How To Use The Internet

I always thought I knew how to use the internet – you type some stuff into Google and then click around until you find what you need.  Getting this blog up and running, however, has exposed me to a whole new world that I never new existed.  Before I get comments telling me to join the 21^st century – to be fair – it is not like there is something out there to update me on what is useful on the internet vs. what is nonsense like most of the internet.  So, what was new to me this week?  And I’ll pause for dramatic effect.  RSS.

RSS is everywhere on the internet, but I only paid attention to it once I knew what it was.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  Think of it like a broadcasting service (like radio), but for the internet.  Here is how it works, let’s say that there is information out there that changes regularly – a favorite blog perhaps.  So instead of fiendishly checking back to this hypothetical blog everyday to see if it has been updated (and judging from my blog stats there seems to be one person out there that does this), you can just get plugged into the RSS feed for the blog and it will send you the most recent post when it gets posted.

This is all pretty amazing because with RSS, the internet comes to you when it changes.  Since most relevant information and most of my internet activity is on a few sites, it is way better for me to get their RSS feeds and then to check those feeds on my RSS reader in one place.   Weather, news, events, favorite sites all show up in one place as they change.  You can even get a feed off of craigslist that informs you when what you want to buy/rent/have gets posted – now that is pretty sweet. 

How do you get yourself set up to receive RSS feeds?  Most sites that I googled made it seem really complicated, but after a while I figured it out.  It only takes two steps, but let’s use an example.  I happen to like a blog called Cooking with Amy.  You can find Amy’s blog here:  http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com/ her recipes help me get inspired to actually cook every now and then.

Step 1 is to get the right software/web site to “see” the RSS feed.  In order to see an RSS feed, you need to get an RSS reader.  This is kind of like getting a radio to hear radio waves.  I found the easiest one to use is Google Reader, which you can access here: http://www.reader.google.com/.  There are many different types of readers that you can use.  I like Google’s because it integrates with my gmail account.

Step 2 is to get your RSS reader to pick up the news, blogs and content that you want.  You do this in Google Reader by clicking on the “add subscription” link on the left.  Once the Reader prompts you to add the subscription, you type in the web address of the information that you want to be updated on.  So for Amy’s site, you just type in http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com/ or for this site you would type in https://newtome.wordpress.com/.  That’s it!

If you want to earn your blackbelt in RSS, you can also create your own RSS feed.  Since I am internet challenged, I found it difficult to follow the sites advising on how to create your own feed.  It boils down to doing three things in the following order:

1:  Start a website or blog.

2:  Get an RSS feed creator.  One place that works for me is http://www.feedburner.com/.

3:  Type in the address to the website that you want the feed to broadcast from when the feed creator prompts you.

Now that I have stretched to the limits of my technological prowess, I thought I would wrap it up with something new I learned on the topic that I wrote about last week.  Another wrench in my “person with the most votes wins” conception of the Democratic Primary is that a candidate needs to win a majority of the delegates to win the nomination.  This is usually not a problem, but as long as Edwards keeps coming in a close third – he will decide who will be the next Democratic candidate for the presidency.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, since in a case where Edwards can influence the nomination, the wishes of more voters will be taken into account (a benefit of having a parliamentary democracy).  For example, if the final tally is 45% Obama, 40% Clinton and 15% Edwards, then under a simple – more votes = victory scenario – only 45% of voters get a say in the policies that the nominee will support.  On the other hand, if a majority is necessary then a Clinton-Edwards allegiance will ensure that 55% of the voters get a say in the nominee’s policies.   Finally, I just saw in the news that Clinton is taking legal action to re-instate the delegates from the Michigan and Florida primaries…this nomination is guaranteed to get crazy.

One Person, One Vote? Not Exactly.

The Democratic Party Primary has been top of mind this week.  After ten years as a registered Democrat (I actually switched my party affiliation to Republican for this primary) and an education in the American school system, I thought I knew how the Democratic Party chooses its presidential candidate.  I assumed that the Party uses a democratic process to choose its Nominee – whoever the majority of party members vote for (with a nod to the sovereignty of the states through a delegate system that resembles the Electoral College) gets to run for president.  Apparently, this is not how it works at all.

A colleague of mine that is active in the Democratic Party took the time to correct my naiveté.  It turns out the people going to the polls aren’t the only ones that decide who makes a run for the presidency.  I found this shocking.  How is this possible?

Well, there are these people called “superdelegates” and “unpledged delegates” whose individual vote counts like that of roughly twenty thousand regular Americans.  Seriously, I am not making this up.  So these special delegates consist of Democratic Party members who are in the House of Representatives, in the Senate and who are governors.  This might make sense under some construct, since these individuals play some larger, elected role in government in America.  However, these individuals are the minority of unpledged delegates.  Most unpledged delegates achieve that status by being part of the Democratic National Committee or by being a distinguished person in the party.  These unpledged delegates are there because of their fundraising prowess or because they were valuable to past presidents or are kingmakers in the Party.  So the numbers work out as follows – there are about 4,000 delegates that a candidate can win, about 800 of those have this unpledged status.  One would expect that if the Party can field a list of real candidates that results in a competitive, tight primary, those 800 unpledged delegates can swing the nomination to whomever the Party leadership wants.  That was certainly new to me.

Now, the unpledged delegates don’t always vote for whomever they want and sometimes they follow the wishes of the voters in their designated states.  However, already about 250 of these unpledged delegates have put their support behind a candidate – thereby ignoring the preferences of common voters.  So when John Kerry publicly announced his support for Barack Obama in South Carolina last week, there was a media frenzy about campaign strategy, positioning, etc…and I remember thinking to myself, who cares which candidate John Kerry endorses?  I mean, are there people who are now going to go out of their way to vote for Barack Obama because of this endorsement?  Obviously, I didn’t know much about the Primary process – the endorsement was extremely important, for a reason that was not mentioned in a single major American newspaper, it was worth about twenty thousand votes.  Obama would have had to otherwise get those votes from regular Americans.

This all gets more interesting when you consider that Hillary Clinton currently has three times as many unpledged delegates as Barack Obama does – so Obama will have to win substantially more than 50% of the popular vote among Party members in order to win the Democratic Party Nomination.  To make matters more opaque, Florida and Michigan have moved their primaries up in violation of Party rules and have been stripped of their delegates.  No one really knows if such action is legally possible.  Since Clinton will probably win these states and the Democratic Primary will probably end up being close, the possibilities for controversy here are endless before we get to the finish line.  In the end, the ultimate Democratic Party Nominee will more likely be the product of side deals within the Democratic National Committee than victory at the polls.  I hate to start on a down note, but that is kind of disappointing, don’t you think?