“	Holy shit. (@ Stonewall Inn w/ 102 others) [pic]: http://4sq.com/jVvxlQ
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

Holy shit.
Photo by randomdeanna on flickr

“	The biggest feeling, after joy, here outside Stonewall: relief. #ssm
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

This is what equality looks like.
Photo by randomdeanna on flickr

“	It seen like ppl are getting engaged every 10 ft, haha #ssm
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

“	OH: “Everyone deserves hugs and kisses.” #ssm #stonewall
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

“	Where it all began. Thank you to all who sacrificed before us. http://flic.kr/p/9WAstm
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

Where it all began. Thank you to all who sacrificed before us.
Photo by randomdeanna on flickr

“	Also a common theme outside Stonewall: random reunions, inspired joyous serendipity. #ssm
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

“	I’m also loving the diversity of genders, ethnicities and identities. Everyone deserves this joy. #ssm #stonewall
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

Crowds outside Stonewall, #1
Photo by randomdeanna on flickr

Crowds outside Stonewall, #2
Photo by randomdeanna on flickr

“	Spontaneous song breaks out: “Going to the chapel” #ssm #stonewall
	randomdeanna June 25, 2011

“	@randomdeanna LOL! KitchenAid Mixer Artisan series. Good call. Have a blast celebrating at Stonewall!
	ruthkalinka June 25, 2011

Empire State Building Goes Rainbow
Photo by zennie62 on flickr

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• Monday, 9:30am. Hyatt TX Ballroom 1.
  The best donuts you’ve ever had in your life will be served!
  People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7037
  With: Twanna Hines, Jean Russell, Cheryl Contee and Andrea Miller.
  Now, social is personal. From finance site Mint.com’s anti-immigration blog post gaffe to YourTango CEO Andrea Miller’s “How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian),” social media fuses personal with public in a way never seen before. Whether sharing taste in hiphop, dating preferences, provocative political ideas, or insider information about a soon-to-be-launched business, social media strategically develops personal and professional reputations. Stories can build audiences, grow support for campaigns and change mainstream ideas about social issues. They can also alienate various communities, compromise business information confidentiality or damage brands. If social media has shown us anything, it’s that stories still matter. This panel will be a concrete conversation on how successful online personalities have managed their personal and professional lives using social media: telling authentic stories about our experiences, and using those stories to build powerful, engaged communities.
• Monday, 11:30am. SXSW Bookstore — ACC Ballroom Foyer D
  Book signing! I’ll be there till 12pm.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_OE00561
• Monday, 12:30pm. Icehauers, 83 Rainey St.
  Twitter for Good at SXSW and Beyond
  http://claire.us.com/twitter-for-good-at-sxsw-and-beyond/
  The lovely Claire Diaz Ortiz, who leads philanthropy and social innovation at Twitter, is hosting this lunchtime discussion and workshop to answer the question: “What 1 THING could Twitter, Inc. do to better help non-profits, causes, and anyone trying to make a difference in the world using the platform?” More details at Claire’s blog post.

I wanted to share with you an amazing worldwide conference that I’m participating in next week. It’s called “Women Who Tech,” and it brings together hundreds of women who leverage their technology savvy to inspire change and transform the world. And it takes place all online and on the phone!

Women Who Tech
When: May 12, 2009. Panels are 50 min long and run from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT.
Where: Everywhere via phone and web
http://womenwhotech.com/
A mere $10 for a whole day of goodness

I participated last year, and at first I thought the distance thing was going to be strange– but it’s absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend joining in the fun. What’s great is that this is really not just for women who currently tech– if you’re interested social media, launching a startup, learning about new tools… this is *the* place to be.

I’ll be moderating this panel:

What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us – 4PM EDT
This panel will look at problems that are arising along gender, class and race lines within the new paradigms of Web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. When we remove explicit structure from the organizing and tech equation, inherent structure arises– illustrating through technology just how far we have to go for social equality. But we don’t want to just kvetch about the problems: this panel will present and brainstorm solutions together. Panelists: Allison Fine, techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum, Tanya Tarr, AFSCME.

Thennnnn, there are parties that evening in major cities for participants to get together and socialize. Shockingly, I’m throwing the NYC party. Details:

NYC Women Who Tech After-Party
6:30pm – 9:00pm
Donnybrook
35 Clinton St (corner of Stanton)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73623154033
Drink specials and noshy things galore!

