Convocast episode 15 is out! Andy answers John Philpin’s question from episode 14 (have I thought about writing a newsletter), Andy asks/answers about balance of free/paid online services he uses, and talk about new equipment and a new website. Check it out!

 

July 26 marks 100 days before the 2020 Election on November 3. As the League of Women Voters celebrates 100 years, and next month marks 100 years since the 19th Amendment was ratified, here are 100 ways to take action, get involved, and make a difference before Election Day!  Everyone can do something—what will you do?

Talking about power tools of the culture

I follow the Twitter writings of Ken Smith, an English professor at Indiana University-South Bend. In early July, he had a thought about “power tools of the culture”:

School shouldn’t be so alienating. Young people are entitled to the power tools of the culture.

They like to hear a faculty member say that aloud in class. They like talking about what it entails.

Education:

1) Shouldn’t be so alienating.

2) Power tools of the culture.

Dave Winer referenced this in a podcast that day. I had some thoughts on this as well, so I have created a wiki page collecting items from Ken’s posting over the past month on this topic, as well as my ideas. If anyone has anything to contribute, respond in the comments!

Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news

Recently, I tried out two tools for creating RSS feeds from Twitter account timelines. My next step was to put this into use for tracking news on a topic. Since I live in the Portland, Oregon area, I thought it would be good to be able to collect Portland protest news from Portland news media, reporters, protest groups, and city/county government into a single easy-to-access source.

My first step was to collect RSS feeds or Twitter handles from news sources. Sadly, the main newspaper in Portland (The Oregonian) does not seem to offer RSS feeds, but I did find some for several other newspapers. What I did find, though, is just about everyone news org is using Twitter to broadcast links to stories. I decided to make TweetsToRss my tool of choice for turning those Twitter timelines into RSS feeds.

Once I had a set of feeds, I made a copy of the single page app for my normal RSS feed reading, and made a few changes to the template. Since I had quite a few feeds, I decided to group them into four categories:

  • News Orgs – Newspapers, TV news
  • Reporters – Reporters from news orgs as well as freelancers and other people covering the protests
  • Groups – Protest groups
  • Government – Portland city government (mayor, city council, police bureau, police union) and Multnomah County government (county sheriff dept)

I then modified my template to add tabs for each of these categories. You can see the result here. I am interested in feedback on the design and in suggestions for additions to the feed list. If you have feedback, send it to andy at andysylvester dot com. Thanks!

 

 

I like hearing from other bloggers about why they blog…

This blog post is dedicated to why you should have your own (independent) blog.

Convocast episode 13 is out – and we have a format change! Starting with episode 12, John Philpin asked his question and then gave his answer – I loved it! I follow his example – so check it out!

I’m now a cop in my hometown, Savannah, Georgia, and I don’t want to fight another war — our “war on crime.” But I’m not going anywhere. I’m just speaking up, to propose that we end what never was a war to begin with. We need to change our mind-set about what it means to “police” in America. At this moment of maximal national tension and outrage, when national leaders are calling the streets of America a “battlespace,” with police officers as warriors who should “dominate” and give “no quarter,” I am telling whoever will listen: Police are not warriors — because we are not and must not be at war with our neighbors.