Pssst. If you enter the coupon code “fireworks” at checkout when you buy one of our ethically-made-in-the-USA t-shirts from Skreened, you’ll get 15% off the cost. That comes out to $3-$4 off per shirt, a pretty good deal. The coupon will work through the entire month of July.

Irregular Times started out on the web a long time ago, back when there was a concern about whether using images would slow down access too much. We weren’t blogging. We were writing. We were a rat’s nest, and it was a very comfortable place to be.

With the 2004 election, we started experimenting with blogging technology, and found that it opened up some new possibilities in what we could do, and in what our readers could do in return, writing back to challenge us and be challenged in return by other readers. I’ve become comfortable in writing through a blog format, though I still enjoy a basic html approach.

Yet, the world of processed writing has expanded… and gotten smaller. Networks like Twitter and Facebook encourage users to blurt out tiny bits of text and to link in to more extended ideas expressed by others, rather than created by themselves. Personally, I’m finding these forms to be of limited use. The majority of users who create accounts on these networks have abandoned those accounts within one month of signing up.

Still, I wonder - could there be something I’m missing, a utility that I just haven’t grasped yet? Should I reconsider this social networking approach? Might I get something out of tagging things in the world as friend or fan?

Last week, a group of programmers announced the creation of BuddyPress, a tool that could enable us to integrate features of the sort familiar to Facebook users right here on Irregular Times. That way, Irregular Times readers could build profiles, assemble in networks with each other, begin to publish their own materials in longer form than our comments form now allows, send private messages, and so on.

These extra features certainly would expand Irregular Times, but the question in my mind is whether that expansion would be relevant to the experience of the site. Would people actually use these features, given that other social networking sites are already available?

My instinct is to say no, to conclude that it would be a mistake to try to adopt Facebook features, just because Facebook has been successful with them. My inclination is to let social networking sites be social networking sites, and allow Irregular Times to remain… something else.

Am I missing the boat by not working to plug in to BuddyPress?

There is one kind of change we really can believe in at Irregular TImes - the kind of change we make to the look of our web site as we experiment to find a new way of expressing our identity without letting excess design get in the way of the words, which is what this site has always been our primary focus.

With this design we’re sacrificing color in favor of a clean look. The fluid width allows the work to fit any reasonable screen.

At the top is Theodiclus Locke, Mr. Odd Clock, our long-lived irregular man character, now in sharper focus. He’s still got a little bit of graininess around the edges. He’s in .gif format right now, after all. I’ll be playing around with his picture over the next few days to see if I can get a sharper .jpg version prepared.

The content is the same, the face is different. We’ve got a lot more color, and a little bit more simplicity.

Why? It isn’t very irregular to always stay the same, that’s why. Maybe we’ll keep it this way for awhile. Maybe we’ll change it on to something else.

Let us know what you think.

Mother Davis folds up this morning’s thin newspaper as she notes,

National Public Radio is firing 7 percent of its staff. The Associated Press is laying off 10 percent of its workers. CBSNews and CNet are merging together, and cutting jobs in the process. Newsweek is firing workers too. A whole bunch of newspapers are going bankrupt or are on the brink. Yahoo is leaking employees all over California.

As corporate media is faltering, we at Irregular Times are not. We haven’t had the strongest financial year ever, but we’re not firing anyone, or laying them off, or shifting them to part time.

How can we get away with that? We’re small. When everyone else was biggering and biggering. We were persisting, and staying true to our independent natures.

We’re all going to rely more on the independent media more than we have in the past, because the mainstream is shrinking significantly. It’s up to those who have retained the flexibility of smallness to do their part and write the kind of small stories but important stories that never have gotten coverage in the big presses.

We’ll do what we can. We don’t pretend to be big, and being small just might help us survive this media mass extinction.

Staying put in her rocking chair as she watches the newspaper blow away on a gentle breeze,
Mother Davis

As we continue to ramp up our I Voted For You, But… project to collect Obama voters’ expressions of personal dissent and progressive activists’ plans for collective protest, we’ve taught ourselves how to write RSS feeds. As a result, we’re able to share with you a new RSS feed of progressive activist events. If you want to keep abreast of activist shenanigans around the country, put the feed on your feedreader. Better yet, if you’re a progressive blogger, you can take that feed and incorporate it into your own website. That way, your liberal-minded readers will know what’s going down, too. (You can see the RSS feed directly incorporated into this web page over on the right-hand side.)

