Power to the People

The recent presidential election touched a nerve inside me. I was all set to relax this month with Dan Brown's Deception Point and Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito. But instead I am getting charged up with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Joe Trippi; and I await several books by George Lakoff, including Moral politics : how liberals and conservatives think, and Don't think of an elephant! : know your values and frame the debate: the essential guide for progressives.

I will surely have more to say about Trippi's book soon. As Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign manager, Trippi played a key role in establishing the Internet as a major force of grass-roots empowerment (not to mention candidate fundraising). Dean may have lost the primary, but according to Trippi the political map will never be the same. What the technology of TV has brought -- top-down corporatized politics -- the technology of the Internet will forever take away. Let's hope so, anyway. I'll say more about this book when I'm actually done reading it.

In the meantime, I am happy to report that I finally got around to hooking up SiteMeter to my blog. This service tells me how many hits Connectedness gets and when they happen. Even more interestingly, it tells me where Connectedness readers link from.

All this information could potentially be quite humbling, if the numbers are too low. So I was keenly interested to see that SiteMeter allows me to keep the statistics to myself, or to share them publicly. Though my primitive instinct said to keep the numbers private, I decided that the spirit of Connectedness compels me to share the information with you. I doubt that you care how many hits we are getting at Connectedness, but perhaps a few of you are curious where the other readers are linking from. So now you can find out.

In checking my first complete day of logs, I have already discovered an interesting site I never knew before. Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS comes from Cambridge, UK and reports methods relevant to development projects and programmes with social development objectives. It includes a section entirely devoted to social networks.