So the McCain campaign has a Web form where you can send your message… to Barack Obama. “Tell Barack Obama it’s not 2004,” it says.

So I took advantage of the form to tell Obama “Keep it up – you’ve got my vote!” You can do the same….

I’m really impressed by the Web sites that have sprung up to spread information about Hurricane Gustav. No government required — regular folks created full-featured sites for people to share information, photos, videos, and whatever as Gustav approached and struck.

Just like Wikipedia, the Hurricane Gustav Wiki allows anyone to add and edit content, creating a one-stop for information. Information like….

…traffic maps, aid agencies and donations, federal and local government resources, FEMA registration, postal services, insurance information, national and local phone numbers, animal rescue resources, health and safety information, shelter lists, ham radio resources…

You get the idea. All of this is created and maintained by average Janes and Joes. And that, my friends, is the power of social media. A government-created site would have info, sure, but you can guarantee it wouldn’t be nearly as comprehensive (ham radio info?), and wouldn’t include on-the-ground updates, e,g., “The 14th street shelter is full — don’t bother going there.”

Meanwhile, the Gustav Information Center, also set up by regular folks, is more of a social network in that users can post blog entries, photos, video, and so on. It even has an interactive map showing evac routes and shelters. If you want the latest news on what’s really going on, that’s the place to be. (It’s not just user-created stuff. It’s also pulling in mainstream news feeds related to the storm.)

Even if you aren’t affected by Gustav, it’s worth taking a step back and marveling at this stuff. The Gustav Wiki was built using the same software that powers Wikipedia. From experience I can say that it probably took about two hours to set up, if that. The Gustav Info Center was created on Ning, a site that lets anyone set up a social network in a matter of minutes.

In other words, all this incredible, high-end functionality took the creators no time at all to have up and running. And now they’re the defacto home pages for the storm.

(The Center for Social Media has a short post about both these sites, too.)

• • •

Looking at all this got me into researching social-network software in case anything interesting ever happens. :) I could use Ning, but I like the idea of self-hosted stuff. I first looked at content-management systems (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), then social network packages (Elgg) and finally realized that what I wanted was groupware. And the big name in that category is TikiWiki.

So I’m creating a test platform to see how long it would take me to create “Whatever Information Center.” It doesn’t have to be a disaster, of course; it could be “Richmond Election Day Information Center” or “Summer Kids’ Activities” or whatever. I’m tossing around ideas in my head (not a long distance to toss) about what such a site would need and what it wouldn’t.

Who knows — maybe next time I’ll be the one running a site like this.z

So tell me, when did “social network” become simply a synonym for “Web site with message boards”?

I’d be grateful if you’d tell me how you usually read this site.

Basically, I want to know if you go directly to an entry (via RSS feed) or whether you go to the home page and read from there.

(If this is your first time here, I’m guessing you went to a specific entry’s page, not the home page.)

Just use the comments. And thanks.

Kudos, props, etc., to the staff of the Washington Post for winning the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for its exceptional, multi-faceted coverage of the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, telling the developing story in print and online.”

The Post also won the Virginia Press Association’s awards for its coverage of the shooting for both “Spot news writing” and “General news writing,” and scored a “Best in show” for is coverage as well: “Clearly the best writing over the entire event. A model of breadth, depth, clarity and sensitivity. This story was a local one for The Post and every other newspaper in Virginia. It was beautifully done.”

But extra kudos go to the Christiansburg-Blacksburg News-Messenger. The tiny, local paper took both first and second place in the VPA’s “Special sections or special editions” category for its extended coverage of the Tech tragedy. (Let’s get some names in here: Tonya Hall Bowyer, Amanda Bolen, and Lawson Koeppel.)

And finally, Alan Kim of the Roanoke Times — whom I’ve worked with and I know to be an absolutely terrific guy — took the VPA’s Best in Show award for this shot (at least I think it’s this shot) in the aftermath of the shooting.

I have to say, though, that I’m disappointed that the single best source of breaking news during the shooting — I was in the Roanoke Times newsroom at the time — was omitted. that was Planet Blacksburg, a student-run news site. It was where we turned to find out what was happening because it had all the information first.

The site got new media — it understood that it’s not about having photos and video and multimedia fluff, but it’s being willing to report rumor and unverified information as such. In a situation like that, waiting for confirmation on every piece of data would have been the wrong move — the old media move.

As long as readers knew the information was unconfirmed and may be revised, during chaos like that it’s best to get everything out there. Detailed, confirmed reporting could wait for the next day’s papers or for the evening news. But the Web can’t work like that, and the folks at Planet Blacksburg knew it. Bravo to them.

Test post from Post2Blog.

Just seeing if this works at all. :)

OK, you’ve probably heard various musicians and other artists shouting “Free Tibet!” and have at least a vague awareness that the Chinese have occupied it against the wishes of its people.

My understanding, though, was limited to that. But here’s a useful link to a short piece in the Sunday Times, “Long-suffering pawn at mercy of the great powers,” that explains the history. FWIW.

And, of course, there’s the Wikipedia entry, “Tibetan sovereignty debate” that goes into more detail.

(I note that this is the reason other encyclopediae are all but worthless. While Britannica has an entry on Tibet (”Tibet autonomous region, China”) I doubt it has a separate piece devoted to the sovereignty issue. Further, trying to read the piece about Tibet that Britannica does have is impossible — popups demanding that you pay for the privilege won’t let you.)

I’m not a fan of Twitter; I think it’s kind of silly to expect people to follow your every move, every minute of every day. Further, it’s yet another site for people to go to check in on their friends.

I have a Twitter feed (and Facebook and MySpace pages, among others), but it’s more because I need to know about this stuff than because I actually use it.

But I found a neat use for Twitter. I had wanted to create a "microblog" — a section on this site for quick hits that didn’t warrant a full blog entry. WordPress lets me do that pretty easily — I can create a category called "microblog" and have posts in that category appear in a separate place.

But that would mean launching my blogging tool (Windows Live Writer) every time I wanted to dash something off. I wanted something quicker.

Twitter to the rescue.

I may not like it, but plenty of others do, and that popularity means there are plenty of Twitter tools, including a Firefox add-in called Twitterbar that lets you type an entry into your browser’s address bar and have it posted to Twitter.

Way cool. Way cool because I also found Alex King’s neat WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. It takes any Twitter post and makes it a blog entry in a category of your choice.

So I created a "twitter" category, installed these two tools, and whenever I post a twit — er, tweat — it’s automatically pulled into this blog. (See the right side of the home page.)

So now I can post a fast "microblog" entry from Firefox’s address bar by clicking on a little green plus sign. Way cool.

Update: I spoke too soon. It seems Twitter has some problems, so the updates don’t always work. I thought it was a WordPress problem, but I see it’s on Twitter’s end. Oh, well.

There’s an excellent post over at PCMech called "Underhanded Hosting Provider Tactics." It’s good reading for anyone who has their own Web site.

There were two things that stood out.

What you think of when you see "dedicated server" and what your host actually provides may be two very different things. And phrases like "Climate controlled environment" and "backup power supply" can mean just about nothing.

Worth a read.