparison to the PBS guys in Iran is tenuous at best.

Anyway, this blog and the interviews are an excellent resource to learn more about Islam in America, both its history and its current state, and to learn a bit about American attitudes towards Islam these days. A good find, and I really appreciate the time CNN has spent publicizing this, balancing out the screaming headlines about burning bonfires of Al-Quran, Islamic cultural centers in lower Manhattan, attempts to stigmatize the President by linking him to Islam, etc.

'via Blog this'

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

oH HELLS YeAH! Generation X Is Sick of Your Bullshit

From 2011-05 (May)

Sorry for the french, but NO FUCKING SHIT!

Generation X Is Sick of Your Bullshit:
"A majority of Americans say, for the first time ever, that this generation will not be better off than its parents." —New York Magazine

Generation X is sick of your bullshit.

The first generation to do worse than its parents? Please. Been there. Generation X was told that so many times that it can't even read those words without hearing Winona Ryder's voice in its heads. Or maybe it's Ethan Hawke's. Possibly Bridget Fonda's. Generation X is getting older, and can't remember those movies so well anymore. In retrospect, maybe they weren't very good to begin with.

But Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.

Generation X wasn't surprised. Generation X kind of expected it.

'via Blog this'

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Afghans rock at first music festival in three decades - Yahoo! News

Afghans rock at first music festival in three decades - Yahoo! News: "Live rock returned to Afghanistan after three long decades on Saturday as young men and women cheered and leapt into the air to the sound of heavy bass beats and punk rock.

Bands from Australia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan served up a six-hour musical feast of blues, indie, electronica and death metal to hundreds of fans, many of whom had never seen live music before.

Sound Central was something new in a deeply conservative Muslim country where music was banned under the austere Taliban regime. Even now music shops are attacked in some cities and musicians taunted for their clothes or hair."

'via Blog this'

Friday, December 17, 2004

In the completely unrelated to anything on this site category…

While I was writing tonight’s entries, I just saw an old acquaintance from high school performing on Comedy Central. He was sporting a nasty looking shiner too.

He’s huge now. I used to drive him around and hang out with his foster sister. I think I might accidentally have broken her heart. High school crushes are nasty like that.

I used to play some music, too. Now I am just an unemployed Dad who kills time by recycling politics on the Internet.

Life is funny.

Saturday, November 06, 2004