Odds & Sods

Things have been a bit light in these parts of late, but I've actually been writing quite a bit in some other locales, so here's a handy pocket guide to some of the headlines:

Over at newcritics, I posted a review of Twisted Head, a hilarious and cutting memoir by the actor and writer Carl Capotorto. You may remember Capotorto as “Little Pauli” in The Sopranos, but there was nothing of the mythical mob glamor about his childhood in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. Capotorto was the youngest child of a family dominated by a father with a violent temper, and the book’s title comes from the literal translation of Capotorto - “twisted head” - which seems so perfectly suited to the temperament of Philip Vito Capotorto. Highly recommended.

I've started blogging at TechPresident and Personal Democracy Forum. Here's a piece on President-Elect Obama's transition site vs. the ideas at Change.org, one of the platform I wrote about in CauseWired: "If President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are looking for a model that uses the power of social networks and citizen democracy to open up government, they ought to bring their own homepage - Change.gov - and replace the g-o-v with a little o-r-g."

At onPhilanthropy, I wrote about Obama's online organizing and what it might mean to the social sector: "In a victory that holds deep lessons for how nonprofit organizations and cause-driven ventures will organize volunteers and build support in the future, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States Tuesday in a near-landslide victory keyed by state-of-the-art social networking and online organizing."

Finally, over at CauseWired.com - where my book blog is evolving into a new start-up consulting and online publishing business (more on this soon) - I experimented with a bit of video, a vlog on some of the big themes in CauseWired: let's go to the videotape: