But for you, I’ll blog it anyway.

The lovely elderblogger Ronni Bennett is conducting a survey, which Liz sent me early this morning. Are Elderbloggers REALLY defined as 50 and over? Sigh. 4 months and two days left for me. Yes, it is all about me, right? Well, almost me, but surely other bloggers out there 50 and over:

“The goal is to find out what elderbloggers are like, how we may be similar and how we are different, how we relate to technology, how we came to be bloggers or blog readers, how we feel about it and what our demographics are.

There are 57 questions, many of which are required so that there is the largest possible population from which to draw conclusions. They are straightforward questions, mostly multiple-choice, and it shouldn’t take longer than about 15 minutes to complete.

NOTA BENE: This survey is for elderbloggers and elder blog readers who do not keep blogs. Readers and commenters are as important as bloggers to the elderblogging community and help equally to make it as lively and compelling as it is.”

Here’s a link directly to the Elderblogger Survey Pass it on, too.

Technorati Tags: elders, elderbloggers, blogs, blogging, community

Kathleen Seidel’s motion to quash the unreasonable and groundless subpoena was granted. And not only granted, but the judge has asked opposing counsel to show cause for why he shouldn’t be sanctioned.

(h/t Liz)

Technorati Tags: autism, lawsuit, legal

If you’re on Twitter, consider following Ted Murphy and Confessionist. They will donate .25 for each person who follows them to Blogher’s Global Giving Online for every person who follows them in the next 48 hours, to a maximum of $1,000 for Ted and $250 for Confessionist.

That’s a potential for $1,250.00 more for that ticker on the widget.

This idea has been met with some questions about whether this is the opposite of the Andrew Baron experiment. My answer is no, because the motivation to hit that “follow” button is charity. You can follow and unfollow any time you want, but if you follow, Blogher’s ticker increases and people are helped. Hungry women and children, those in need of education or just a healthy meal once per day.

All you do is hit the follow button on Twitter. Ted Murphy and Confessionist do the giving. That’s exactly opposite of selling your community. It’s asking the community to join in a common cause for good.

The control is all yours; the cost all theirs.

So go follow, or if you are uncomfortable following, then please, consider a gift for the sake of giving. Let’s ratchet up that widget total by another zero by Mother’s Day.

Thank you, Ted Murphy and Confessionist. (I’d link you but I can’t find one).

Technorati Tags: blogher, hunger, charity, twitter, followers

You scared me there for a minute. Get some rest and back on your feet soon.

The lesson learned: Don’t ignore pain, especially chest pain.

BlogHers Act! launched an initiative that’s near and dear to my heart today. Being fortunate enough to have a relative in the foreign service who lived in many beautiful, yet poverty-stricken areas , I learned about Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, Surabaya, India and Thailand, about the people, the art, the textiles, and the poverty endemic in these places. I’ve even been lucky enough to meet some people from those areas.

Yet, even with all of the wonder of those countries, there has been what feels like an everlasting dissonant chord: The heavy toll of poverty on the women and children’s health, happiness and well-being.

BlogHers Act! has begun a campaign in partnership with GlobalGiving.org to help improve the health and lives of women and children in countries like Darfur, Nepal, Afghanistan, South Africa, and Burkina Faso.

I’d like to ask you to spend a couple of minutes reading their post, and consider giving a small donation (as small as $10) to help women in these countries have a chance at a healthier and happier life.

There’s a little widget on my sidebar that you can use to go directly to the donation page, but if you’re unable to donate, will you please blog about it and link back to the BlogHer post? Let’s see how many lives we can save between now and Mother’s Day.

Thank you.

Technorati Tags: Blogher, BlogHers Act, womens health, darfur, nepal, afghanistan, south africa, burkina faso, health, giving, charity

Although I’ve stayed outside of the autism/vaccination debate, make no mistake: I do not believe vaccinations cause autism, but I do believe there is a group hysteria around the topic that’s fueled by some clever, smart, vocal parties who have a vested interest in getting others on the bandwagon.

Consider Jenny McCarthy, who would love to sell more of her books about how her son was ‘cured’ of autism. How insulting to other parents dealing with living day-to-day with their autistic children! Or the Rev. Lisa Sykes and her husband Seth, who have a $20 million lawsuit pending against vaccine manufacturers and would love to win it — big bucks and glory in it for them, after all.

On the other side, Kathleen Seidel blogs for Neurodiversity.com and has written extensively against the theory that autism is caused by vaccines. She has been subpoenaed by the Sykes’ and the scope of the subpoena (PDF) should frighten every blogger out there, no matter what their topic.

