DSC_0073, originally uploaded by david parmet.

Astronomy is one of those esoteric hobbies that have pretty much been saved by the Internet. Online retailers like Orion Telescopes have thrived where once we only had mail order and a few retail stores in major cities from which to purchase the tools of our trade.

And like other hobbies down the far end of the Long Tail – it’s a lot easier for us all to find each other online than it was back in the day when all we had was a subscription to Sky & Telescope.

NEAF – the North East Astronomy Forum – is the SXSW of amateur stargazing. Every April the Rockland County Astronomy Club throws a two day shindig in the bowels of a Community College gymnasium and thousands of the faithful come from all over the North East to gaze and paw at the latest in telescope gear.

This is a ‘hold on to your wallet’ event – unless you have a few grand in the bank, it’s hard to come back from NEAF with much of anything. But in addition to the vendors, there are demonstrations of archaic skills like mirror grinding and collimation. And the schwag is second to none.

So if you are a stargazer and live in the North East, don’t miss NEAF.

Cross posted to The Backyard Stargazer

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Since the dawn of my Twitter account I’ve mostly followed anyone who followed me. I basically trusted in the innate goodness of most people to follow me because they found my 140 character musings to be enlightening.

Silly me.

That was fine and good when it was a few dozen of us trying to figure out where to hang in Austin. When you have 3,000+ followers, you open your browser and wonder ‘who the heck are all of these people and why are they all talking about real estate opportunities?’

So largely at the encouragement of a few smart friends, I’ve taken a blunt axe to my ‘following’ list and have reduced it by half. I’m still chopping away. Finally once again I can see conversations I might actually want to join.

This whole ‘friend’ thing, though, is getting silly. Or it was already silly and we’re now first noticing. Ed Adkins puts it best:

You don’t have to follow anyone. You don’t have to worry about unfollowing people. The sites that you use to follow people today could easily be gone tomorrow, along with your entire buddy list. Breathe deep and realize that none of this matters.

Link

Sigh. Amen.

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As the President said in his Not-The-State-Of-The-Union last week, each of us should resolve to learn something new. So I’ve been brushing up on my (barely-existent) coding skills by playing with SimplePie. SimplePie is described as

a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the ’simple’ back into ‘really simple syndication‘.

Basically you can toss any feed or feeds into it and get out a nice, managable thing suitable for framing or putting into any web site.

You can see my early tinkerings here.

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But the real work comes from following a couple of blogs and seeing who they link to and follow. And then gradually you will know who the authorities in any given field are, and conversly who the gasbags are.

It takes time, I know, but nothing worth doing is worth doing sloppy.

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You might notice the “REBLOG” link at the bottom of each post – that’s from Zemanta. Adding the plug-in to Wordpress adds a tremendous amount of relevant material in the ‘Post’ interface, stuff from all over the Web to add to my posts. You can see some of that in this post. Anything to add more information is fine by me.

I’ve also added Disqus to my comment set-up. This adds a great deal of functionality, like the ability to continue the discussions or add video comments via Seesmic.

Finally, I’ve added Google Friend Connect over there on the far right side bar. You can log-in and as Google adds more functionality to the system, I’m sure there will be some cool bells and whistles as well as some amazing new toys for us to play with.

All of this seems to move us from the Age of Blogging to the Age of Spokes in a Larger Social Network of Blogs. There’s also a great deal going on under the hood in the latest version of Wordpress that seems to be moving us in this direction. It’s funny but for five years now I’ve been hearing the ‘blogs are passe’ meme and every time, some new functionality comes along that blows that notion out of the water. If you accept the notion that blogs are really just content-management / easy-datebase-backed-web-site tools for the masses, this can only be seen as a positive development for those of us who are passionate about self-publishing and our ability as publishers to change the world.

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You too can obsess about the Minnesota Senate race 

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The “New Organizers” have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so “top-down” and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or “bottom-up” organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.

From The Huffington Post

The world of organizational science has changed dramatically. Witness the decentralized / centralized Obama campaign as it changes the rules of political campaigns across a battleground state near you.

The real change is the lowered cost of participation. Not in the dollars and cents sense of cost but in the effort involved in getting up off of the couch. We don’t have to find our checkbook, an envelope and a stamp anymore to make a contribution to our favorite candidate. We can do it with two clicks of a mouse.

The Obama campaign is at the forefront of this right now. If I want to call voters in swing states, I have an iPhone app that will do the work for me. But pretty soon the rest of the political spectrum will catch up and then watch out.

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