Robert Goulet passed away yesterday at the age of 73.

Now who will mess with my stuff?

Two nifty new Richmond blogs are now out for all to enjoy.

RVANews, brought to you by the same folks who did that whole RVABlogs thing, has aggregate and original content to give you a taste of of Richmond by Richmond.

And new to the community blog front is River District News, covering Shockoe to Rockets and beyond.

Great reading all around. Go partake.

Pick your poison.

You can play in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, where you challenge yourself to write a 50,000 word novella in 30 days.

OR

Try your hand at NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month, where you write a blog post a day, every day, for 30 days. Not only is it less writing, but you could win a prize!

I’ve tried NaNoWriMo in the past, successfully completing it in 2003 and failing miserably ever since. I may try it again this year, especially since I don’t have steady access to the Internets to do NaBloPoMo.

Best of luck to anyone trying either of these exercises. Looking forward to the results.

(Hat tip to Kamen Lee for finding NaBloPoMo.)

MySpace founder and president Tom Anderson is older than his profile suggests. But only by five years. When MySpace started in 2003 his profile claimed his age at 27 but in actuality he was 32.

Is it a big deal? Anderson, who has said he was 27 when MySpace launched, built an empire by tapping into the youth market. History might’ve unfolded differently if those first few users had known that the site’s hipster co-architect was already well into his 30s. “Young people don’t want someone their dad’s age running a site they think is cool,” says Pete Cashmore, the founder and editor of Mashable.com, a blog that covers social networking.

What this also highlights is one problem with MySpace and much of social networking: honesty. It’s easy to create a new persona online, especially through services like MySpace, and it’s these little lies that create entirely new people. These are the same holes that are abused not just for marketing purposes (as it potentially was for Tom), but for more illicit purposes, like 45 year old men stalking 18 year old girls online.

While Tom’s age difference of five years may have been a little white lie, it leads me to wonder how serious MySpace really is on cracking down and setting up barriers and verification systems to limit the abuse of the social network by people with less savory intentions.

PS - I don’t really think 37 is an “old fart”.

YourStreet takes Google Maps and puts pushpins in your area for news stories and the like. TechCrunch sums it up nicely:

The startup has developed an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map. The site will start off with regular Google AdSense ads, but that same algorithm will allow it to place local ads with extremely fine granularity. “The thing that distinguishes us,” explains CEO James Nicholson, “is that we can get down to a specific street level on the ads.” If he can attract enough local visitors to YourStreet, the local dry cleaner may also want to show up to advertise there. The localized ads will be simple text ads at first, but they could also eventually be push pins of a different color.

There’s not a whole lot to it right now but it looks to be just getting off the ground.

With Virginia’s 1st Congressional District up for grab there’s a lot of talk of who will potentially run on both sides for the special election on December 11th. Virginia Virtucon has a running tally here (scroll down to 1st House District). On their list as well as many others circulating of potential Democratic candidates is current 17th State District Senator Edd Houck who is currently facing a challenge Republican Chris Yakabouski.

So does Edd Houck want to be a State Senator or a Congressional Representative? People in the 17th District, my old stomping ground and home to many friends and family members, deserve a representative that will truly represent them in the Senate, not just aim for something else a month later. Chris Yakabouski has solidly served Spotsylvanians as a Supervisor and is running a great campaign on solid ideas.

So will it be a lame duck or a real representative?

Jim Riley has his thoughts here.

Chris Yakabouski
17th State Senate District of Virginia

men.style.com had an article up earlier this month about the resurgance of opium as a upper middle class drug and starts with a group in Richmond:

“Nice, isn’t it?” Steve asks (the names in this story have been changed). He’s a 33-year-old medical student with frameless glasses, dressed in a crisp white American Apparel polo shirt. “It just gives it that little added something.” Steve and his wife, Cindy, a 32-year-old journalist with long, coffee-colored hair, are hosting this gathering at their cozy two-bedroom house in Richmond, Virginia.

…

At around 10:30, the party takes a turn. Brian sets his wine down and produces a small silken pouch. He extracts a folded wine label, and displays the contents on a table beneath a vintage lamp: about 10 grams of tar-colored opium—a Tootsie Roll-size chunk worth about $750.

The writing style used in the article isn’t my cup of tea (oh boy, a tea reference when talking about opium, har har) and the failure to highlight the horribly addicitive nature of the drug really rubs me the wrong way. What I wonder is, is opium use growing or even a widespread issue in the Richmond area? Or does the author happen to be from around here?

This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.

And it’s pretty interesting.

Patrick Ruffini has a post up about how to utilize Facebook’s new Flyer Pro system to find out more about a target audience demographic than you may ever need to know. It’s quite a fun little tool if you’re into data and what that may mean from an advertising or a mobilizing standpoint.

I decided to play with it a bit and see what I could find out about Facebook users who are part of the Richmond area network (whether nor not they really live here isn’t known, anyone can join any network they’d like). This data is an aggregate of what people claim on their profiles. Some people don’t list their sex, relationship status, political views, etc, so the numbers might not add up to 100%.