Liz has many, many details here. You can also Digg this story here. According to Liz’ post, the opinion of one who reviewed the subpoena was this:

…the first phrase that occurred to me on looking through the subpoena was “fishing expedition”, and the second was “intimidation”. Several clauses indicate that Shoemaker is hoping to turn up evidence that Seidel has accepted support from the federal government, or from vaccine makers, which she says she hasn’t. Also among the documents demanded: Seidel’s correspondence with other bloggers.

One of those other bloggers is Liz herself.

Basically, these people are making an assertion with absolutely zero fact to support it that Kathleen Seidel is a pharma and/or government shill, and has possibly conspired with other bloggers, the government and pharmas to damage their case.

They should have a problem with this. After all, they don’t get to go on a fishing expedition for random nuggets without some basis for doing so. Unlike their autism argument, they actually have to PROVE a link between these bloggers and the defendant in the lawsuit. Unlike their autism argument, they do not get to pick and choose facts to fit the situation, because the judge is the arbiter of such decisions.

If plaintiffs in lawsuits are permitted to use their standing in a lawsuit to silence bloggers, we all lose. Kathleen Seidel had the resources to be able to file a motion to quash the subpoena, but not everyone does. A blogger who writes fact and opinion, who is honest and transparent in doing so and who does so in the spirit of informing and discussing issues should not have to face an unfair violation of her privacy as well as other bloggers who have supported her in the past, present and future.

More to the point, the Sykes’ use of the subpoena seems to be specifically targeted to suppress dissent, something that should never, ever be tolerated or sanctioned by the courts.

It doesn’t matter where you stand on the question of vaccines and autism. If you want to be able to write about it freely and without intimidation, support Kathleen Sykes, because the underlying principles affect each and every one of us, whether we’re writing about autism, ADHD, Twitter or tech.

The violation of Kathleen Seidel’s rights is the violation of all of our rights. It’s time to stand up and tell the lawyers we’re not spineless, nor are we voiceless, and they are not going to suppress another blogger’s right to speak with their legal subpoena hammer.

Related Links: EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers, Anti-SLAPP Resource Center

Technorati Tags: autism, vaccines, sykes v bayer, subpoena, kathleen seidel, liz ditz, neurodiversity, advocacy, intimidation, suppression, quackery, skepticism

The photos I posted earlier today came straight to the blog from the Blackberry. They suck. That’s because the Blackberry’s camera sucks. The lens sucks, the hardware sucks. There’s no video. What there is, though, is the ability to send a picture to the blog straight from my phone on a beautiful spring morning (that’s turned somewhat dark and cloudy in the afternoon).

Amy Gahran just bought the much-ballyhooed N95 and spent the last 24 hours trying to get it set up for moblogging before the firmware update bricked it. The updates she was posting were driving me crazy — why the problems pairing bluetooth keyboards and headsets? Geez, that’s old tech, should work fine by now, you’d think. But no.

As much as I love my Blackberry, it drives me crazy that the camera sucks and that I can’t send my photos to my computer via Bluetooth because ATT has disabled the bluetooth port that would allow the connection. I can’t play YouTube videos on it (thanks again, ATT), and if I make my own little videos from concerts and the like I can’t put them on the micro-SD card and reliably play them because Windows Media wants to “fix” them first.

Even the iPhone, everyone’s darling, has features I hate. It’s not on the 3G Network (neither is my blackberry…sigh), the touch keyboard is absolutely impossible for me to use because I’m anal about spelling and can’t stand typos. The data/text/voice plan for it is ridiculously expensive, and it’s not flexible when it comes to adding any enhancements to its applications.

And then there’s Twitter. Twitter’s great on mobile — you can use GTalk or just get everything by text, assuming you’re following everyone and have turned updates on for everyone. But sometimes I’ll follow and forget to include turning their updates on, because I have this nice desktop Twitter client that picks up tweets from anyone I follow. When I switch to mobile, suddenly there’s half the tweets — what I call Twitter Lite — which is neither great-tasting nor less filling. It just sucks.

On the Blackberry, GTalk won’t shut up unless I turn off all the sound on the phone. I’ve told it six different ways from friday that I really don’t need to hear a ding every frickin’ time someone tweets, but it won’t get it. So GTalk is only a partial option for me because I can’t sit in a client meeting and have my phone ringy-dinging every two seconds. I have limited texting so GTalk is a good workaround, but for the noise.

Look, I’ve written about this before. All I want is a mobile device that I can use as a phone, take a picture that doesn’t suck and post it to my blog, take a video that doesn’t suck and send it to YouTube, read email, tweets and blog posts, and click on links from those without hanging the whole phone because someone hasn’t adapted their site for mobile (which is a LOT of sites). I don’t want to see the dreaded “502 error” that I get when clicking on a video or audio file, and I want to download the audio for Newsgang Live directly to my micro SD card and listen on my phone.

So to the mobile service providers, please stop being greedy and let me decide how use the bandwidth. Quit demanding that I pay another five bucks to watch your crappy edited video and let me watch what I want. Let me listen to what I want. Get over your control game.

