For those of you who can’t get enough of one political scientist blogger (me), here are two more political science bloggers on which to keep an eye.  King Politics is run by Marvin King, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi.  The blog provides an interesting and unique take on American Politics.  King also has a podcast where he interviews other bloggers and researchers.   Worth a listen!

The other worthwhile blog is ImmigrationNow by Gustavo Cano, a Ph.D. political scientist from Columbia who runs the Transnationalism Research Project at the Mexcio-North Research Network and specializes in immigration issues.  He has also created a site called Immigration Research Now that serves as a compendium of current research on the subject.  Both are worth a look.

Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉

On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog

From Andrew – The Obama Effect?

Al Jazeera makes its Gaza coverage available to the public under Creative Commons license via Jo Ito’s blog

Great infographic on international migration in Good Magazine – from our friends at Sociological Images

and please indulge my soccer geekdom:

Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)

Bookforum is the greatest aggregator of quality web content I’ve ever come across. The only problem is that it fills me with anxiety to know that there is so much good content out there I’ll never be able to read. This is my filter of their filter of the best of the web today….or those aspects of the web which most closely adhere to what I’m interested in today.

When Groups Don’t Think – Utne Reader

Vote for me Not my Facebook Account – Slate

Three Maps that Get People Worked up – Mental Floss

Deep Throat Meets Data Mining – Miller McCune

Symposium on “The Good Life” – Human Affairs

Winter illness has impeded my blog posting for the past few days….

For anyone who’s interested in what I actually do for a paycheck, here’s my Internet and Politics syllabus for the fall (feel free to pick apart).  As befits a political scientist who blogs for a Sociology journal, the syllabus has a decidedly interdiscipinary bent.   If anyone has some reading suggestions…serve ’em up.

My hope is to incorporate the blog into the course discussion and vice versa.  I welcome the community to take part in our ongoing conversations.  I’ve used blogs in the classroom the past two semesters and I’ve found that the students learn a great deal from comments posted by faculty or students from other institutions.  It’s a great way to extend the conversation beyond the walls of the classroom.

Ben Smith at Politico has a fascinating little tidbit about Obama’s release of photos from his daughters’ first day of school.  While Smith suggests that at first glance the release of these photos might seem invasive, he links to Garance Franke-Ruta at the Washington Post who offers up this keen observation:

It may sound counterintuitive, but the best way for Barack Obama to keep any of his life private in this era of cell phone-snaps, Facebook goofs and long-lensed paparazzi is to do exactly this: reliably and regularly release pictures of newsworthy intimate family moments in a manner that he can control.

That’s because online, the only way to control your own image is to drown outsiders’ takes in media stream of your own creation — and there is no news agency or paparazzo in the world with better access to inner workings of Obamaland and the Obama family than Obama himself.

If Obama’s active Flickr account means the end of the paparratzi, then I’m all for it!

Stuff I’d read right now if I wasn’t about to watch Baby Mama….

From Bookforum: The first chapter from Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations by Hayagreeva Rao.

Edge.org’s annual question for 2009 – What will change everything?

IT Conversations interview with Jeff Jonas – IBM Entity Analytics.

From National Journal by way of Bookforum – Hacking the Hill: How the Chinese — or someone — hacked into House of Representatives computers in 2006.

From BusinessWeek via Planetizen – Bringing Broadband to the Urban Poor.

Also, if your NetFlix queue is not piling up, check our the Contexts podcast where Jon Smajda and I talk about blogging in academia.

Until I’m back from vacation and my four year old gets over her Spore addiction, here are community development based links for 1-2-09….. buen provecho 🙂

From Cultural Survival Voices: A primer on Community Radio.

From the Seattle Post Intelligencier (via Planetizen) Obama’s Food Politics

From UChannel – Transforming Mexico City

From ICTologist – Creating Community Knowledge

and

The son of Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle

New Year, New Feature 🙂  An assortment of things that pop up on my Google Reader feeds that I’d like to read or listen to or would like people to think I’d like to read or listen to (my new year’s resolution is to appear more learned than I actually am).

From Flowing Data: Nine Ways to Visualize Consumer Spending

From KCRW To The Point: Is the Internet Speeding us Up by Slowing us Down?

From Slate: Can cities save the planet?

From IT Conversations: A Talk on Human Centered Design

From Psychology Today via Bookforum — Men do everything they do in order to get laid

Street Art via Google Maps Street View. Some of it is sweet, some is voyeuristic. Not sure why, but here’s my favorite:

HT: Jonathan Pfieffer

I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’m addicted to the Lifehacker blog.  The site provides links to resources intended to simplify (hack) aspects of your life.  While most of the posts consist of tech stuff, there are also posts on finding holiday bargains or inexpensive things to do with your kids, etc.  The blog is one of many that feed a growing culture of “Life Hackers.”  Other blogs include Lifehack, Zen Habits, and 43 Folders.

The subculture is complete with its own bible.  Getting Things Done (GTD) a 2002 book written by David Allen, a California-based productivity consultant created a buzz among “life hackers.”  The organizational system detailed in the book (which I try to use myself) tries to help people organize their lives through an elaborate system of recording and lists.  The system has spawned a wave of practitioners providing their own variations on the system in the effort to create the perfect organizational system.

I’ve always thought this would be a great subculture for a sociologist to study (we political scientists don’t get to look at fun stuff like that, at least not pre-tenure).   What interests me is whether you could create similar subculture of “poli-hackers” or “power-hackers” people who share tips about how to more effecively access the political process.  It would be interesting to create a site where activists or lobbyists share what’s worked for them in the past.   It seems to me that if you can “geekify” the political process, the results would be interesting.