If you are an organizer who has a progressive demonstration, rally or march coming up, click here to submit the information on your event for inclusion in the feed and in the searchable I Voted For You, But… event database.

Here at Irregular Times we occasionally like to tweak things a bit, but every once in a while a bigger change is called for. A few years ago we decided to “upgrade” a discussion board we had going on by replacing it with a diary system in which anybody could write long-form articles and gain comments on them. To make a long story short, by private communication to us and by low use we figured out that people didn’t like it. It usually only takes us a few years to figure out our mistakes, and right on target we finally decided to let the diaries go. The diaries are still there, but we’re not going to upgrade them any more.

In their stead, we’re going back to what worked and what people liked, putting back a good old-fashioned discussion board. It’s called the Irregular Times Forum, and it’s wide open with possibility. You can register with an account to post topics, but we’ve also tweaked with the settings to allow anonymous posts and comments for secret agent types and desperados. Links to new topics on the Forum will show up automatically on the Irregular Times main page, over to your left, which we hope will keep the talk going.

Please let us know what you think, either here or… over at the Forum!

Blue states, red states are theoretical. I want to know where the politically active people are - the people who care enough to stick their necks out and make a little public statement every now and then.

I’m experimenting with Google Maps to try to understand how American looks from an activist perspective. One of my experiments is the map you see below, though which I’m beginning to track the cities and states (street addresses remain private) where we are sending the buttons we sell on Irregular Times and ship directly.

These are just the places we’ve mailed buttons to in the last week or so. You’ll be seeing more points soon. Get a button, and you’ll put your town on the map.

View Larger Map

As I explained over the weekend, Social bookmarking and wikimedia have turned me sour. I’m remain open, however, to other sorts of collaborative media experiments online.

One such experiment is Zimbio, a place where authors, graphic designers and videographers can contribute their efforts to the construction of online magazines that focus on particular topics. It’s kind of like Squidoo, only more cooperative in structure. A Squidoo lensmaster controls a lens fairly tightly, whereas the who purpose of a Zimbio magazine is to have more than one person contributing to it. Zimbio magazines, with multiple pages, also have a lot more room to work with.

We’re experimenting with what Zimbio can do, contributing to the Barack Obama Bumper Sticker magazine there, and constructing our own Ocean News magazine. So far, I’m noticing some different challenges. The Barack Obama Bumper Sticker magazine has its niche clearly defined - perhaps a little too narrowly. Though there are multiple contributors to the magazine, much of their content lacks expansive interest, and I could see it devolving into little more than a classified advertisements sheet.

The Ocean News magazine, however, may be too broad in its attention to work on Zimbio - given that oceans cover most of the face of the Earth. Only one other person has contributed any work to the Oceans magazine, so far, and to be honest I was underwhelmed with the quality of that contribution. So, at the same time that I’m maintaining the Ocean News magazine, I’m also updating our own Protect the Earth’s Oceans page of resources here at Irregular Times.

As the Green Man and I have both pointed out, the crisis in marine ecology is probably the most under-reported story of our time. It’s worth going out on a limb on Zimbio for, I think.

But is working on Zimbio worthwhile in any other sense? I’d like to hear from other people who have worked on Zimbio, and hear what they had to say about the experience.

As you may know, we’ve had a system for rating members of the House and Senate for a few years now, with information on votes and cosponsorships that are important from a progressive perspective.

We’re planning an upgrade of our congressional database system in the near future, and we have some nifty plans for the kind of information we’re going to make available. But I thought it would also be a good idea to ask you what sort of information you’d like to see, or what you’d like to be able to do with it.

If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

Lately, CafePress and Zazzle started selling round lapel stickers in sheets of 48. We started adding designs for those lapel stickers (here, for instance, are some Hillary Clinton lapel stickers; our Zazzle lapel sticker collection for the two candidates is over thisaway). But we abruptly stopped work on these collections when we noticed the high cost for these stickers. You might say we had a case of sticker shock.

At Zazzle, a sheet of 48 lapel stickers with one of our designs would cost you $48.59 including shipping and handling costs. At CafePress, a sheet of 48 lapel stickers would cost you less — $34.50 including shipping and handling. But that’s still a lot. Way too much. Extravagantly expensive. Stratospheric for what’s being sold here, which is a lapel sticker. These are not waterproof, UV-protected, big vinyl bumper stickers you can see from 30 feet away, after all. They’re lapel stickers that can be weatherproofed with a can of spray, but without that they’re ephemeral and intimate. They’ll last on backpacks, or on notebooks, or on… well, we’re sure you can think of some places they’ll last. But they’re not your uncle’s rugged bumper sticker. There’s no excuse for this kind of charge, although there is an explanation: it involves a multiple-step process with two big corporations who have employees and administrative staff and subcontracting designers, all of whom take a cut. That, and the allure of a really big profit margin, explain the high cost.

