Do a little good with your spare time…

Anyone looking for a great way to get involved that gives back to children? Interested in volunteering? Find out more.

“Volunteers have always been at the heart of Children’s. The volunteering tradition began at Children’s in 1917 when University of Washington student volunteers brought enthusiasm and vigor to the wards.”

Learn more about the hospital as well as volunteer opportunites.

 

 

Here comes Obama!

The superdelegate chase is a key piece of good news for Obama in what has been a bad week.

“Barack Obama is closing in on Democratic presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton’s advantage among superdelegates, building on his lead in the primary race even as he faces troubled times.

Party leaders are encouraging superdelegates to pick a side by late June to prevent the fight from going to the national convention in August, and it seems some are listening as the race enters its final five weeks of voting.”

 

Blog or Fiction?

When deciphering what’s credible and what’s not on the Internet, who to read and who not to read, and finally what is fact and what is fiction how does one find a site in which they will become loyal readers? Well, you could go online and sift through the various blogs and discover someone that perks your interest and gets you hooked or you could simply just ask around. Word of mouth is the most powerful tool in the creation of success in most things in life, just as it was for for the journalist Zeyad whose healing Iraq site exploded once word got around. He reported on how Iraq was faring by using extensive detail and honest language in a timely fashion on the blogosphere.

When individuals set out with the intention of using their words to rely a message without the intention of gathering a huge following is that more intriguing to us as the readers? Because we know that the message is not distorted with fluff and the proper politics of “real” journalism. Well, behold the power of the blogosphere. An emerging journalistic faculty that allows for creative writing as well as deliberate message portrayal. We are getting the facts and we are getting them in a way that allows for personal voice to be heard. Which, in my opinion adds to the intrigue of a particular blogger. Opposed to traditional media where we are given visuals but pre disposed scripts that does not allow for any personal voice.

So when deciding what’s a good blog and what’s pure fiction, I have found it helpful to trust the power of the majority’s opinion along with a bloggers’ ability to deliver the message in an informative yet creative way. Witness the power of good bloggers, just as in the case of Zeyad, who was able to portray the raw facts of what was going on in Iraq, in a very raw way that hooked his readers. Buckle up news followers of the world, we have now entered into a journalistic phenomenon, the blogosphere.

 

• How do we make it easier to sort through the fact vs. the fiction in the blogosphere?
• What credentials are required to be considered a credible blogger on the web?

Come blog with me.

Before the days of Facebook, before I knew how to create online photo albums, and even before I could construct an “about me” that let potential friends and readers get an idea of who I am beyond stating all my best friends names along with the phrase “BBF’S” was my one and only mode of online communication with friends. Good old ICQ. For those of you who are unaware, ICQ is an old school form of AIM or MSN messenger, that to this day I believe only people within my hometown of Aberdeen knows even existed.

I bring up ICQ because this past weekend I reflected upon the capabilities of the web from then until now. Just for fun, I googled my own name, and sure enough there I was. I exist as an entity on the famous search engine Google. How cool, but yet how frightening. There I am, for future friends, employers, and just about anyone who comes across my name to look up with one click of the mouse.

Throughout the readings from Blogistan to online articles, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me the power of technology. Do we rule our world? Or has technology come to rule us?

As Professor Gill said last week in class, we are only in the transitional period right now. We are at the tip of the technology takeover and must keep in mind although particular days and instances may not follow us, the world wide web does. So in conclusion, let’s keep our pictures classy and our about me’s insightful, and let’s get together and come blog with me.

• Within the technology takeover that is upon how does one use the internet while still maintaining a sense of privacy?
• In what ways have internet communities such as Facebook and Myspace taken away from the forming of relationships within the world that exists outside of the web? How has it added to it?

Real politics made for real people.

How do you make politics more real to the average citizen? Well, how about by combining public opinion and public radio. That’s exactly what happened in Exeter, New Hampshire. In the article, “Creating a Primary Place for Citizens Online” a local radio station created a website entitled Primary Place Online, as a companion to a year long radio series covering the residents of New Hampshire during the 2008 presidential primary allowing citizens to create a space to communicate with one another about their feelings on the race as well as the candidates.

In the small town of Exeter, with a population of only 15,000 the online space was used for residents to go to and express their thoughts and feelings on the race. By the end of the project there was 187 registered users with 72 of them posting at least once. This gave the followers of the campaign a chance to contribute to the ongoing coverage as well as use it as a supplemental source of traditional media enabling many individuals who do not watch traditional medias to follow the election to be an active participant as well as an opinion leader within the community.

