Gregory Heller Get in touch

Writing

The blog

725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.

  1. Why We Fight

    Why We Fight Last night I went to see the Eugene Jarecki documentary “Why We Fight” about America’s propensity towards militarization and war. The film was disturbing. People will say it is “over the top” or slander it as “left wing liberal media propaganda”. Those people will continue to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with a government that spends three quarters of a trillion dollars ($750,000,000,000) on its military each year. Which is more than on all other discretionary spending put together. When we put this into the context of the disaster in the Gulf Coast region, or the failings of our public schools, or the cuts to higher education funding, housing assistance, job training, health care…. well it just makes me want to throw up.

  2. Web Developer Death Match: Zack Rosen vs Jon Stahl!

    ( read in booming announcer voice ) “Good evening ladies and gentlement. Tonight, for your blood thirsty viewing pleasure, we have a death match of epic proportions! in one corner, hailing from the Pacific North West, ONE/Northwest’s Jon Stahl ! In the other corner from Saaaaaaan Fraaaaaanciiiiisssscoooooo…. CivicSpaceLab’s ZAAAAAACKKKKKK ROSEN !!!!”

  3. More on NYS and HAVA

    As one of our voter data experts, and being that New York is my home state, this article in the NYT is particularly… exciting? No. Disturbing? eh… maybe. Shocking? Not at all. As I said, NY is my home state! And having worked for the State Senate there is nothing surprising about the gridlock that has put the state in the position of being sued by the feds. I have posted about this before . Here are some excerpts from the recent article and some thoughts

  4. Drupal Professionals Shop Conference Call

    We just finished the first Drupal Professionals Conference Call. The Agenda was: 1) Introductions: Rep from each shop introduces and mentions any client funded module development, or other module development that folks might not know about (please limit to 3 to 5 minutes) 2) Discussions: a) Drupal Pros Directory (15) b) Drupal Camp Training (15) c) Contributing Back to the Drupal Community (15) d) Building shared support infrastructure for customers 3) Next Steps (planning next call, smaller working groups, etc) We had 21 total callers according to the conference call service.

  5. Return to sender….

    How many times have you received an email from a sender you don’t recognize about a website that you do recognize? More specifically, how many political emails (about candidates or otherwise) have you gotten that are sent by some staffer on the campaign who’s name is generally unremarkable? Well, i get dozens of political emails a week, many from NY State or city candidates. Recently a new name started popping up in my in box. lets just say the email address is “Sally.Smith@s68659.istandfor.com”, but then the from addres in the message header appears to be “Campaign Manager markgreenny@gmail.com”.

  6. Adding Audio or Video to make your site stickier

    Many organizations don’t think about how they can incorporate new types of content into their web strategies in order to compete in the “market” for their members’ or constituents’ time. The same goes for politicians and candidates. Podcasting and videocasting is really much easier that it looks and sounds. Many organizations already do plenty of things that would translate well to the web. Politicians give speeches all the time. Non profits have member meetings, or board meetings, conference calls. Recording these events, either audio or video, and then making this content available on the web gives site visitors a reason to come back over and over again. A conference call can easily be recorded using Skype and some desktop software. A press conference can be recorded with a digital voice recorder, or a laptop, or digital camera with video recording capabilities. Sites like YouTube allow you to upload video and serve it out to the web. GarageBand and Audacity are two applications that let a user edit audio on the desktop and encode it as an MP3 file.

  7. World Changing: Open Source Design and more

    Every few days, or at least once a week, I scroll through my World Changing feed and read a few articles, forward them to a few friends, maybe blog one. Today I am going to blog a few, because there are a bunch stored up. So here they are: Alex Steffen rights about Cameron Sinclaire’s Ted Prize Wish to create an open source design resource: collaborative solution-seeking is not only our best hope for solving the most profound problems facing our planet, it is our only hope.

  8. Attention Streams

    Distributing the Future has podcast with a segment on “attention streams”. I have been posting on the topic here , including 2 podcasts with Fen. I declare 2006 the year of attention.

  9. Gun’s and Airplanes

    I took this photo in a newstand at Sea-Tac on my way back to NY last week. I wonder what would have happened if I had purchased all of these titles and was reading them while waiting to board the plane?

  10. Personal Democracy Forum

    The Personal Democracy Forum in NYC at the CUNY Grad Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10016