Contrary to the delusions of rightwing bloggers who troll leftwing blogs looking to stir up trouble, the first amendment does not mean that blog owners have to allow the spewing of venom on their personal blogs. I choose not to approve comments that I consider namecalling (a rightwing specialty), a personal attack, patently untrue, or otherwise ugly in spirit. If you want to express a contrary opinion, I’ll be happy to read and publish it — if you can find the capacity to state your case using reason and respect. If you can’t, please leave — why would you be the least interested in this site?

Rule the second: If you are going to malign someone’s physical appearance, you must first submit photos of your perfect specimen of a body (nude, four angles), complete with a full medical file with affidavit from an MD, in triplicate.

Well, we can hope, anyway.

One of the blogs on the Oklahoman’s web site is “Go Green” and actually, despite my considerable reservations about it going in, it’s good. The worst thing I can say about it is that there’s not enough promotion of it in the company’s more visible operations, the dead-tree newspaper and main site, NewsOK.com (for the life of me, I can’t find links to any of the blogs on the new version of that site.)

The main writer is John Sutter, “environment reporter” for OPubCo. Did you even know that the Oklahoman had an environment reporter? Me, either.

Also contributing is Micah Gamino, whom I met several years ago when he was a journalism student. He’s a committed environmentalist, but again, doesn’t seem to be well utilized by his employers.

But the real blame for the lack of attention to environmental issues doesn’t really lie with OPubCo, but with the state itself. There is a tragic lack of attention to and leadership on this issue. And Go Green itself addressed this problem on Sept. 23 with OKC and Tulsa Among Least Green Cities.

One of the entries of Go Green that caught my eye was E-Waste in Oklahoma, which talks about a new law going into effect in 2009 to deal with the potential toxicity of discarded electronics.

The Oklahoma Legislature made a move to address the issue by passing a law last session will require computer companies in Oklahoma to take back and recycle worn-out computers. The law, which goes into effect Jan.1, will encourage the development of companies that can recycle e-waste in Oklahoma, said Fenton Rood, of the state Department of Environmental Quality (see video above). The law only applies to household computers, not those in office buildings, and it doesn’t cover other e-waste, like cell phones and televisions.

Before the law goes into effect, people in Oklahoma City can take their old computers and electronics to the city’s hazardous waste center. There’s only one other permanent hazardous waste collection center in the state, in Midwest City. Towns and cities in rural Oklahoma hold recycling events from time to time. Rood said the law is designed so that it hopefully will be more convenient for people to recycle their computers in the future.

About time, but more is needed. I know that the recycling program in my community is a joke. There is a three-hour window on Saturday morning when I can take items to a designated location. I’m actually thrilled to see as many people take advantage of this as do, but I know the vast majority of my neighbors could not be bothered. Most locals think like my brother, that they’ll recycle when they get paid to. What the government needs to do is educate its populace how much they are paying by NOT recycling.

I would encourage anyone interested in sustainability for Oklahoma to read Go Green and let its corporate sponsor know you appreciate the attention to environmentalism and sustainability in our state.

Meta note: the Oklahoman’s blogs use the Wordpress MU platform.

Steve’s take on a MSM Wall-Street-themed take on blogs. You can count on him for a reality check. To the writer (of the NY Metro feature), blog readers are simply consumers, and blogdom is designed by Christof.

He references the dotcom disaster (and before that, I remember all the hoopla about the Japanese business model, that was going to leave us all in the dust), and all the CW about where that was going, as a cautionary tale. So have no fear about the Wal-Martization of blogs.

As one of his commenters stated:

What makes Gilliard solid, in my opinion, is his ruthless allergy to bullshit, his eye for creative abuse and his ability to caption his abuse (the better shots of the ongoing Stop Snitching “portraits” deserve framing IMO.) If Gilliard turns into a whiner or a panderer we will all leave his whining, pandering ass in the dust. He probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

What non-bloggers don’t understand is how time-consuming and difficult blogging is. Those who make it to the so-called A-list, usually do so because they work extremely hard and take it very seriously.

This is a new medium still in its infancy, but it has already changed the way information is produced and distributed. It has the potential to spread democracy in a viral way in which no tank, bullet or bomb can come close.

I am perfectly content to be a C-list (more like Z-list, but the NY Metro writer assumes only three levels to his heirarchical flowchart) blogger. My blog will not have advertising, unless it’s for items like books or films that promote my bigger agenda. It is an adjunct to my organizing work, and I think at this point I can safely say I won’t be selling out to on that score.