To keep a short story short, we looked at the economics of it and realize that we, not a corporation, with no administrative staff and no employees and no designing subcontractors or any of that jazz, could offer you the same product at a much lower cost. So as of right now, we’re selling sheets of lapel labels with dozens of designs on them at a much lower cost. You can buy 48 lapel stickers from us for just $12.00. That’s a quarter of what Zazzle charges and only a bit more than a third of what CafePress wants you to pay. We also sell lapel stickers in a variety of quantities (48, 40, 24, 20, 12) and sizes (2.5 inches and 1.5 inches in diameter) to match your desire. As with all the other stuff we make ourselves, we ship it to you direct from our little shops in our attics and basements to directly using the U.S. Postal Service.

Here are links to our brand spanking new galleries of lapel stickers:

Barack Obama Lapel Stickers

Hillary Clinton Lapel Stickers

Anti-Bush Lapel Stickers

Pro-Constitution Lapel Stickers

Environment Lapel Stickers

Liberal Lapel Stickers

LGBT Lapel Stickers

Peace Lapel Stickers

Religious Freedom Lapel Stickers

If you have any ideas for lapel stickers you’d like to see and perhaps put on your lapel (or, ahem, somewhere else), let us know.

Since 2003, we’ve been selling our own politically and socially progressive bumper stickers, buttons and such. Since last year, we’ve been selling sweatshop-free made in the USA shirts, too. Today, we’re happy to take our offerings to a new level. Click here to check out our new tool for you to create your own election 2008 bumper sticker, poster or button.

Here’s how it works. We’ve created twelve poster, button and bumper sticker designs promoting the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama. All the items are located on a special webpage, ready to be customized by you. The candidate’s name is fixed (and the word “for” in each design is fixed too, kind of to minimize the evil Republican snark factor), but the rest is up to you to dream up. Carpenters for Hillary Clinton? Dreamy Poets for John Edwards? Frenchmen for Barack Obama? Mais absolutement! Find the poster, button, or bumper sticker design that you like best supporting the candidate of your choice. Then type in the word or short phrase you’d like to see in the blank space of the design. We’ll generate an instant link for you to a product with the phrase just as you type it. The link will send you through to a Zazzle shop on which you can purchase the product and get it sent out to you lickety-split. If you don’t like the look of the phrase, realize you’ve made a spelling error, or perhaps want a different font of a different size, you can even mess about with it further, right then and there.

Give it a whirl. We hope you like it.

The Draft Bloomberg website started by Unity08 CoFounders Douglas Bailey and Gerald Rafshoon started out four days ago with a grand opening covered by three cable news channels, seven major newspapers and Time magazine. Bailey and Rafshoon often relied on their media contacts to pump up their Unity08 e-mail fundraising list, and it would typically work for a day or two. But since the idea of a presidential ticket stage-managed by a corporation never really resonated with the public, the big-media tactic couldn’t sustain Unity08’s growth.

I’m seeing the same pattern with the Unity08 CoFounders’ Draft Bloomberg petition. Here’s a graph of the total signatures by day (blue) and the new signatures added in the 24 hours previous to that day:

The total number of signatories to the Draft Bloomberg petition stands at 1,401 and, as you can see, the number of new signatures has dropped significantly as the big-media effect has worn off. In the past 24 hours, just 65 people added their names to the petition. The Draft Bloomberg petition is small and its growth is slowing down.

Way back in 2005, I set myself a goal of compiling a list of 2,008 reasons to elect a progressive President in 2008. I set as stakes for the challenge a nasty punishment: If I failed to compile a list of 2,008 reasons by January 1, 2008, I would write a check for $2008.00 dollars to every Republican presidential candidate.

The high stakes worked as a motivation, especially this last month, and as of this afternoon, we have 2,008 reasons compiled. A few need to be edited, sourced, or sorted, and some revisions may need to be made as we now doublecheck the list to get it up to date but all the material is there - and just in the nick of time.

What a relief. I’m now ready to sleep my way into the new year. Auld Lang Nap, everyone.