First announced by Oakland Unseen, the City of Oakland has officially unveiled its new city flag replacing “1852,” the date it was founded, with its new city motto: “YOLO.”
Is this the best place for me to start blogging again? 10 months ago, I said I was going to redesign my name site, which feels old and stale. Good luck with that—doing Oakland Local, my hyperlocal start-up, and some side projects, like consulting, takes up all my work cycles, pretty much.
Yesterday, I had a brain wave? Why not just blog on tumblr? At least until I come up with a better idea (and one that is neutral in its impact on 3,0000+ and 10 years of blog posts on moveable type and blogger.
Where are you blogging? What advice do you have for moi?
I am doing a webinar for The Knight Digital Media Center at USC and The Knight Foundation’s Community Innovation Challenge Project on March 6 from 11-12 PM, Pacific time. The topic is Raising Visibility: Building Audience, Engagement and Reach and there are some free spots left for the class—go to http://bit.ly/YGIfUe for more information and to sign up.
Here’s some more info on the class:
What’s this about? Raising visibility for your project teaches you how to increase both online awareness and community outreach and engagement for your project,. This one hour webinar that will take participants through the basic elements behind successful online promotion via social media and through local events and outreach in your community .
Who will benefit from this session? Everyone involved in managing and promoting a project will learn about best practices, tools and techniques for increasing audience engagement, driving traffic and engagement through social media, optimizing web traffic through SEO, syndication and distribution, and using data to fine-tune results.
What we will talk about:
• How to use Facebook and Twitter to increase engagement
• How to optimize headlines and content for SEO optimization
• How to build syndication and distribution partnerships to increase visibility
• How to use basic measurements to fine-tune results
Please check it out if you’re interested; there is also going to be a 4-week virtual class in April 2013 on this topic that I am teaching.
First announced by Oakland Unseen, the City of Oakland has officially unveiled its new city flag replacing “1852,” the date it was founded, with its new city motto: “YOLO.”
Good one
words from a million bears by spencer madsen, art by @catabmendoza
BIG LOVE for this.
“Aaron’s death demands a great deal of soul searching by the US Attorney who decided to massively overcharge this young man and the MIT administrators who decided to involve Federal law enforcement.” — The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” « Unhandled Exception
“When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren’t treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned.” — danah boyd | apophenia » processing the loss of Aaron Swartz
Grandfather Mountain, NC, 2013
Darin Jensen, “American Beershed” Infographic from Food: An Atlas, 2012 (via ediblegeo)
“According to Food: An Atlas, a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded, “guerrilla cartography” project led by UC Berkeley professor Darin Jensen, you see the distribution patterns of the global almond trade but also the lost agrarian landscapes of Los Angeles, the geography of taco trucks of East Oakland and the United States beershed, as well as the rise of foodbanks in the UK, and much more besides. Over the past five months, Jensen has pulled together more than seventy maps, more than one hundred volunteers, and now more than three hundred supporters in order to assemble this kaleidoscopic introduction to both the cartographic context of food and the stories maps can tell.”
priceless—and funny. And true. #Elizabethwurtzel NYMAG
(via cmonstah)
Cthulhumas II (by liquidnight)
Love it!
It had already been 6 months, yet for some reason they were at it again. After the incessant vows to “never text or call again,” well, of course they were calling and texting again. Generally that promise only lasted, on average, for about 3 days, although once it lasted for 8 days, which was a truly remarkable occurrence.
After all the shit that had happened, this now alleged truce was merely born out of a subconscious desire for closure. Therefore the amicable nice dinner. The sweet and pleasant conversation about the things they wanted to do with their lives. Out to a couple bars to play Oakland gutteratti society couple, but also to get ungodly drunk. You know. Just like in the old days. Go back home, do some blow, fuck like crazy for a few hours. Do some more blow, talk endlessly, try to fuck but mostly fail, fall asleep. Wake up.
It was an evening that was modeled on the usual pitch and sway of their relationship: drink, fuck, coke, bars, fuck, fight, sleep. It was a rather mathematical and predictable relationship, even if that particular formula gave way to rather raucous, emotionally traumatic, abusive scenarios. For one day, she’d accuse him of being an alcoholic fuck up, his room littered with shooters and empty 12 packs and cigarette butts all strewn across a filmy layer of dirty clothing and discarded Taco Bell wrappings. The next day, he’d be screaming at her for being crazy and a liar and demented, mostly due to behaviors such as calling 17 times in a row then hitting on all his friends and maybe fucking some of them, too. Just for revenge. Maybe they were both kinda right about all the things they said, but it was shouted out in a red haze of fury and hurt that made everything seem…well it hurt, but in a way that made it okay and justifiable to forget. To act like the things the other person said were completely invalid, mostly due to the other person’s flaws. They showed each other the darkest parts of themselves, which is exactly why they wanted to forget each other. And also fuck each other, but it was hard to decide which option was the healthier choice.
But there they were. 6 months later. After about a month of bitter silence and countless shenanigans on each side to ensure a total state of napalm-esque mind fuckery intended to, on some level, completely decimate the other person’s social standing, mental stability and overall ability to be happy on a long term scale in life, they had, of course, come crawling back. Was it out of morbid curiosity? Or an underlying sense of self sabotage and an addiction to train wreckage? Perhaps both. Probably both.
Brilliant. I know them. So many of them.
What I want for xmas.
(via lei-wolf)
“When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram’s meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can’t search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself. We’ll fix these things; I don’t worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.” —
So well said, once again.
Oakland Local is having a holiday party/benefit during which we’ll also have the first Community Voices Awards—come check it out—and join us! Get more info: http://communityvoicesawards.eventbrite.com