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The Survey

I upgraded the blog from Drupal 4.6.5 to 5.5. It was relatively easy.

ZNet has launched their new website: Z Communications.

They're moving from a community of commentators, to a much larger and dynamic community that includes any of their members who want to join. It's possible that tens of thousands of members could start to use the new system.

They did a complete redesign of their site - which looks very good.

The latest version (3.3) of the software is now up and running on CampusActivism.org and ActivismNetwork.org.

So far, I've noticed very few bugs. Users are uploading pictures and filling out parts of the longer profile. So far I haven't noticed as many comments or resource ratings.

As always, you can see a list of features that I'm considering implementing.

Currently I'm on a community kick. So I want to create a better landing page for people when they log in. A page that includes a customized events calendar (including local events), links to their friends, and other info.

Several of the leading nonprofit email service providers sponsored a study on
Email Messaging, Online Fundraising, and Internet Advocacy Metrics

Among many useful bits of information, I notice they found a 0.3% mean conversion rate for an email donations appeal.

Today I mistakenly typed in ufpj.org - to get to the United for Peace and Justice (aka UFPJ) website.

It's redirected to democrats.org!!! Appalling, but unfortunately not all that uncommon on the web.

Presumably some unethical person bought up the domain and redirected it to the democrats. It's on the fringes of legality.

If you do a Whois look up on it, you find "Domains by Proxy" which is a service owned by the owner of GoDaddy which keeps your information private (making it harder for people to find out who is behind this, though the general function is to reduce spam).

The r

Activism Network 3.3 is currently online at www.campusactivism.org.

I'll upgrade activismnetwork.org soon and do a release in a week or so (once I iron out some of the bugs).

Start writing comments, filling out your personal profile, adding friends, inviting friends to join, uploading photos, and rating the resources!

Loosely based on the idea of Google's PageRank (a measurement of a page's authority, based on the strength of incoming links), I think it would be interesting to have one or more measurements of PoliticalRank for web sites.

Unlike PageRank, which is more of a quantity measurement, PoliticalRank would be a quality one - evaluating the relative political position of a website on a basic left to right scale (where left wing pages would be quality, just kidding!).

You'd need to write a bot that would collect a massive database of webpages. Then you'd evaluate the relative politics of each website (and perhaps each page on each site) based on factors like keywords, the site that the page was on, incoming links, outgoing links, and ultimately on user site reviews.

I'm working on version 3.3 of the software!

My main goal is to increase the interactivity/community-building features. Thus I've added the ability to Write Comments. You can write a comment on almost everything. You can delete other people's comments (Ex. if someone writes a nasty comment about you in your profile).

I've added photos. You can upload one or more photos for a person or group that will be displayed with their profile and in a photo gallery.

Currently I'm working on the ability to add "friends".

There are a couple smaller things that I might do now or later - including adding tags, popularity based functions (what resources/people/groups/events are "hot"), and links to your other social network profiles.

NuSOAP has a new release out - 0.7.3. If you want to do web services with php I recommend using it.

There is a small NuSOAP community that I'm hoping will grow. We're encouraging people to use the forum on sourceforge.net for support (and retiring the email list).

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57663