I cannot get the widget to embed in my blog at the moment – it just shows up as a gray box – but you can run the full screen version by clicking here.

Update: It is working now. The view below is a calculator for the presidential race. You can successively click on a state and assign it to different statuses depending on the latest polls.

The conference lasts through Sunday, July 20, so there is still a chance to join in the fun, and I highly recommend listening to some of the sessions that have been taped on ustream.tv. Every session that I have either attended live, or viewed on tape has been excellent. The panels are chocked full of excellent presenters, and the topics are completely relevant to the issues and challenges that we are facing on a daily basis. More importantly, the sessions are not focused on merely defining the issues, they provide practical suggestions for positive action that everyday people can engage in to start working toward long term solutions to the issues.

Attendance is totally free and open to the public. They ask that you remove your extra prims before attending the big events like the keynote speeches to cut down on lag. There were over 50 avatars at the opening keynote speech on Thursday in the Netroots Arena, and the lag was not a significant problem. The audio and video feed from the Austin venue was not very good quality unfortunately, but the workaround to that was to use the ustream feed and to turn off the SL audio and video. That way I was able to enjoy the interactivity of attending the event with fifty other people while still getting a decent feed.

I took some picture of the fantastic venue that the Netroots folks built in SL for the convention to give you an idea of how fun it is to visit, even if there isn’t an event in progress. Stop by anytime (slurl is on the NNinSL site). There are always quite a few friendly and helpful folks there to answer your questions or to show you around. However, they have provided site maps and event schedule info boards everywhere so you can find your way around by yourself quite easily.

Netroots Nation Headquarters

Netroots Nation Headquarters

Netroots Nation Ballroom

Netroots Nation Central Patio Area

Keynote Speech in Netroots Arena

Keynote Speech in Netroots Arena

See you in Second Life.

My New MacBook

I never thought I would be blogging from a Macintosh – ever. I used Apple IIs and Macs in the early days (80s) of the PC, and I thought they were nice machines that had no place in the business arena, but were great for graphic designers and educational purposes. So I stayed firmly rooted in the IBM PC camp while keeping an eye on the Mac world. Now, more than twenty years later, I have finally decided to purchase my first Mac, and I am very pleased with my decision thus far.

From the ease and speed of the selection, configuration, and ordering process on the Apple.com site, to the timely delivery of the machine, to the intuitive setup process and user interface, this has been the most positive and exciting experience I have had in acquiring a new PC. It is hard to believe that I am using a completely new operating system, and was up, running, productive (with my Google tools), and playing (on SecondLife) within an hour of powering up the machine for the first time. I cannot get over how well engineered both the hardware and the GUI are. So elegant and yet useable.

I have really missed not having a laptop for the past year. When my ThinkPad finally bit the dust last spring I decided to replace it with an HP mini tower with a high end graphics card and monitor so I could enjoy my SecondLife experience more fully, as well as for more speed and precision when editing photos and graphics. I have been pretty happy with the HP, but I hated being tied to the office all the time. I yearned for the freedom to work from other locations. I wanted to be able to watch UT basketball while blogging at the same time – as I am doing right now. This is as close to heaven as I have been in a long time.

This OS X Leopard operating system beats the pants off Windows. The networking is effortless and fast. Upon bootup – with an Ethernet cable attached to our office LAN – the OS found the network, found the internet, and attached me to every shared device and directory available without any action from me whatsoever. Try that with Windows. So far, the most annoying problem I’m having that I haven’t been able to resolve is the locating the ‘end’ key or function. But I haven’t cracked a manual yet, or looked at any online help yet either.

Well, I’m off to learn more about the features and functions of my new ‘toy’.

Happy Easter!

I wanted a fairly simple tool that would give me insight into how my blogs and web pages are being used. Who visits them, and how often. What content is viewed most often, and what search words are being used to find my content. Things like that.

I found a WordPress plugin, semmelstatz2, that I have been using to report stats for one of my WordPress blogs, but for some reason I can’t get that plugin to work on my other WordPress blog. The other issue I have with this plugin is it that it isn’t English, so I have some trouble reading the reports. Meanwhile, I had set up a Google Analytics account months ago to try to get that tool to pull data from my domains for more analytical reports, and this was working fairly well, but I didn’t have the time or knowledge to configure it to get much granular information out of it.

So when Google Analytics version 2 came out, and I saw the book pictured below on Amazon.com, I decided it was time to learn more about this tool so I could improve my stat reporting and my web site performance.

I ordered the book, and while I was waiting to receive it I installed the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin on both my blogs, and got a GA 2.0 profile set up for each of my blogs, as well as my main web page so data collection could commence. The installation of the plugin on both my blogs went smoothly (I use different themes for each blog which I suspect was why the other stat plugin didn’t work on both of them.), as did the profile setup on Google Analytics. In less than 24 hours I had data for both of my blogs and my home site all collecting to their own profile so I can view separate reports for each.

Now that I have received the book, and have a little bit of data to play around with, I can start learning some of the finer points of GA v2. I have only read the first few chapters, but I have learned much that I did not know already, including a lot of really helpful information about AWStats reports and how to interpret them. There are actually two chapters at the beginning of the book that are devoted to AWStats which helped me understand more about my AWStats reports than I had been able to figure out from the AWStats documentation. Additionally, the authors explain the differences in GA and AWStats and how the two tools can be used in tandem to get a pretty clear picture of web sites usage and activity.

I’ll share more of my experiences with GA configuration and results as I have anything of interest to share. I must say though, just looking at the first few days of data, I am completely surprised by what I am seeing.

More later.

I thought it was an excellent piece. They had a short interview with Markos, and another with Gov Richardson. There are a couple of nice clips from the presidential forum. And there are some nice interviews with attendees. The coverage was very positively framed, and showed that PBS views Kos and the NetRoots community as a powerful and informed influence on political policy in the US.