As the years go by, more and more organizations are creating networking sites (either just plain directories, or schmancy social networking ones).

Unfortunately everyone is creating their own proprietary site. The data that they are collecting, whether they admit it or not, is effectively owned by them - as it has nowhere that it can easily go. Yes, these organizations are creating their very own Data Silo!

The problems of a data silo include
-Concentration of data in the hands of an elite. Users might be able to remove themselves from the site, but in general the site owners can do almost anything they want with their user base including choosing the campaigns they work on, choosing how they work on those campaigns, fundraising money, and otherwise shaping their actions by exerting the power of setting the agenda (ex. MoveOn asks its members to fund Democratic canidates, whereas it could be raising millions of dollars for United For Peace and Justice or other grassroots peace groups). Typically the owners of these sites aren't accountable or come from segmented organizations that do not represent the breadth of our social movements.

I modified my Yahama T-85. I replaced all the fm filters (not sure what they were exactly, as I'd replaced some of them before with narrower ones) with 150 khz ones (that I got from dxer Bill Ammons). So it now has five 150 khz filters.

The downside is that there isn't much difference between the four filter settings anymore (superwide, wide, narrow, and super-narrow). So changing filter width isn't fun anymore. Suprisingly it doesn't matter too much whether you are using two 150khz filters (super-wide) or five of them (super-narrow).

The advantage is that I think I gained several decibels of sensitivity (I think from replacing old yamaha filters - the new low-loss filters have a couple db less loss than the old ones, not sure when the new ones were introduced -- or it is possible that the gain is from using a narrower filter and thus being able to concentrate on amplifying the signal). Also now I get the strongest signal meter reading for all stations when I'm in super-narrow mode, without having any distortion (probably because Bill Ammons matches the filters), except for a couple stations that are over modulating. Previously, I'd get a stronger signals in super-wide mode, because the narrow filters had higher loss (and/or were misaligned).

A group of people needs to launch a quality web forum for US activists!!!!! I've been thinking this for a couple years. It's an example of movement-building online activism than I'm hoping we'll see more of.

(Canadians already have one)

I suspect most people don't appreciate the usefulness of a high quality web forum - simply because, like quality email lists, they are rare. The overwhelming majority of email lists either have too little traffic (they never took off, or due to neglect they are dying), too much traffic (spam), too high of a ratio of off-topic messages to on-topic ones, too many weirdoes, too many posts by the same people, or some other problem. Web forums have similar problems.

I'm proud to release the latest version of Activism Network.

The new version is Beta because I did a large number of changes to the structure of the code that might have unforseen consequences. So I suspect more bugs than version 3.1.7 (which was relatively very stable and low on bugs).

The main goal of the release is to make it easier for other developers (including myself) to modify the code and to customize it. For instance, I turned the javascript navigational menu into a global array - to make it possible for you to change it all in once place, and without understanding the rest of the code.

If you need web-hosting, based on my five years of customer experience, I recommend checking out Jaguar PC.

(Ethical note: If you sign up using this link, I get a small amount of money. However, I've been recommending JaguarPC for years without getting any money.)

Web-hosting is a very mysterious business. Unfortunately it is general practice to over-sell - namely a company will sell you a plan for around $10/month that will give you more disk space and bandwidth than 95-99% of users will ever need. Their business model counts upon most people not using it. So if you are actually planning on using what anywhere near what a web-host is offering you in a plan, you are risking slowing down the server that you are on, or angering your host, and you should probably upgrade to a better plan.

On June 1 Facebook launched a development platform. Basically they're providing an unprecedented level of access to their social network for anyone who wants to develop software that benefits from their network of 25 million users.

Main site for developing facebook applications
http://developers.facebook.com/

Link to a rather long, but good video that presents the platform. Worth watching at least part of it to get an idea:
http://developers.facebook.com/videos.php

The "causes" application already has 1 million users.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2318966938

If you do a Google search it will often show results that do not have the word you searched for, but instead include a word that Google has determined to be a synonym.

What is particularly interesting, is that Google doesn't use traditional synonyms.

If you do a search for "activism network", Google shows results with both "activism network" (and note that it highlights "activist network" in the search results), and "activist network". However if you search for "activist network" it only shows results for that. The results for "activism network" are nowhere to be seen. This is because it treats "activism" as a one-way synonym for "activist", but it doesn't treat "activist" that as a one-way synonym for "activism".

Ever since the spring of 1999, I've been interested the tactic of a student sit-in, and I wrote my thesis on this topic.

Now you can see videos of them: YouTube Sit-in Videos

Today I did the first official release for "Online Ballot 1.0", the software that powered PhillysBallotBox.org.

The release is at
sourceforge.net

If you are interested in holding your own referendum/ballot question, and want to only let people vote who are on the official voters list, then this software is for you!

Note: It was designed for the Philadelphia election and thus you're going to want to customize it for you own election. You might want to hire me to do this =)

27,000 Philadelphians signed a petition calling for a vote on whether to have a 1500 foot buffer zone between casinos and homes, schools and places of worship. The Philadelphia City Council voted unanimously to place this referendum, Question #1, on the May 15th ballot.

The state Supreme Court has denied our right to vote on the casino buffer zone. On Election Day, we're holding our own election so that Philadelphians will be able to vote on Question # 1 on May 15th.

May 15 - You Can Vote
1) Online
2) By phone - 215-925-6380