Chris Hardie » blogs

Links for the Week - February 24, 2009

Chris — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:01:44 +0000

Things feel kind of in limbo right now, don’t they? What are you in between? While you think about that, here are some links you might enjoy:

Have a young one or someone who gets overwhelmed by the language in standard Wikipedia articles? Try Simple Wikipedia, which only uses simple English words and grammar.
Jim Hair posted a Youtube video of photographs from his trip to the Inauguration. He’s got DVDs available too.
Literal Music Videos – what your favorite artists were really trying to say
A few new (at least to me) local blogs to check out: Michele is rennovating a cool house here in Richmond, Adrienne is blogging about books and various other things, Cassie is blogging about life at IU East and in Richmond and also has a pet sitting service blog, Nate is looking at technology as a means to community empowerment and engagement, and Jay is writing about outdoor experiential education. Keep it up, folks!
25 people to blame for the financial crisis (according to TIME magazine). Be careful, you might be one of them.

Links for the Week - September 28, 2008

Chris — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:32:03 +0000

I don’t feel guilty for not blogging for a while, no I sure don’t. Guilt is certainly not why I’m posting a bunch of random (but great) links for you to look at. Nope, not at all:

Hospitality for the Coming Age: Sharing in the midst of scarcity: Anna Lisa’s new blog chronicling her ministry formation work around sharing resources – food, listening, time, hope – when such things are scarce. Brand new, ready for your comments!
indexed: astute and sometimes funny observations about the state of the world, presented as simple diagrams on index cards.
Project 10 to the 100th: Google is giving away $10 million for good ideas – anyone want to partner on a submission?
FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments: in the tradition of lolcats, some really funny and scary stuff here, like this abomination of truth in marketing.
Found Magazine: random bits of other people’s lives found, scanned, and posted to the web. Wow.

Links and Feeds for the Week - April 12, 2008

Chris — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:08:01 +0000

The feeds reminder and redux edition:

I’ve been updating my list of local blogs and bloggers in Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. Check out the new additions, and if you have any blogs to suggest or corrections to make, please let me know.
My page of custom RSS feeds doesn’t have a whole lot going on these days, but one feed I’ve started actively maintaining again is a Kicks96 / 930WHON News feed. As one of the few other newsgathering entities in the area, it makes a nice complement to the custom Palladium-Item news feed (which is usually updated earlier in the day than the one they provide). Since Kicks96 doesn’t publish any RSS feed themselves (why, in this day and age, oh why?), I hope you find it useful.
Remember that you can use ProgressiveWayneCounty.org to get easy access to a consolidated feed of local progressive bloggers and local news feeds.
Despite not feeling Twitter, I can’t help but highlight a link Thomas Kemp posted in the comments: TwitterLocal will help you find people Twittering in your area so that you can…I don’t even know.
And finally, in the theme of aggregating useful information into one place, check out LegiStorm, a site that makes information about Congressional reps and their staffers available all in one place, including salaries, trip records, and what other organizations they are affiliated with. For example, it notes that on a recent trip to Boston, Mike Pence (R – Indiana, 6th) had some unusually expensive hotel charges – $476 for one night. I hope he got a mint on his pillow.

April Fool's Day 2008, So Far

Chris — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:42:53 +0000

Well, you know my criteria for good April Fool’s Day jokes. Here’s what I’ve kept track of so far for the day:

I had a little fun with the users of the Palladium-Item forums who like to post anonymous rants. It resulted in at least one phone call threatening legal action against me and started at least one conversation about the nature of privacy on the Internet, so I consider that a mild success.
Jim Hair, photographer and community activist extraordinaire, announced he and his wife Vicki are moving back to California after he accepted a position there. Funny on a number of levels, but mostly so because of what they’ve invested in Richmond.
Jean Harper is at least fantasizing about a good joke, though I’m concerned about her allegations that members of the Earlham College swim team are promiscuous. Wait, does Earlham have a swim team? Ahem.
Google’s got it going on with a new kind of wakeup alarm, plans for colonizing Mars, and a way to never send an e-mail that’s late.
Lawmakers in Congress are “criticizing” oil industry executives for not investing in renewable resources – jolly good show!

What else ya got?

Links for the Week - March 26, 2008

Chris — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:12:53 +0000

What kinds of information the NSA is collecting about your communications – it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you. And they have really cool PDAs to do it with.
The Feminist Review – bloggers calling patriarchy as they see it
Geni – free Web 2.0 enabled online genealogy software
The Onion nails it again: You know what’s stupid? Everything I don’t understand – “God, all the people, places, and things I haven’t made the least bit of effort to comprehend should just die already.”
Get up to $15,000 for a project in your hometown – I love seeing this kind of use of the web.
Some E-Cards – for when you care enough to hit send

Links for the Week - February 17, 2008

Chris — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:54:14 +0000

The “I’m too busy with the dog show to blog for real so I’ll grow them a linkfarm” edition:

Popping Culture Blog by Michelle Manchir: Michelle’s journalistic efforts at the Palladium-Item are some of the more refreshingly comprehensive and useful to come along in a while, and her blog entries are turning out to be similarly insightful.
Peter Suber of Earlham College Gets Win for Open-Access at Harvard: Peter was a professor of mine at Earlham, and is one of the most interesting and intelligent people I know. He’s been working hard at making scholarly articles available for free online, and this news is certainly a great milestone for that effort.
WayNet.org allows organizations without 501(c)3 status to apply for fee-waived membership: Now you don’t need to have a letter from The Man if you’re a low-budget not-for-profit organization wanting to join this Wayne County community network association.
The Palladium-Item is revising its forum posting policy so that it holds its online users to some of the same standards as its letter writers in the print edition. And yet despite some heroic efforts, as I predicted in 2005, the forum remains something of a drowning pool where trolls go to feed.
Check out my Summersault Weblog entry on adding a free chat room to your website. Any questions? Come ask me in the chat room at live-richmond.com.
I am searching for the medical term for “an irrational fear of velociraptors” – anyone?

Links for the Week - December 16, 2007

Chris — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 04:14:46 +0000

The Story of Stuff – “From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.”
The Official Blog of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and the New York Times article that introduced me to it. I wonder how much comment spam *he* gets?
Local geek Charlie Peck is still Intel’s “fastest geek” – or, how to win $30,000 with just a screwdriver.
Taking Charge of Your Fertility – the companion website to the book by the same name.
Local Food Cooperative Management System Software – open source software to connect local food producers with local food consumers. It’s one piece in creating a more self-reliant local economy.

The difference between dollars and cents

Chris — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:35:36 +0000

I have yet to reach the end of the enjoyment I am experiencing from hearing this tech support call that someone recorded: Verizon doesn’t know the difference between dollars and cents. As it turns into a global phenomenon, the caller documents his experience on his blog: http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/.

Your call may be recorded to insure quality, indeed.

A missed meeting with Senator Bayh

Chris — Fri, 26 May 2006 01:44:41 +0000

Last week I was invited to have lunch with Senator Bayh on Monday of this week, apparently as one of a number of Hoosier bloggers that received the same offer. I wasn’t able to make it and was okay with that at the time, but after reading the Indiana Blog Review’s roundup of narratives and reflections from those who did, it sounds like it was an event worth attending. In any case, thanks to the Senator and his staff for the invitation, my compliments on taking the time to hear what we have to say.

Props to the P-I for embracing conversation technologies

Chris — Wed, 03 May 2006 14:58:45 +0000

It wasn’t too long ago that I took an inventory of the quality of public dialogue in Richmond, and in doing so, sprinkled in some cynicism about the role played and limitations imposed by the Palladium-Item in that measuring. A bit later I brought the cynicism up a notch (or, down a rung?) in predicting that their online forum wouldn’t bear much fruit. Today I ought to take a moment to congratulate them on their recent efforts and successes in improving the quality of (or at least the opportunities for) public conversation in town, especially around the issues the paper covers. A few of the ways they’ve done this, if you haven’t already noticed:

Their online forums have been expanded and enlivened significantly beyond the original parenting scope. They seem well organized, appropriately well moderated, and a great place to discuss the particulars of a given article on a given day. I’m sure they’ve put some staff time and money into making this work, and it’s working.
They’ve launched a significant offering of weblogs, including the flagship Editor’s Blog written by managing editor Rich Jackson. Jackson’s blog in particular is full of interesting insights into the newspaper biz at the local and national level, and presents some nice opportunities for discussion about how the news is covered.
They’ve increased visibility of their open editorial board meetings. It’s something they’re clearly proud of, and they’ve gone out of their way to make sure the public can not only participate, but also has a chance to know in advance what they’ll be talking about. This is a significant and welcome departure from how many editorial boards tend to work; I only wish my schedule allowed me to attend more often.

Beyond those items, there are a few nice smaller things they’ve done recently that I appreciate as a technical person and consumer of online news:

Adding RSS feeds to their site. If you don’t know what that means, or even if you do, you might enjoy my Summersault weblog posting about how content syndication can change your life. I think the P-I feeds are updated a bit later in the day than my own custom ones so I’ll stick with them for now, but it’s a great step.
They’ve added a “P.I. in the A.M.” feature on their website, which displays the first sentence of the top stories from the forthcoming online edition. It’s a nice way to improve the timeliness of their site, without giving away the farm when it comes to their print edition income.

So, props to the Pal-Item. Newspapers are typically one-way pipes from the publishers to the readership, with a few exceptions. The P-I is trending toward a more bi-directional mode of covering and discussing the issues in our community, and this is a good thing (if a little scary for traditionalists).

I’m sure that all of this isn’t by accident – they’re smart folks and they know that there are relevance and revenue issues at stake here as the world of print journalism continues to be affected significantly by online publishing. But good for them for embracing it and trying some new things out – I think our community is better for it. And while I’ll continue to wish for a little more nuance in their editorial viewpoints and a little more profundity in their news reporting, at least I and all of their readers now have many more opportunities to do so publicly, openly and directly – as it should be.