Right now, this blog is about progressive politics and the greater Waco, Texas, area known as “The Heart of Texas,” with a little science, food and personal diversions thrown in for seasoning. Not really a recipe for “success” as defined by Blogshares.

Update:
Peter Daou surveys the left side of blogland.

The attempt to marginalize progressive bloggers as part of an angry, unwashed, irrational mob is in full swing, but truth-telling has a self-sustaining power. Bloggers will continue to cut through the fabricated storylines, providing clarity, sanity, honesty, and an abiding loyalty to the Constitution and to the principles our country is founded upon.

History will look kindly on them.

And Reddhedd at FireDogLake takes the next logical step:

It seems to me that we have reached a point where things are moving up to a whole new level of discourse among progressives around the blogoverse. The question is: what direction do we take things from here? Now that is a question worth pondering, isn’t it?

Mike at Okiedoke is a great promoter of Oklahoma and bloggery — he’s even organizing the 2006 Oklahoma Blogger convention — so who better to institute the Okie Blogger Awards? Good thing he’s taken his own out of contention, or the rest of us wouldn’t have much of a chance.

I don’t do nearly enough browsing of the blogs of my fellow Okies, despite the fact that Mike and K at BlogOklahoma make it their mission to keep track of them for us. I have become quite partial to Okiefunk since its debut this year. Kurt’s profiles of radical Okies really are something special, and the one of Woody Guthrie was so good I copied it to OKIMC.

My friend James Branum was kind enough to vote for me in two categories, which only makes me think he hasn’t been doing much blog surfing lately either. The categories were “unusual” and “culture.” Hmmm, I wondering about that! But I do appreciate the thought.

But if there was a category for most blogs created and/or maintained, I could really be the hands-down winner. To wit:

www.gypsyresort.com
www.peacearena.org
www.herlandsisters.org
www.okgreens.org
www.okobjector.org
okcodepink.blogspot.com
ruralgreens.blogspot.com
www.okimc.org/blogs
www.okimc.org/network
www.greencommons.org
www.greenbloggers.org

There are others that are no longer active, and thus not eligible, including okprogressive.blogspot.com and www.gypsyresort.com/shoot66/.

There are probably a couple of other live ones I’m forgetting at the moment, but I think I’ve made my case.

I realized this week that my blog has been screwed up for almost two months. Well, actually, the blog was fine, but it was in the wrong directory.

See, I originally was going to use Mambo for The Re Collection. I set it up, found a theme I really liked, then started posting, only to find that that CMS was actually too robust for my little effort here. It wasn’t really geared to posting on the fly, which is a feature I need if there is ever to be any activity here. (BTW, I’m now using Mambo for another project, where it is an appropriate choice.) So, I decided to switch to Wordpress, which really is, IMHO, the best CMS for a basic personal blog.

Things then got complicated, because I really, really liked the Mambo theme I had found, called box_red451, which is a Mambo China creation (see the link at the bottom of this page for more info). So, I began to port that theme to Wordpress. This became quite the project — in fact, I’m still not finished with the finer points — since the two templating systems are rather different, and box_red451 is, dare I say, a wee bit over-designed.

Anyway, somewhere in that process, sometime in April, I think, I actually began posting to the WP blog instead of the Mambo one. However, I forgot to change the directory names, putting WP at the /re/ address, so for all that time, I’m strictly blogging for myself (which I do anyway, but I like to pretend I’m putting it out there for the world, else I wouldn’t do it at all, most likely).

So, this week, light dawned, and I made the correction. I’m still tweaking the templates and adding plugins — something I will probably never stop doing, since I clearly prefer designing and fiddling to actually posting content!

At any rate, welcome to the new, simpler-but-not-so-simple WP version of The Re Collection. Let the collecting resume.

(I will have a theme-changer at the bottom of the sidebar, so if you hate box red, or don’t want to load all the images involved (or have a browsing device that won’t accept them), then you can switch to a basic, cleaner display. Your choice can be saved in a cookie.)

This is hilarious:
Blogs Will Change Your Business

..wherein you will learn such important points as “[...]we’re going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story — call it Blogs 101 for businesses — in the style of a blog. We’re even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story’s online version to another Web page. [...]

and so on. I will give the writer credit for at least making one critical point:

But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

Couldn’t be happier about that, myself.

Oklahoma Women is a new blog promoting the accomplishments of Oklahoma women, politicians, artists, educators, et. al., as well as providing news about and information for Oklahoma women. You can nominate a notable Oklahoma woman with a comment or email to the admin.