I am watching a live video speech by a bi-racial leader of the free world on the website of a newspaper on a link that I found via Twitter.

I am talking to people in real time using less than 140 characters about a speech I am watching on the website of a major newspaper.

You would think with all this ability to communicate through various media in real time, somehow people would be able to come to a consensus on health care reform.

You would think.

People call this NaBloPoMo. And while NaNoWriMo is an annual November event only, NaBloPoMo is really pretty much any month you feel like trying it.

The first three days of the month have gone smoothly. Today was a little tricky because it’s my b-day, but I still made a sliver of time to put together this post.

(I am not doing all my posts on one blog–I will be spreading the love to the various blogs to which I contribute on Identity Theory as well.)

The conclusion? “With content ranging from John Cusack’s views of torture to a wickedly satirical short story about a marketing consultant, IT defies demographic niches, and proves that you can do serious reading on a screen.”

Check it out over at: Burlington Resident Explores Identity Theory in His High-Profile E-Journal

The plan is to create a Wordpress “child theme” based on an open-source framework like Thematic.

Child themes are pretty easy to make just using CSS and some occasional PHP snippets, so I should be able to have a site that feels more like “me” up here in much less time than it would take to do a theme from scratch (which is what’s been holding me back all this time).

On top of getting my own site looking more legit, I hope to have new sites for AfricansinVermont.org and Borealis PR up and running within the next month.

“20 Kick-Ass Wordpress Theme Frameworks For Rapid Theme Development” at Codefusion Lab (which ironically is hosted on Blogspot)

“15 Killer Hacks for WordPress that Are Extremely Useful” at wpbeginner

And here’s an article on Twitter SEO targeted to job seekers

This week’s issue features:

* an interview with author Tom Grimes, who, in addition to literary matters, puts forth the idea that America has “for years” been a fascist country, and claims that Kanye’s famous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” outburst really only applies to poor black people.

* a piece of fiction written in a sort of chat-room + email format.

* a review of the Calamari Press reissue of Gary Lutz’s (very awesome) Stories in the Worst Way

* an essay on “empathy marketing”

Publishing multiple articles at once helps me appreciate the range of quality content being put forth by our contributors and editorial teams.

Speaking of which, we are looking for a new fiction reader.

ISED’s old site, built using ColdFusion, was years out of date, visually unappealing, and had a major lack of focus and interactivity.

Our goal with the new site, which we developed in Drupal, was to upgrade the look and feel, enhance the focus of the content, and add essential features such as blogs and other resources for each project.

While the new site is officially “live,” it is still far from complete. In the near future, users will be able to register for conferences, view an interactive project map, subscribe to email blasts and listservs, and much more. We will also be continuing to upgrade minor details with the design over the next few months.

Check out the new ISED site here.

Usability is really important to creating web content, and Twitter’s interface for creating content is about as easy as it gets. No worries about formatting whatsoever, and brevity is encouraged. Therefore, it’s much easier for me to send a tweet than post to this blog.

Also, there’s not as much performance anxiety involved in tweeting as there is in writing a blog post. Blog posts require planning and editing and also need to have a clear purpose, whereas tweets can (and should) be incredibly simple.

Finally, tweets can get immediate feedback and form conversations easier than blog posts can (especially blogs as obscure as this one).

So, it’s easy to understand why I’ve been “twittering away my blogging time,” but I still plan on ramping up my blog-post production with more meaningful and developed writing in the very near future.

About six years ago, I made a hideously ugly mock “fan” website about Kato Kaelin called “Can I Get a Witness?”

The page featured several banal quotes from O.J.’s famous houseguest as well as a “Kato vs. Plato” section.

I put it on an ad-laden free-host service and did not place my name or email on the site, and then I pretty much completely forgot about it for several years.

Due to my natural prowess at search-engine optimization, the site became a top-five result for “Kato Kaelin” on just about every major search engine.

A couple of years ago, Ask.com did the above commercial featuring Kato Kaelin, and as you can see, the title of my “Can I Get a Witness?” site played a prominent role as a front-page result for the pseudo-celebrity’s name.

Put that in your 25 random things and smoke it.

Bush and Cheney are no longer there to help me come up with easy blog posts...or are they?

As much as I’d like to be freezing in Chicago with the literati right now, I’m instead shockingly not freezing in Burlington, where a spring-like, mid-February rain gave me a free winter carwash this afternoon.

Coming up with ideas to post to a non-themed blog is difficult because of the complete lack of “topic fences.” You’d think I could just find something that makes me really angry and write about that. But I don’t know what to be mad about right now. I simply don’t feel significantly peeved about anything in the world. It used to be much easier to come up with stuff to get riled up about because I could just type “George W. Bush” into Google News and instantly feel completely incensed. But now he’s gone, and he’s taken my anger with him.

Certainly, Bush’s exit didn’t magically make the world a better place, but I think over his eight-year reign of anti-terror-terror he gave many left-wingers the opposite of compassion fatigue. Call it anger fatigue. Now that Obama’s in charge, the blue staters seem to be relaxing because at least for the time being, they are sick of boiling their blood over unjust wars, declining civil liberties, faltering economies, and so on. They’re still mad, yeah, but not mad enough at any one particular individual or cause. Case in point: Bernie Madoff screwed people out of billions of dollars and is still not in jail.

Now, clearly, the world is not short on causes and topics of outrage and actionability, so this lack of anger is somewhat troubling. How does that saying go… “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention”?

The United States, like much of the world, is probably more rife with critical issues than ever before—and shorter on time to act on them. The economy is falling apart and people don’t have health care and the pandas are dying off and all of that stuff, but the big picture is even more grim: how are we going to feed and house our booming population and run all these fancy machines when we have such a limited amount of space and a rapidly decreasing supply of nonrenewable energy?

This is an obvious point, but worth meditating on: anxiety over the dire state of the world should dwarf any distress you felt over the last eight years when you watched Bush stumble over the lines of a speech force-fed to him by his friends in the oil industry.

Of course, while the urgency of creating a more sustainable world is great, the difficulty of overcoming the forces that made it unsustainable in the first place are even greater. So, it’s no wonder liberals focused their anger on Bush for so long—he was an easy target who personified their struggle. But now that he’s gone, it’s vital that people don’t trap themselves by thinking that the non-green forces he represented somehow scurried away to rural Texas with him.

So, I suppose what I’m trying to say is, it’s well past time to stop celebrating Obama’s victory; it’s now time to get down to the business of saving the world.