To the hardware manufacturers, including Apple, figure out how to make it suck less. No firmware upgrades that brick phones (can you IMAGINE how Microsoft would be villified if they did such a thing?) Ship it right the first time, provide a pathway for upgrades that justifies anyone forking over $400-700 for a mobile device. Give me a device worth that kind of money in a world where a cheap laptop is $500.

Make it suck less and do it sooner rather than later.

(Did anyone count the number of times I used the term ’suck’? How many?)

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Blackberry, mobile, mobile web, suck less, fix it now, ATT

A Twitterstorm of sorts is flurrying around tonight. I didn’t start it but I fueled it, somewhat inadvertently. (I can hear my mother telling me I really DON’T have to jump into every conversation… or my old boss telling me I had rabbit ears that picked stuff up from three offices away, or just knowing I’m easily distracted…)

The eye of the storm is attention. Or attention deficits, maybe. From a life standpoint, this is one of my best topics — I’m a master at not paying attention, paying too much attention, or dividing my attention, depending on the day and time. In this Twitterstorm, the discussion swirls around the question of gestures — what they are, how we make them, and what they represent.

It seems easy enough, right? But it’s really not, because attention can be divided up and expressed in so many different ways. Zoning out when my daughter is talking to me is a gesture. So is choosing to ignore a tweet that yanks my particular chain. Clicking on a link dropped into Twitter is a gesture, too. All of these add up to attention. Or lack of it, depending.

All of this seems simple, but it’s not. It’s complex, particularly when put into the context of social networks. On Newsgang Live a couple of weeks ago, I tried to make the case that using favorites would be one way to weight attention on Twitter. Steve Gillmor, who has spent a ton of time thinking and writing about all of this, pointed out that using favorites is too easily gamed, because the act of making something (or someone) a favorite is an explicit gesture that can be too easily duplicated.

Before I start overthinking this too deeply and lose my own train of thought to my short attention span, I should probably turn to the little Twitterstorm. It started with Steve Gillmor telling Rob LaGesse links are dead. This is a statement Steve has made many times, but I still don’t quite understand it, beyond knowing that he means that links as a measure of attention are like favorites — they’re explicit gestures that can be gamed too easily. They can mean attention or they can mean popularity, which isn’t the same thing. In the conversation that follows in 140 character bursts, I admit to not quite bending my head around implicit gestures; that is, gestures like sharing posts with Google Reader, dropping links into Twitter that are interesting, and so on.

Rob’s response:

realy smart people make really complex things simple. Like Winer did with RSS.

My mind started turning with that comment. On one level, I was feeling like it was a bit of a snipe at Gillmor, but on another, it just didn’t sound right to me.

Can anyone reading this tell me with any degree of certainty that they fully understand the power of RSS? If we did, all those great things that we don’t have now but want would already be built. Examples: Disqus, the commenting system used here, rolled out an incredible update that actually creates community around the blog comments here. If you sign up for Disqus and comment under your Disqus name, you become part of this, and other Disqus-driven communities.

Then there’s FriendFeed, which I like to think of as my personal kitchen sink. Friendfeed takes everything I’ve posted here, to Pownce, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Zooomr, to my other social networks I’ve added and puts it in a stream. Then it adds the conversation around those items, so looking at my Friendfeed means seeing a picture of the social footprints of me, my friends, and my contacts around the web.

Both of these are driven by RSS. Without RSS attached to Twitter and other networks, there would be no foundation to build upon. RSS has been around for what? 10+ years? Yet, it’s taken this long for Twitter to evolve, and Disqus, and Friendfeed and many others and all pivot on RSS.

RSS is definitely a really simple thing, but it’s so complex I don’t think any of us fully understand its power. Maybe Dave Winer understands it, but I think even he doesn’t really envision all of the ways it might be used. Dave’s writing apps using RSS as the foundation for his FlickrFan application — a “this year” brainstorm.

Really simple, but not so simple. Really simple, but so powerful we haven’t figured it all out.

The same is true of gestures, both on and offline. I’m sure my kids view my zone-outs while they’re going on about something or another as a gesture of inattention. I’m sure my creditors understand my forgetting to pay their bill as a gesture of inattention, and I’m sure the volume of posts on the other blog compared to this one over the past month or two also gestures where my attention has been lately.

It seems simple enough, but it’s really much more complex and powerful than any of us understand. If you feel so inclined, you can find and follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed. I will consider that a gesture, too, and pay proper attention.

Final wisdom from a Hugh McLeod tweet:

“Twitter is a river you live beside. You don’t have to [...] catch every fish to live beside it.” http://tinyurl.com/2futq9

Technorati Tags: networks, RSS, simple, complex, social graph, social networks, social web, attention, gestures