I've been charged with helping Feministing evolve into the wonderful world of Web 2.0, and you might notice a few changes that we are just pleased as punch to share with you all.
First, there's a set of links at the end of each post now where you -- yes, you! -- can save your favorite Feministing items and help spread the word to the rest of the world. Second, there's a link to a service called "Spotlight" where you can send posts right to local and national media outlets.
What? Why? How? OK, here's a little primer...
There's this idea called "social bookmarking" that's all the rage right now. You know how when you're web browsing, and there's a menu item called "bookmarks" or "favorites" where you can save things you like? When you click that, it just saves it to your own computer. What if you wanted to save things between your work computer and your home computer, or easily pass things on to friends?
Enter social bookmarking. My personal favorite for this kind of use is del.icio.us. You can create a username where you'll save all your own stuff, and be able to "tag" it with keywords so that you can find it easier later on. Then (if you want) you can give your bookmarks URL to all your friends, and they'll be able to see what you're bookmarking. (There's also a "private" feature that's quite handy.)
But say you want to recommend a particular post to a wider audience, something you think everyone should be reading. That's where recommendation services like digg and StumbleUpon come in; I'll use digg for this example, but it pretty much works the same for all the services. After you create a username, you can "digg" a post by clicking the link at the bottom of it. This submits it to the digg site, and then the more people that digg it, the more popular it'll become on the digg site (because it'll start appearing on the "popular" pages after a certain number of diggs). And then it'll have a better chance of getting out to people who might not otherwise know (or care, haha) about feminist issues. So, these are great outreach tools for everybody, and we strongly encourage you to use them.
Last, but definitely not least, is the new Spotlight link. This is a new service built by a guy name Mark who has devised a way for you, dear reader, to be able to send Feministing posts to your local and national media. Simply click on the "Spotlight" link at the end of each post, and then choose the media you want to send to. Then you can write your message to them, and voila! Media activism accomplished.
There are some guidelines for using Spotlight, though, that we'd like you to take notice of:
- Please be polite and professional! No name-calling, and stick to the facts as much as possible.
- The people receiving these messages are real people, too. We want to influence them, not alienate them.
- Spotlight is a serious tool and not just a toy, so please use wisely.
- Any problems with the tool can be reported to help at thespotlightproject dot org
Whew. I think that's it on the tech front. Oh, you RSS readers, you should now see some links at the bottom of each post, too, so that you can join in the fun. Yippie!
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I may be a luddite - which is interesting considering I'm a web developer - but some aspects of Web 2.0, web-based applications, and social networking scare the sh*t out of me. The technology is wonderful - that's not my concern.
My concern is the further erosion of our privacy. As we put more and more of our deeply personal lives out on the web to see, we subject ourselves to more and more attacks from people who don't like us (gay, feminist, transgender, immigrant, poc, etc) and want to destroy us.
Worst of all, is that our lovely government, who cares not a whit about privacy or the constitution, can compel these sites to open themselves to government inspection. Do you really want BushCo trolling our LiveJournal entries, del.icio.us bookmarks, Google Docs / Calendars / Spreadsheets for information that can be used against us?
I really am shocked at the attitude of many young people, who have no understanding of privacy and think nothing of splashing their entire lives onto the web. This scares me, not because I have any moral objection to sharing one's life as one chooses, but because my fear that these same folks will not object as government intrudes on our private lives more and more.
Indeed, I am probably taking a considerable risk by commenting on several blogs. I am limiting my risk (a little bit only, probably) by not having my own blog or social network accounts or by using Web apps like those offered by Google. Sure - Google might encrypt and secure their databases, but there are those wonderful Intelligence Letters that could compel Google to decrypt their databases - and Google would rather comply than go out of business.
I don't have gmail for that reason. They'd send me to Gitmo for all my searches. I stopped livejournaling for that reason but haven't stopped blabbing out of habit and addiction really.
Rachel, I'm with you. I'm pseudonymous so that I can be entirely frank on sexuality issues, and I don't want that to bite me in the ass. So I comment under the same pseud across many blogs. Compiling an exhaustive list of what I've said would only be possible for someone with access to all those blogs' archives, and that's a big project. I have no networking site profiles, and I post little enough identifying information that only the bloggers are likely to be able to back out my identity -- and most of them, I trust.
For those posting to del.icio.us, I suggest using the “feministing� tag to link up bookmarks relevant here.
I also am getting to quite like the Ma.gnolia bookmark site. It has some features lacking from del.icio.us. Most notably, groups. (I’d like to see the Feministing folks setup a Feministing group on Ma.gnolia, please.)
http://ma.gnolia.com/
Awesome! I love the technology behind Digg.com and kill time with it at work, but it and all of these websites are OVERRUN with fratty/nerdy characters. The comments are full of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and the stories that make the front pages are littered with softcore porn, the newest biggest hard drive, or whatever. The 6 main categories on the site are "tech," "science" (top subcategory: space), "world & business" (top subcategory: business/finance), "sports," "entertainment," and "gaming." It's obvious they're targetting 25-40 year old, white, upper middle class, heterosexual, nerdy, socially unaware males.
That said, it is a great piece of technology that is a gem of democratic news-gathering... as long as you don't mind scrolling past the "Grand Theft Auto 6 announced" and "Cleavage pix of Rachael Ray" stories.
Regarding privacy, Rachel from Philadelphia, PA: use a pseudonym and manage your identity online! You can make Livejournals and Myspaces private, and you can manage what certain people can see. For public blogs, you can either use a pseudonym unless you WANT to be known for what you write, like I assume the bloggers here do. I don't think privacy is really an major issue with these Web 2.0 sites unless you choose (either willingly or through carelessness) to make your choices very public or personally identifiable.
And, indeed, jamier, it's true that I did not help my situation by choosing to blog under the name that I do...And, I'm afraid that it's too late to move to a pseudonym, as my current username is all over the place (at least, on the many blogs that I comment on).
About changing attitudes towards privacy: there's a fascinating article from New York Magazine a few weeks ago that I strongly encourage folks to read: http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/index.html
It really had an impact on my attitudes towards those that do and don't value online privacy.
I'm sort of in the middle when it comes to this stuff; I'm over 30, so I'm wary of things, but I'm a big nerd who loves playing with toys, so I get all crazy when new things come out.
That said, I think there's still a huge potential for traditionally marginalized groups (self- or otherwise, btw) to run with some of these things and make a splash. I mean, one word kinda says it, in a way: macaca.
On a more meta-level, on what would happen if The Government got ahold of The Google... well, I am slowly becoming like some of those kids in the NYMag article-- I'd rather have all my dirty laundry out there and go down in style, then crouch and hide. Valiant words in times of relative safety, I know. ;-)
It's true that digg is overrun with frat idiots, but that's the number one reason why people should digg feministing articles. The best way to poke a hole in their homegenous reality bubble is to make their site as heterogenous as possible. My theory is that a lot of these guys dread looking stupid in front of other guys. You get 1,000 people on their site under anonymous names espousing the opposite of what is normally espoused, and they're not going to be anywhere near as firm in their convictions as they currently are.
This is a late comment, but it just occured to me. In addition to having folks tag feministing posts they find interesting in del.icio.us or the like, feministing should set up it's own delicious account (like you did with Flickr) so that readers could send relevant links (like a story I read in the Washington Post today about a female law student who was harassed online to the point that it hampered her job search). What do you think Deanna?