Moving from the grassroots up, Primary Place Online became a respected source of presidential coverage within the community. One individual was quoted as saying he used the website to guide his decision on who to vote for. The project was labeled as a three fold project, reason number one being to show the rest of the voters in the country what goes on during the New Hampshire Primary. Second the give Greenburg (the brains of the operation) insight into what was going on when he wasn’t there documenting the process, and finally to give the residents of Exeter a fuller sense of what it is like to participate in a democratic process. It was designed to give residents to communicate and give feedback with their friends, neighbors, and families to see what was going on within their own points of reference.

The greatest thing that seemingly came out of this project that was quoted over and over again was that it gave real feelings to real people and allowed the primary to be a real process to those who had never had a chance or possibly had an inclination to participate beforehand. People were able to see beyond the perfectly articulated media messages and see the expression of real people, and in short put a face on the politics that are often times obscured by false messages and media fluff.

PPO allowed for people who weren’t necessarily experts to give feedback. Although the initial fear for the general public to lend opinions about an issue they may not be within their “expertise” is to resist and not become active, which many people and organizations did do, PPO also gave others an opportunity to lend their voices and opinions and connect with others within the community to guide or influence decisions.

• Why is their a resistance by some to participate in online groups such as PPO?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of creating a space that relies solely on public opinion? and how do you believe an organization such as PPO would function in the greater Seattle area?

Personalizing our news.

 “I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news.” This quote, that came straight out of the readings for the week from Chapter 2 of We the Media, when discussing the use of the web to help guide what was going on at the time of the 2000 presidential election.

This brought me back to a recent discussion in which myself and another person were discussing in what ways new medias these days can really make or break a person. In a class I took recently, I watched a clip of a politician on You Tube, which I might add was favored to win the election, was caught on a cell phone video camera using a racial slander which was later in the day posted on You Tube. Needless to say, he lost that election. When talking about using the web to “roll your own news” to get a more varied and complex story it’s really true that with our new medias we got the whole story and not just the fluff stuff that the topics of article pieces are discussing. There is no room for mistakes, no time gaps left open for misinterpretation, and one must always be at their best because you never know when a sneaky camera phone is going to be leering behind a corner.

So, with the new phenomenon of “pesonalizing” our news to exactly what we want to see beyond the headlines in papers and edited interviews on television, we must keep in mind there comes a point when we all will say something we didn’t mean, we just were lucky enough that no one cared enough to post us on You Tube!

• How will the major move to internet news lead to the demise of newspapers as we know them at both the local and the national levels?
• In what ways do/does You Tube have the potential to affect our world in world in a negative rather than positive way?

 

 

 

 

 

Moving from the grassroots up.

• Just as words hold no color, as did big media in the mid 1980’s. On the color palette of journalism there was very little room for ethnic publications and broadcasters in the realm of popular media. While thinking about the article, “From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond” the importance of grassroots activism and its role in literally making things happen from the ground up by the people and for the people, it’s interesting to contextualize the world as we live in today and be able to see the importance that one’s opinion and voice can have on a generation. Through grassroots activism, big media began to ethnically diversify. A group of people came together and basically said this is what we demand, and this is what we will achieve. Because we will use our words to educate and influence others to support the cause. It wasn’t based on the political powers of our government, it was simply the political will power of our citizens. Because in the scope of things, the biggest powers behind movements are people talking to people. Educating one another and using word of mouth to get to the nitty gritty details in a more simplistic way than may be presented to us by political authorities. So, just as grassroots activists stand for our wants and needs in our tangible societies, as do blogs in the realm of our virtual societies. Although information technologies such as literature, newspapers, radio, and television have been a major source of information gathering and a space for people to critique and form opinions about the world, blogs have captured it in a way that these sources may not have. Blogs have created a space for citizens to respond in a very immediate way. We now have the freedom to read, analyze, and respond all in one sitting. We can get our information quicker, form our opinions faster, and connect with people who agree and even disagree with us. And so, in partaking in creating social spaces such as blogs we are now be the grassroots activists of the web. Let us all have our voices be heard in a meaningful way and be a positive contribution to the world in which we live in.

·     What direct effect will blogs bring to popular media such as magazines and newspapers that we have yet to see?

·     What role does grassroots activism have in the current presidential election?