crowdsourcing patronage

Just what is journalism going to look like in the future? It’s a question that’s been bouncing around my head for a while, and articulated in various pieces by Ben Thompson (in a nichification process), my friend Eric Hydrick, and others. Eric brought up the idea of supporting “special” journalism through services like Patreon. I …
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how to turn a google+ community into a quasi “mailing list”

Spurred by a recent question from an acquaintance in town, I asked on Google+ whether or not you can enable emailed notifications for a Community. This led to the elaborate Settings page for G+. It turns out that if you combine enabling a Community’s “Community notifications” (under the specific Community’s settings (which you find by …
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group admin in the era of facebook

Along the difficulties of initially building a good group/community, comes the hassles of managing said [virtual] community – especially on the book of the face. I am a coadmin on the Ontario & Western Railways Historical Society Inc Facebook group. My friend Peter is a coadmin of the Linux Mint group. Something both of us have noticed …
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community building is hard

Establishing and building a community around a common interest is hard. After exhausting your network of friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc – the only way of getting new folks into the community is to aggressively campaign and advertise to them. Let’s say you’re a technical user group (like a couple of the ones I’m a part …
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redecentralizing school

I have a very long–term interest in education. As I look at the current public education “system” in the US, I can see a variety of major problems. The biggest problem, endemic of any system built around the premise that the only people who should be together all day long should all be “similar”. Somewhere …
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asymmetric communication – the facebookification of society

The first communication method we ever learn is the interaction between ourselves as infants and our caregivers (just to cover the possibility of a parent, foster parent, day care worker, orphanage employee, etc). They speak to us, hold us, and in general take care of us while we cry, burp, laugh, and gurgle in response. …
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