Richmond, VA Area Facebook Users

Total	-	86,900
Male	-	35,000	(40%)
Female	-	42,960	(49%)
—–
Liberal	-	13,620	(16%)
Moderate	-	9,940	(11%)
Conservative	-	8,620	(10%)
—–
Single	-	32,220	(37%)
In A Relationship	-	21,800	(25%)
Engaged	-	3,060	(4%)
Married	-	8,620	(10%)
—–
Under 17	-	12,520	(14%)
18-24	-	56,600	(65%)
25-35	-	13,500	(16%)
35 and Over	-	3,600	(4%)
—–
In High School	-	13,860	(16%)
In College	-	26,840	(31%)
College Graduate	-	24,120	(28%)

For further breakdown of the political numbers, male and female affilliations are:

Liberal - 13,620 (16%) (M - 5,220/F - 7,800)
Moderate - 9,940 (11%) (M - 4,860/F - 4,760)
Conservative - 8,620 (10%) (M - 4,620/F - 4,240)

If one wanted they could break this data down more and find out how many proclaimed single female Conservative 28 year old college graduates were out there (of which there are fewer than 20). It won’t give you names, but it may give you hope.

The numbers are interesting, though, and provide fodder for some interesting thoughts. Say you were a Convervative thinking of making a run for office in the Richmond area. By Facebook’s standards, there are 8,620 people you can specifically target and hopefully mobilize right in your neighborhood. Or if you want to advertise a college dating service in the Richmond area, you can narrow it down to single college students between the ages of 18-23.

What you can do with these numbers beyond crunching them or actually advertising is beyond me right now, but as Facebook expands and tweaks its system you may find the usefulness of such numbers growing.

Need some last minute plans for your Friday night fun? C’mon out to Plant Zero for RDD’s Demons Ball.

Perhaps Ben Tribbett is getting flustered about nonsense because Jeannemarie Devolites Davis is now polling even with Chap Petersen, wiping out what had been a substantial lead for Chap in the last weeks of the campaign. This is huge news not only for the JMDD campaign but seems to also be a trend for Republican’s statewide.

The National Journal’s “The Campaign Spot” blog reported on Tuesday that numbers are suddenly looking a little more promising for Republicans in Virginia:

Today I report that the news in those internal polls continues to be good. Surprisingly good. They’re showing a markedly better environment for Republican candidates, and campaign pollsters aren’t quite sure why.

One strategist familiar with the results speculated, “It may just be that there are Republicans out there talking about their issues. The campaigns in aggregate are spending a bucket load. And they have good stuff to say. It may just be that there are folks going, ‘Right. I remember that I agree with those guys, regardless of the fact that I’m angry at the President over Iraq,’ or whatever other issues.”

With 12 days to go things are starting to fall into place for some Republican candidates. But the races are far from over. Do your part by contacting your local committee or campaign to help volunteer, GOTV, or contribute.

Ben Tribbett cries foul at a recent mailing by Jeannemarie Devolites Davis that includes an image of Chap Petersen’s disclosure form that happens to include Petersen’s home address and phone number. All of that information is publicly available to anyone willing to look for it not just on Petersen’s disclosure forms but through his campaign’s website and even shared on his blog. Devolites Davis’s personal contact information is readily available, even her phone number which Ben Tribbett is threatening to release to the public.

Yet Ben Tribbett’s reasoning is more malicious than JMDD’s, seeking to intimidate her and her family. Instead of being reasonable and understanding the nature of the information or maybe even offering a polite suggestion, Ben Tribbett is attempting to call on others to stalk and hound JMDD and her family. Ben Tribbett is the same person who has called on his readers to telephone employers of private citizens merely because he doesn’t like a ranking system on their website. Ben Tribbett is also the same person who has taken to using derogatory and cursing in his site to refer to candidates. Nevermind his articulate one-word post on Tom Davis’s potential decision not to run for Senate.

So, Ben Tribbett, get over yourself.

FLASHBACK UPDATE: Back in August Ben Tribbett wasn’t so concerned about releasing the home information of private citizens who disagreed with him. More colorful language too. Civil discourse have been dead over at Not Larry Sabato for quite some time…

DailyKos poster rainmanjr has written a rambling post that speculates that national Democrats have given up on attempting to lead because the White House has blackmailed them!

That would explain a lot of folding and playing dead. Wireless surveillance could have been done on our House/Senate people, learning things that Rove could use, and now they’re afraid. Maybe they were even quietly threatened with plantings of drugs, kid porn, gay porn, National Review…that kind of sorted thing. You get tagged with any of this stuff and your career is over.

There’s even a poll where readers can give their thoughts on the viability of such speculation. The results? As of 2pm today:

So 79% of DK readers firmly believe or think it’s entirely possible that the weakness of Democratic leaders in Washington is not the result of bad polices and a failure to act on asinine policies and promises during their 2006 campaigning but a result of some clandestine scheme by the White House and Karl Rove who, having nothing better to do in retirement, spends his free time listening to their phone conversations and planting pornography on Democratic computers. Completely within the realm of reason. If your room has padded walls.

This week finds our hero in New York City for the 2007 CMJ Music Marathon. One day in and I’ve already seen People Noise, Breaking Laces, The Hollow Sound and Jennifer O’Conner (links and thoughts when I have more time). Off to do more music related stuff.