September 6th, 2008
I was brought up in the South where politics was a subject that was considered impolite to talk about at the dinner table. In general, I think that’s probably a wise piece of advice and perhaps that line of thinking is what prompted me to consider deleting my latest blog entry where I discussed the Sarah Palin hoax (I was sort of kidding about the hoax part). If your blog is not a political blog is it polite or even unwise to talk politics on your blog??
I’m not one of those people that preach my political views to everyday life. If you talk to me long enough you’ll probably get the idea that I’m more liberal but it’s not because I’m bashing a certain party or shoving my politics down your throat. I think most people are rather surprised when they find out that I majored in politcal science. When I was in college my political science professors were not allowed to tell us their party affiliation or personal political views for fear of bias in teaching. It therefore became a goal of almost every poli sci major to figure out what each professor was before we graduated.
I now wonder if I should have adopted that philosophy and kept quiet on my political views in this blog. But then I thought why wouldn’t I share that information?! It doesn’t make what I say about blogs or the web world any less valid. We are embarking on a very important election here in the U.S. and every voice counts right now. I’m going to let the cat out of the bag on this blog and occasionally sound off politically when I 
feel inspired to do so. It’s with pride that I say, “I’m a democrat and I’m voting Obama.” It’s time for a change people.
I can’t wait to hear what the family will say when I go home for the holidays. I have a feeling someone’s going to break that no politics at the table rule.
As my favorite (democratic) poli sci professor would say at the end of every class, “Good luck everybody.”
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April 7th, 2008
So there used to be a really cool web 2.0 site for the writing community, and for the life of me I can’t remember the name of this thing! It was super cool because you could sign up and create a profile that specified how often you were supposed to write to hold you accountable to that goal. If you didn’t meet that goal then it would state on your public profile that your accountability was poor. If I remember correctly your name was listed in green when your accountability was high and in red when it was low. I LOVE this idea because I love to write but I’m really bad about holding myself accountable so I thought that this was such a clever way to give writers a push. The other really cool thing about this writing community was that you could start a story (in a similar way you start a thread) and other members of the site could collaborate on your story. I believe you would be notified in your profile that others had collaborated as well. Once someone had collaborated you had a new deadline to contribute to the story. I created a few of these “story starters” and had some pretty good collaborators contribute. It was really fun to see where people went with your idea. If you didn’t collaborate by your deadline you were publicly shunned in the community….just kidding, I think your profile turned red or something showing that you contributer creditability had gone down. The members of this writing website who had the highest accountability were posted on the homepage enticing all the members to read their stuff. I can proudly say that I was on the homepage for a short time, okay a very short time.
Man- after remembering all the cool features of this site it really is a bummer I can’t find it. I wonder if it’s still around? Part of my problem is that I can never remember all my user names for these web 2.0 sites. I should just make one user name and I know a lot of people are starting to build up comment creditability from that user name (and that’s a whole other blog topic) but I kind of hate doing that. I’m not sure why. If I could remember my user name for that site I probably could find it that way. Does anyone know of the site I’m talking about? If so, please let me know!
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