PTP Blog

“Cingular Wireless is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone.The new service, powered by OZ Communications Inc., is designed to adapt the look and capabilities of a Web portal or e-mail program such as Outlook to the limited screen size, keyboard and processing power of a garden variety handset.”

From: Cingular Introduces E-Mail Access on Cells

Which raises all kinds of questions for possible use in an organizing context.  We’ve heard that ACORN was using text messaging to connect with members follow Katrina - could email via cell phone change how we think about using email?

Technorati Tags: Email, cellphones, communityorganizing

I finally got around to the downloading and installing Flock this morning, and am writing this post from it.  You can learn more about Flock at http://www.flock.com.

Good things about flock:  del.icio.us integration is cool, so is flickr integration.  It’s a nice browser overall since it’s built on Firefox, but feels more polished somehow.

Not so good things:  some plugins don’t work.  Rss aggregation is a bit strange.  I had high hopes for it’s aggregator, but it’s about as bad as the one is Safari - maybe even a bit worse.  It is however not even a beta release yet, so hopefully this situation will improve.

In all, I think Flock is going to be a great tool for folks who blog, flickr, or use del.icio.us more than casually.

It would appear that in my endless quest for the perfect operating system, I continually find myself coming back to . . . Windows!

Yes, for the past two weeks, I’ve been pretty much exclusivly on a windows box.  Largely, this is because I got tired of struggling with using a Mac in a windows - and specifically Windows 2003 server + Exchange environment.

So, I’m back to Windows, and though it pains me to admit it, I’m quite happy here.  XP is a large improvement over previous versions - it just might be the best Micro$oft has done since Windows 98SE.

There are a number of things that are missing - the biggest being a decent free RSS aggregator - though some swear by Thunderbird for that so maybe I’ll give it a look.  But all in all, it’s just an operating system that, much to my chagrin, does a surprisingly good job of getting out of the way so that I can just get things done.

I’m excited to say that we have “gone public” with a PTP training program that we’ve been working on for the last two years - our Community Organizing and Technology Institute also known as COaTI (the capitalization is there not just because it’s an acronym, but also because it helps differentiate COaTI the PTP training program from coati the racoon-like animal).

You should check out the page for more detail, but in brief, COaTI is a multi-session intensive training program to develop skills of organizers and build a community of user-experts who share their skills and knoweldge with organizers around the country who are working for social, economic, and environmental justice.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be updating the COaTI page to include links to curriculum as well as links to resources created for COaTI. In the meantime, I’d love feedback on the pages and information that’s there, and if you or someone you know is interested in being in an upcoming COaTI, please let me know!