Feel free to come by and say “hi” even if you’re not attending the conference. Other parties are scheduled for DC, San Francisco, London and Atlanta, too.

I can’t express enough how excited I am to be part of this gang. Please feel free to forward on, and if you’re one of those journalist types and you want to write about the events or women in technology in general, drop me a line!

There is the obvious tragedy of the dead and wounded in Binghamton, NY. The anger and despair, the terror of knowing that a gunman can walk into a building in a relatively small city in rural, industrial upstate New York and massacre people at will.

Then the other layers start piling on top of the fear and the rage: the layers that make the story just a little cloudier and darker. Yeah, there’s an inside joke in there– I grew up there, and Binghamton is the seventh cloudiest city in the country. The cloudiest east of the Rockies. No doubt that the lack of direct sun contributes to a sense of malaise in town, but it’s likely the overall economic decline over the last 20-25 years that makes Binghamton just a very sad city in many ways.

We all have our grownup sensibilities about the towns we come from, especially those of us that moved to Big Cities– all our bravado about how glad we are that we “got out,” our vows to never look back (maybe), or quietly and smugly looking back at those quaint li’l places. But there is something special about Binghamton. It was never a thriving metropolis, but it got by alright, and that’s what most of the folks that live there seem to live by.

I once wrote that the people from my hometown were never the stars of the production. We were always happy to be in the background, providing the scenery. Maybe once in a while, we were the people that got a line, fingering the suspect. “That’s the guy,” we’d say. It would be straightforward, without fanfare. That’s how people from Binghamton operate.

Being brought to a national stage like this, under such horrible circumstances, is devastating. Not only do “things like this” not happen in Binghamton, but additional layers — economic duress, the immigrant aid center where it happened — make it all the more sharp.

We have long been the destination of swaths of migrant populations: in the early 1900s, it was Eastern Europeans, and the Orthodox churches’ gold onion domes still dot the city landscape when you drive out along Route 17. More recently, it’s been populations of folk from a number of countries in Southeast Asia: Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotian and more. Not to say that there hasn’t been difficulty in transitioning populations, especially for a place with largely conservative values, but I always had the feeling that Binghamton prided itself on its immigrant foundations and offerings. Centers like the American Civic Association give new immigrants a place to find their footing in a cloudy city in upstate New York.

Offerings. IBM was in many ways the responsible party for Binghamton’s survival for a lot of years, and when they left town, so did most of everything else. Now we’re learning that the shooter was recently laid off from one of the last vestiges of IBM. Economic distress might have been the thing that flipped this guy’s sanity over to the dark side. And now people are dead.

(thanks to SuperSpade for this)

Friends, colleagues, New Yorkers, Americans:

Below is a call that went out earlier in the week for us all to gather at Wall Street tomorrow (Thursday) at 4pm to protest the inanity of the $700 billion bailout. Seven. Hundred. Billion. Dollars. For what? For them to screw up again and rob us blind? Please!

My big question in all of this is: who’s going to bail out Main Street? What happens to the over a million people with foreclosed homes this year alone?

And hey, I’ve got a buncha useless crap around that I could use some money for– thanks to the folks over at BuyMyShitpile.com, there’s an idea to bring it all down to Bowling Green and see if there are takers. Even WIRED Magazine is in on the fun: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/outrage-online.html

So, heed the call– the unions, the grassroots organizations, the media… everyone’s in on this one. Come on down. Bring friends. Forward this on. I’ll see yas there. Full details below.

————

This week the White House is trying to push through the biggest financial theft in world history with nary a stitch of debate. They're asking for a blank check for over 1 trillion dollars to bail out George Bush's Wall Street cronies who created this economic crisis in the first place.

If this passes, we can forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national health care, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate.

Let's rally against this bailout in the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.

What: Say NO to the Wall Street bailout
When: Thursday, September 25: 4pm
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area, by the bull statue
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.

Do whatever you can for this historic event and contact all your groups and friends. This proposed financial bailout is without precedent and we have to stop it!

Since Wall Street is asking us to give them money for their worthless investments, some folks are planning to bring their OWN junk to Wall Street and see if they'll buy it. Bring your collectible mugs and limited edition Thomas Kinkade prints and add ‹“em to the pile! This action inspired by Buy My Shitpile – (http://www.buymyshitpile.com/)

“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!

