What the heck is going on here?

Well, we're conducting one big experiment--how to do a big group blog for a special event, in this case, election day. Hopefully this will turn out to be such a fabulous idea--with brilliant posts and insta-community--that we will do it again and again.

Here's an email we sent out to potential contributors... you could be one!

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Greetings:

One of the clear winners in this election--the only clear winner, for now--is technology. Election 2004 saw the rise of the blogger; the increasing use of email organizing for voter registration, education and mobilization; and the proliferation of animation, graphics, and humor distributed online.

Now it's your chance to have your say.

PopandPolitics.com has launched a live, interactive, real-time forum for telling the story of election 2004.

Check it out here: PandPElex.Blogspot.com


The whole point is your participation. You can email in your personal story or observations from going to the polls; mobilizing voters; or monitoring the election. (And if you're one of those people with a web-enabled PDA, you can do it from anywhere.)

Some of you may have received invitations to join the blog via Blogger... email is easier! But the email-to-blog function was down, now fixed just in time for the big day.

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Here's How You Email-to-Blog:

email the blog at: PopandPolitics.Vote@blogger.com

your header will be the header for the post

your email body text will be the text of the post

It's that simple!

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some notes:
1) we want to know who you are! the technology isn't going to automatically ID you. So at the bottom of your email give us an ID, like:

Farai Chideya, Berkeley, California
or
Farai, Berkeley, California
or
A California Voter Hoping for the Best

2) if you have an automatically-generated ID tag or other gunk at the bottom of your email, you can delete that stuff, or put

#end

at the end of your text, so the other material doesn't post

3) this experiment is only as good as the folks participating, so please lay off the ad-hominem attacks, profanity, blah blah blah. we're all grown-ups. (well, actually, it would be cool if kids posted too....)

4) you can also comment on other people's posts. just go to the site (http://pandpelex.blogspot.com/) and look at the bottom of the posts. You'll see how many comments each item has, and by clicking on the comment line, you can make a comment yourself. making a comment keeps similar thoughts together in a flow, rather than scattering them throughout the blog.

5) feel free to distribute this email widely. we want to hear from people around the country--especially in battleground states--and around the world.

Be well,
Farai, Jean, and PopandPolitics.com
http://www.PopandPolitics.com