Coco’s Friendster Blog

I’ve been working on LiveDigital for a couple of years.. an AJAX  enabled SNS built by Rob, Karim and Dave.  The site rocked.. great tools, great community, lots of promise, but alas no more.  It was shut down three weeks ago.   I was a bit attached to it..  to say the least.  My title was manager social media.  But I was a member of the site, friends with the community, and it really hooked me on social networking and all the cool things that go along with that. 

It was liberating to have my online profile erased, just like that… POOOFFF!  Now the community is scattered all over the place… the site I found most fun is Ning.. that’s where a lot of the LD community is hanging out. 

I’m stopping by here to see all the updates and improvements!  Wow.. Friendster has changed!  Looking clean and spiffy!

OK.. on a Skpye call with China.. wouldn’t you know. 

Cheers, and happy 08 to all!

Coco

picture by vinzula

I’ve been managing a new kind of social network, and it’s getting to be a bit of a party.  Hope you can stop by and say hi!     My Profile page    My Blog    My Albums   

Here are more LD sites to check out:
Campaign USA   Terrence McNally’s Radio Interviews   James’s movie trailers

Check out a new kind of Get Out The Vote event called
Campaign USA:
http://campaignusa.tv

LiveDigital and Terrence McNally have invited armchair
politicians to join a digital video town hall meeting to discuss election-year
issues. Stop by and check out what an emergent democracy might look like in the
future.

It’s hard to avoid politics. It’s how we make decisions as groups in
the office, our schools and most anywhere we come together. We know
it’s important, but when it came to participating in the 2004 national
elections, 105 million Americans, half of America’s eligible voters,
chose not to. Balderdash!

Common reasons are that voters feel that they don’t make a
difference, their votes don’t matter, or that they’re tired of choosing
between the lesser of two evils. TV commercials have totally confused
the issues in recent years, and so have politicians who seemingly
identify with every group they talk to. Have Americans become
hopelessly passive and simply avoiding their civic responsibility? Hogwash!

There are other reasons people don’t vote: rush hour traffic, lack
of parking, polls that are only open two hours before and after work,
hard to find polling places, computer vote tampering, voter’s names
deleted from registration lists, malfunctioning computers, confused
volunteers who don’t even know how to turn on a computer, all those
boxes of votes left in the trunks of cars, pesky chads, poorly designed
voting cards, not to mention all that Hanky Panky!

Given the importance of the control our elected leaders have on our
lives, nationally, the lives of others the world over, and the future
of our planet, it is crucial that our citizens participate in the
election process. This year, run to the polls as if your life depended
on it. Just the anime communities alone on the internet could bring
enough votes to swing and election! How’s that for people power? Hear, hear!

As many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment
during the last election! Those lost votes affect us all. If we can’t
bring the people to the voting polls, let’s bring voting to the people!
Nothing makes more sense than to use the internet for voting!

From Weblogs and Emergent Democracy by Joichi Ito

Can citizens self-organize to deliberate on, and to address,
complex issues democratically, without any one citizen required to know and
comprehend the whole? This is the essence of emergence, the way that ant
colonies can "think" and cellular DNA can evolve complex human
bodies. If information technology could provide tools for citizens in a
democracy to participate and interact in a way that facilitates self-organization
and emergent understanding, we can evolve a form of emergent democracy that
would resolve complexity and scalability issues associated with democratic
governance.