• Over at Hightower Lowdown, we’ve launched a new weekly video series featuring America’s #1 Populist. What more could you ask for? 2 minutes of Jim talking to you every single week! You can also watch it on YouTube, or subscribe to the show in iTunes.
• And for AlterNet.org, we relaunched the front page to be snazzier and brighter. Design was done by Design About Town, engineering by the ever-smarty Shawn and project management and OCD tweaking by me. Whee!
• I redesigned and launched the website for best-selling author Amy Bloom, who has been an absolute riot to work with. I haven’t read her newest, but Come To Me was highly recommended to me by Bitch Magazine co-founder and feminista-extraordinare, Lisa Jervis. And it rocked.
• Lots of photosets from the last couple months.
• Um, I upgraded to Leopard last night, and so far so good. One thing that I called tech support about because I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else: yes, Time Machine will wipe your external drive the first time you use it, but then you can continue putting other things on it after. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated Time Machine drive, whew.

That’s pretty much it. Holidays are a-comin’ and I’ll be up in Bingotown for a while, hanging out with the fam, and then back in NYC for New Year’s. Hope all’s well in the land of not-my-apartment!

Brian Williams, the darling of NBC, had this to say:

We work every bit as hard as our television-news forebears did at gathering, writing and presenting the day’s news but to a smaller audience, from which many have been lured away by a dazzling array of choices and the chance to make their own news.

Err… um, well, no. Trust me, Brian, those folks not watching the evening news, it’s not because they’re off blogging. (Mom? Remember, we talked about “blogging” — people writing their own news, opinions and analysis in an online journal. Here’s the presentation I did for you guys over Thanksgiving.)

Most people are fed up with mainstream journalism pushing one side of a story (hello, WMD!), the ridiculous celebrity obsessions (she showed her what? I still don’t care), the reign of infotainment — which has its own Wikipedia entry, by the way– over corporate news. That “dazzling array of choices” isn’t just the magpie-effect, Bri. That’s the “looking for the whole, real story” effect. They’re mostly not blogging, but they are seeking independent sources of news. And that’s what NBC should have been worried about eons ago, when the interweb first landed on your doorstep.

The other thing that kills me about these discussions are the people decrying the end of culture, news, life as we know it. Just because a bunch of people digg a video showing a guy getting kicked in the package doesn’t mean there aren’t some valid attempts at art on YouTube. Does anyone actually still watch “America’s Home Videos?” I’m pretty sure it’s still on the air, and that hasn’t ended the movie industry, has it? Making creative production easier doesn’t, on its own, reduce the value of something. Inspiration and humanity = still required components of producing worthwhile culture.

I work with some media organizations that are tackling the issues of what to do with this stuff right now. I reinforce with a few of them the idea that hardcore journalism is not going to be eradicated, ever. People will continue to look for their fluff and their in-depth analysis and reporting; I know plenty of New Yorkers who read both the Times and the Post. It’s a media ecology people. It’s getting bigger and bigger, which is a Good Thing ™. People will always look for content from sources that they trust; it’s that the way the trust gets earned is changing, and that messes with the mainstream/corporate brain like nobody’s business.

I’m more excited by the stuff I see out there every day. Places like Cruxy are exploding with content that blows TV outta the water. So, when Brian Williams and the other mainstream folks put on their sourpuss faces for the 2.0 evolution, you can just tell them: Awwww, you’re just jealous.

Brad taught me about white balance on my camera, how to walk slowly enough to not mess up your picture, and to always point the mic at what you’re shooting. He was earnest and spirited — a wide smile and a big heart. He believed, and dedicated his life to showing others the truth.

More from Jason, and the AP report with quotes from Beka and Brandon.

News on vigils and protests, and latest reports: http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/bradleywill/archive.html

“Love is a memory that never fades. May memories be your comfort.” — anonymous

I finally got around to posting my first blog over there, so go read and let me know what you think… “Evolution of geek culture.”

Oh, and the site looks real goofy in Internet Explorer for PC right now (only the browser that 90% of you are using). You should really be using Firefox anyways.

Fixed that problem. Only thing not really working is the flickr badge at the bottom of the sidebar in IE6.0 for PC; I’m getting a 404 inside the iframe. sigh. You all should really use Firefox. ;-)