Tales from the Net

My annoyance with Twitter has slowly been building since one of their last updates. I don’t like how Re-Tweets (RT) are handled in the latest updates so I put off updating the software. Twitter’s new authentication process recently went live (a good thing), and it forced me update TweetDeck, the client I use to follow Twitter. And this update included the change that I had been avoiding for months and months: the new RTs.

If I didn’t update, I wouldn’t be able to log into Twitter. So I updated, and the RTs are just as annoying as I thought they would be.

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IfWeRanTheWorld CEO Cindy Gallop describes it as “a radically simple web platform designed to turn good intentions into action, one microaction at a time”.  Giovanna’s intention here is straightforward: write a short story. As anybody who’s ever tried to write can tell you, though, that’s easier said than done. Using IWRTW, Giovanna’s defined an ‘action platform’ with the steps to accomplish her goal.

Right now Giovanna’s got 10 microactions ‘in play’ and 36 done. “If We Ran The World allows me to express my intentions in a meaningful and quantifiable way”, Giovanna told me. “I love this platform.”

IWRTW is very social in terms of being designed for people working together (you can target microactions as invitations to act and pick up somebody else’s microactions) so Giovanna’s action platform also invites others to help her if they’re interested. The site’s business model is to work with businesses that want to put together an action platform designed to do good and make money simultaneously, and is still in beta. So far the reviews are positive. Bruce Mau Design’s blog summed it up: “Beautiful design + social engagement + fun to use = awesome!”
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Last week we discussed the lack of diversity in The Economist‘s debate on online privacy.  After reflecting on it over the weekend, it still bugs me, so I decided to write a letter to the editor:

Sir,

Women, people of color, students, and migrants all have important perspectives on privacy, and I was disappointed that you didn’t include any in your recent online debate.  Please consider repeating it with a more diverse range of perspectives.

They probably get a heck of a lot of letters.  So as well as emailing it to them, I’m going to use act.ly to call it to their attention via Twitter.

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This blog is meant to address the censorship on The Huffington Post. I’ve been a Huffpo user since the site launched… Since then Huffpo has been my main site for news.

— Red Dog in Welcome to Banned from HuffPo, April 14

Pssst…hey kid! Wanna a few words that will get you past the censors over on Huff-Po? Pay attention; you gotta use the weasel words and technique that make you appear normal; you know, conversational stuff or you get banned by JuLiA, HP’s newest software.

— Terry, in the comment thread

Censorship’s one of the topics we’re planning to discuss in Tales from the Net, so we were delighted when Expose the Truth left a comment on our Relaunching… post with a link to Red Dog’s blog and James Ballard’s petition to talk show host Thomas Hartmann.*

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