The idea of Web 2.0 may be a new concept to you — it was to me when our new Executive Director mentioned it to me last summer.  It refers to all of the new technologies available on the internet, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.  It essentially takes the existing internet and makes it more dynamic and enables faster, briefer communication.  However, it’s constantly evolving and new tools are arising all the time.

I went to this interesting conference today called Feminism 2.0.  I also blogged about it for work here.  Sitting in sessions surrounded by women who are contributing authors on 7 or 8 blogs (often in addition to holding down full-time jobs, having partners, and having children), I felt like a complete slacker.  We can hardly manage to update our blog monthly, much less multiple times a day.  But it was really interesting to hear about all of the different blogs that exist, and also to see what all of these blogs mean in the grander scheme of the internet.  For instance, if a blogger can get lots of other bloggers to link to her site and if she also links back to those sites, she increases her standing in the internet rankings.  This might not be news to all, but even more interesting is a map of a small segment of the blogosphere that’s available here (you have to type in a username and password, which are available at that link).  The yellow dots represent some of the more popular feminist blogs.  If you click on a dot, you can see which blogs the blogger links to, and which blogs link to her.  (I think green lines are outgoing links, red are incoming links, and yellow are bidirectional links.)  The tool was even more elaborate than this — he was able to show the position and linkages between these feminist blogs and conservative and liberal blogs, which shows the number of feminist blogs that are able to get their ideas into more mainstream blogs.  Not surprisingly, almost all the links went to and from progressive liberal sites.  He was also able to show which types of blogs (conservative vs. liberal) had the largest share of posts about certain topics — reproductive rights, violence against women, economic justice, etc.  All of these metrics are extremely useful for planning and messaging purposes (although unfortunately not all are available at the link above because they are proprietary).

As I sat at the conference, I thought about the blogs that we link to and the blogs that our friends link to.  And I started to get really interested in ways that my friends who blog regularly can get their ideas heard by wider audiences.  As I said before, this isn’t news to most of you.  But if it is, and if you want more info, let me know and I can share anything else I learned.  In the meantime, I look forward to checking out some of these new blogs.  Who knows…we might have a new blogroll coming soon.

I haven’t totally drunk the Kool-Aid, though.  I still think Twitter is stupid and having people’s “tweets” displayed on a huge screen behind the presenters was extremely distracting and detracted from the presentations.  Either my brain isn’t big enough to process so many stimuli or a bunch of people think they’re engaged in things when really they’re not.  Or maybe a little of each…

All of our neighbors ran outside as soon as the electoral count rose over 270.  Everyone was banging on pots and pans, drinking champagne, and hollering.  There were fireworks.  Passing cars were honking.  The solidarity was amazing!

This is what Barack Obama will bring to our country.  This is what we’ve been waiting for.  We can make it until January.  Only 76 more days.

Here’s to eight great years!

The funny thing is that we didn’t even know this was on. Someone in his office saw Frank on the TV in their lunchroom (which is always tuned to CNN).

Here are some great Washington Post stories that provide more details:

From the front page of the Metro section on June 29th, including a photo of PreventionWorks staff:  House Repeals Needle Ban.
Sunday, July 1st:  Big Break is Possible for Small Crusade.
Op-Ed from July 2nd:  Needle-Exchange Victory.
And, the article those of us interested in international health as well as domestic health have been waiting for, a letter to the editor from July 6th:  Needle Exchange Needs Beyond DC.

If you have no time for the above links, here’s an excerpt from an email I got from AIDS Action summarizing what’s going on:

“The House debated the Souder amendment to ban DC from using local funding on syringe exchange late on Wednesday night.  During that debate, the first amendment offered by Souder was ruled out of order because it was considered a legislative action on an appropriations bill.  So he offered a second amendment that narrowed the local spending prohibition on syringe exchange to Whitman-Walker Clinic (an HIV/AIDS clinic here in Washington) and PreventionWorks! (a syringe exchange and HIV prevention organization).  Souder lost the voice vote and a roll call vote was delayed until yesterday evening. Finally, during yesterday’s voting, the amendment was defeated 216-208.  It was a very close vote – 30 Democrats voted in favor of the amendment, but 15 Republicans voted against it.  This is literally an historic vote – the first vote on syringe exchange since 2000 and I think that it is the first favorable vote ever.  Here is the recorded vote [...] We expect that with a quick resolution in the Senate, Washington will now be allowed to use its funds on syringe exchange.  However, there continues to be a ban on allowing any federal funding to be spent on syringe exchange.  Not only does this hamper HIV prevention efforts in many communities throughout the U.S. it also has caused U.S. officials to disapprove funding in other countries for syringe exchange.  This is particularly problematic in countries which receive U.S. funding and which have high rates of HIV due to intravenous drug use.  We will continue to work to end this ban in the future.”