I’m super excited to announce that my new segment on GRITtv with Laura Flanders has launched! I’ll be doing regular segments featuring all things tech: politics (like episode 1, here), life hacks, sanity checks, gadget giddiness, you name it. Have suggestions or hot tips? Send them to blog AT deannazandt.com!

Hey y’all! I’m here at Personal Democracy Forum I’ve got a Nokia N95 (thanks, Micah!) and I’m gonna be running around all day talking to folks for GRITtv. Watch live!

(If I’m not on live, then it’ll just show a white screen… look at older clips here)

Shameless self-promotion, because I’m honored to be included in an article with so many stellar women of the media world — check out Adele Stan’s fantastic writeup on women making media: Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media.

no no, thank YOU, Adele!

A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner’s panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on “Empowering Online Communities.” (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)

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What Gerald Ford said about her: “if God created the world in 6 days, he couldn’t have rested on the 7th day– he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.”

I’m watching CNN this morning as we gear up for Democratic Decider Day, and there was just a commercial on the absolute unwavering virtues of… coal. In the background, “Celebration” (wah-hoo!) played. America’s power! (wah-hoo!) It’s what runs 70% of our energy systems! (wah-hoo!) Heyyyyyyy… wait a second.

But the “I Like to Watch” column in Salon yesterday had world view that was a little more akin to my own — on the economy:

The talking heads want us to think that it’s all our fault for charging a 52-inch plasma flat-screen TV on our credit cards, but we’re not buying that song and dance anymore. A pound of chicken breast is $7 at my grocery store. I live in a working-class neighborhood. What the hell are people eating out there? The federal minimum wage is $5.85 an hour! Can you imagine working over an hour for a f***ing chicken sandwich? What is this, Zimbabwe?

In troubled times like these, I like to tune in to “The Suze Orman Show” (9 p.m. EST on CNBC) so Suze and her befuddled crowds and I can sigh heavily together over the sorry state of the U.S. economy. I love how Suze talks about good things to do with money I don’t have. I like putting imaginary money into IRAs and then saving some more imaginary money for a 529 college fund. It feels reassuring, somehow, to know that if I stumbled on $10,000 or $15,000, I’d know lots of things to do with it that wouldn’t involve Cabo San Lucas or high-grade cocaine at all.

Amen, sister. I do however, really like the Holiday Inn Express breakfast bar commercials.

I was interviewed for an article about the Internet and the campaign season for LinuxInsider:

“A lot of little folks are being empowered with tools and communications in ways that were previously unavailable,” Zandt told LinuxInsider.

This, she said, is “a huge paradigm shift, from a small number of people controlling communications to everyone having the power to communicate with everyone else.”

I feel so hardcore!