A new site dedicated to disAbility Rights and social media launched last week DisAbilityRightsGalaxy.com. The site is a news and recent events  site like huffington post with social media driven outreach.

Even though the site has only been up for a few week the site has 120 plus post relating to disability rights issues here are a few recent ones:

All content is available via RSS (we are working on adding sectio0n specific RSS feeds currently) and several of the areas have interactive polls or quizzes.  I will be participating in the online book club, here is the first book chosen:

“Three Generations and No Imbeciles”

“Three Generations, No Imbeciles” is the Galaxy Book Club selection for the months of June and July 2011. This forum will be devoted to it through July 31, 2011. We hope you will enjoy reading it and join in this forum’s discussion. “The Ugly Laws” will be the featured book in the months of August and September 2011.

MODERATOR: We’ll provide a question related to the bimonthly book selection and let you take the discussion from there. A review of “Three Generations, No Imbeciles” by Shannon Sommers appears on Galaxy’s history page.

QUESTION: What lesson learned from reading “Three Generations, No Imbeciles” is most applicable today?

Post your answers and anything else you would like to say about this book below. Don’t hesitate to ask a question of your own about this book.

Disclaimer: I have proudly worked with Disability Rights Washington to help develop the site and the social media features.  Accessibility  been a real challenge.  Social media and start ups tends to think of accessibility last.  If you have practical advise on how to improve the sites accessibility please let us know we want the site to be usable by all and we want to keep up using the latest ways people are connecting online.

The first of two blogs I am overseeing this winter has just started to pick up with some great posts. This blog is for LIS550, Information in a Social Context and is written by second year  MILS students (mostly librarians).  Topics include trademark, Burning Man, copyright, net neutrality, spam, privacy, Free Press, patents, hacking xbox and many more topics.  I am impressed by the topics and the quality of resources referenced, these posts have lead to some strong in class discussions.

Here is the first round of public posts:

LitigationVille: Can FarmVille prevent other social media games from using the “-Ville” suffix?

A Second Helping: the Return of Rustock and all the Spam you didn’t get over the Holidays.

Trademarking Tradition: Getting the tm on Baltimore’s Hon

The Implications of Geolocation and Digital Images

Video Game Consoles: Information Appliances or Generative Platforms?

Copyright Reform in Canada, Bill C-32 – Point of Comparison for the U.S.

PatentlyO & Microsoft i4i

Scam baiters: better than the spammers they’re scamming?

Net Neutrality – The FCC Ruling and Its Impact on Developers and Libraries

These are mostly short form post about recent events.  Longer form opinion pieces will be incoming later on in the quarter. Follow the blog at brianrowe.org/LIS550/ or read more on the syllabus at brianrowe.org/LIS550/about/.

Two weeks ago in my International Human Rights Clinic we had a class on press releases without one mention in the readings of how to promote press online.  My critical response for the week focused on how to blog.  Here are the highlights:

• Add visuals – Visuals draw people to text, they also get you hits from Google image search.
• Make headlines simple and direct, do not hide the ball with a witty headline
• Add meta data and tags to increase Search Engine Optimization
• Use broadcast tools to promote the press release – Twitter, Facebook, Digg, reddit, your blog, your orgs blog, list serves, Slide share, YouTube. In the human rights context use Witness for videos and for legal docs use JD Supra.
• License your work for others to share your message with Creative Commons Licenses (this blog is under a public domain dedication)
• Consider using multi media – a cheap 5 min video will get you 10X the number of hits a text post will over the long term
• Provide links to related works
• Invite community feed back – open comments
• Enable community action – do not just give people a story give them a way to take action!
• Provide links to related articles – see end of post
• Make it easy for your reader to educate themselves through the press release with links. (to wikipedia or relevant sites)
• Promote others that are talking about the same topic (see Cory’s video at end of post)
• Keep it short 200- 400 words for short posts, no more then 1500 words ever.  If you are going over 750 word you better have an amazing reason.

Cory Doctorow: How to be an uber blogger:

Further reading:
Slate Review of Huffington’s guide on how to blog
Four steps to a great Nonprofit Blog by Sarah Davies

Take Action: Start a blog through WordPress