This Saturday, May 19th is the 1st Annual Dance Parade celebrating every imaginable dance and drawing attention to NYC’s archaic cabaret laws. I will be putting on something snappy and lindy hopping with my fellow swing dancers from yehoodi.com. There will be literally thousands of other dancers representing a variety of genres from capoeira to…
Category: Politics
Save Internet Radio 10-hour Party this Saturday in SL
I got news of this cool "save Internet radio" party coming up this Saturday in SL! DJ Synn invites all music-loving avatars to come out to a ten-hour marathon protest party from 10AM-10PM PST on Saturday May 12. The all-day event is an effort to raise awareness of the threat to Internet radio (in the…
Code Pink SL presents “Impeach on the Beach” this Sunday
Ana Herzog sends me info about a fun progressive political action in SL, "Impeach on the Beach." The feminist activist group Code Pink invites avatars to gather at Mikianna Island in Second Life to help spell out the word "IMPEACH" lying head-to-toe on the beach. The event is this Sunday, May 6, starting at noon…
Reporters without Borders comes to the world without borders
The Paris-based press freedom Rapporteurs sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) has opened a new Second Life headquarters to draw attention to their work in support of persecuted and imprisoned journalists around the world. You can find a "hall of shame" showing prominent persecutors of the press around the world, news feeds from their work around…
Obama reclaims his myspace page: the limits of viral grassroots organizing
PoliticsOnline.com reports that the Barack Obama campaign has "taken control of the volunteer created MySpace page listed under his name." Apparently 29-year-old Joe Anthony created the MySpace page a few years ago after hearing Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention. Since then, it has unofficially hosted news and information about Obama and his campaign,…
It’s Press Freedom Day: let’s free some press
Happy Press Freedom Day! Here’s some of Rapporteurs Sans Frontieres statistics on press repression around the world this year: 24 Journalists killed 5 Media Assistants killed 125 Journalists imprisoned 4 Media Assistants imprisoned 65 Cyberdissidents imprisoned Also check out Freedom House’s world map of press freedom. Support your local press freedom, freedom of expression, or…
Support Net Radio: get your congressperson to support H.R.2060
Looks like the US Copyright Office has denied requests for a re-hearing on the issue of the new royalties structure for internet radio stations. For those who haven’t been following the issue, the RIAA in early March successfully got the US Copyright Office to accept a new set of exorbitant song royalty fees for netradio…
Yahoo announces “first” online-only presidential debates
e-Democracy expert Steven Clift sends along the press release that Yahoo!, Slate Magazine and the Huffington Post have teamed up to organize a series of online-only debates between presidential candidates. Steven corrects the press release, which claims that this will be the "first ever" online-only debate between presidential candidates, which actually occurred way back in…
Does Web2.0 make us more engaged or divided?
I went to a cool panel on “Democratization of the Networked Public Sphere” at the New School featuring Danah Boyd, Ethan Zuckerman and Trebor Scholz. So many thought provoking ideas flying all around the room, I was dizzy by the end. Ethan’s talk was closest to my heart, talking about the potential of networked, remixed…
Google Earth + Darfur: a powerful tech mash-up
The US Holocaust Museum has teamed up with Google Earth to offer a startling and powerful overlay of the region of Darfur onto Google’s interactive earth map. You can see where all the of the refugee camps are, which villages have been destroyed, view photos, and read testimony from people in the region. I have…