The Empowerment

2009 Birthday State of the Empowerment: Announcing Stores & Comics

March 18, Pescadrome, Santa Barbara: Alex gave his first Birthday State of the Empowerment talk to announce Empowerment's first retail stores, preview upcoming comics and explain the spacepunk movement behind it all. Then he wrote a blog post about himself in the third person and this fourth wall-shattering sentence.

So I'm doing a whole new Empowerment talk at the BIL conference on Feb. 7th and I've posted my talk proposal on the BIL site.

If you join BIL.com and add it to your Favs it will climb in the rankings and hopefully you'll be able to attend BIL and see all the great talks that will be happening there!

Add the talk to your Favs!

I made it to Vancouver's 10th Rantiversary and it was good! It was far more epic than I even imagined it could be. First off, Cimm, Sean and the rest of the rant crew put on a historic countercultural convergence event at the Varsity Theatre. Then there was the camaraderie created by all the internationally converged wogs which made for a whole weekend of exciting face-to-face discussions. We held the first ever impromptu Afternow Roleplaying Game playtest with 4 d20s freshly bought at Drexoll games where we had pilgrimaged earlier in the day. I could go on and on and I will when I have more time to blog but right now I'm still in the northwest completing tertiary missions seeing people I've been missing since I left Vancouver. To all the wogs I had the privilege to meet, I salute you! Your creativity never ceases to amaze.

Pictures from wog photogs are in the Flickr Group and the Wog Picture Archive.

I planned this 2008-08-21 15:45:48 and now I have to plan a way home.

43 Things is inspiring to our Missionpedia project.

They've got a terrific book out and a whole ton of tips about the importance of using life lists to live a richer life.

http://www.43things.com/book/guide

Should Do This is cool (http://www.shoulddothis.com/about/first_time_visitor ) because you can suggest things.

This is analogous to our suggestion mission feature and we should integrate a big suggestion box feature like this.

Their 43 People ( http://www.43people.com/ ) is similar to our planned Peoplepedia.

The thing is, theirs is sort of wide open with no explcit linkage between all these elements, whereas we intend to integrate all these things towards empowerment and to link it all through Facebook and OpenSocial as the connective tissue.

Their stuff works through very dynamic folksonomy node creation, which would be great to achieve with some new code for handling urls that don't exist like wikis should.

Someone did a usability community analysis of 43 Things that is very interesting: http://www.unc.edu/~mchabib/43things/index.html

They concluded that 43 Things is more of a society than a community bcause it is more about the benefit of individual members rather than the benefit of the community group. More about doing than cheering essentially.