Would you like to be able to do all of the things you can do with CampusActivism.org on your *own* website?

I

Imagine. It is spring 2005 and Bush has been re-elected. The Bush Administration escalates its public relations war on Iran arguing that Iran is supporting the Iraqi resistance, encouraging Islamic fundamentalism, a general threat to democracy in the area, researching and building weapons of massive destruction, and violating the human rights of its people.

The Bush Administration is preparing to go to war against Iran and you want to stop it. What should you do?

Fortunately you know about this online activism system that will help you.

(Note: in general most of the things below are possible. Some things are

Yahoo changes its rankings. We went from #13 to #3 for 'activism'! I think it changed the algorithm.

This is weird because yahoo still has only indexed 1000 out of the 20,000 pages on this site so we are still getting literally 100 times more traffic from Google.

Do a Google search for "Activism". We're ranked #2!

Back in September 2003, I started wondering why some websites got more traffic than others. I looked into how search engines work, read several books (ex. Search Engine Visibility), and started religiously monitoring Webmaster World.

I decided to take a gamble. We were only ranked around 75th for the activism keyword, but I bet that we could make it into the top ten which is the only way to get a decent amount of traffic. Until last night, we'd be stuck at around 5th, occasionally getting 4th for a couple hours - then suddenly we leapt to 2nd. Who knows if this will last or just be another blip on the screen, but it is a fun ride!

If you want to democratize the electoral system proportional representation (PR) is a good idea, but not a perfect one. As everyone focuses on the advantages of PR, in the spirit of critical analysis I will give several reasons why it could fail to be adequate.

Poor People Vote Less
Poor people (and people of color) are less likely to register to vote, and less likely to vote. (Does anyone have statistics on this?) If representation is set so that each district has approximately the same number of people, and if the Census accurately counts poor people (not true for the US Census) then having a district with a poor majority can give them fairer representation than PR.

If you have an online discussion forum, chances are that Google indexes only a handful of the pages. The problem with most forums is that they use dynamic pages and have too many variables in their URL for Googlebot to understand. Googlebot can handle dynamic pages with only one variable.

If you have phpBB2, a popular forum software, then there is an excellent mod that you can do that will greatly increase the amount of direct search engine traffic that your forum gets.

You can download the Able to Know SEO 2.0 Mod from the second post in a lengthy discussion of how to optimize phpBB2.

Currently this website provides many powerful tools that you can use to promote a campaign, issue or network.



For instance, when you start a campaign, issue or network you get your own webpage. However the issue pages aren't controlled by anyone, and really you don't have much control over the page of campaign or network.



So we're going to change this by giving you a webpage that is part of the CampusActivism.org system, but is one that you can make your own.



You will be able to

During the summer, it is possible to hear FM stations (and also VHF channels 2-6) that are 1000 miles away using pretty much any FM radio!

From May 15 - August 15, the E layer of ionosphere will sporadically achieve a high enough level of ionization so that higher frequency signals (low VHF and FM) will bounce off the E-layer back to Earth, instead of going out into space.

This condition is rare. It is most likely that you will notice it on TV channel 2, because lower frequencies bounce back to earth with less ionization. During the course of the typical summer, I only get E-Skip twice, generally for a period of 1-3 hours.

Is Online Activism

Most people do not realize that at its political convention the Green Party chose to run David Cobb for president. There are actually two progressive tickets running for office. Nader as an independent and Cobb as a Green.

The Greens choice was close. On an approximately 300 to 200 delegate vote, they went with Cobb over "none of the above" - the latter option was pushed by Nader supporters who wanted the Greens to endorse the Nader canidacy.

So progressives must decide between holding their nose and voting for Kerry, voting for Nader (who is running in all states), or voting for Camejo (who has an official strategy of only running in "safe-states" as he does not want to throw the election to Bush).