Ambush kills U.S. troops in Iraq

Snip: The suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire killed at least two Marines and four others were missing and presumed dead. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female.

The ambush late Thursday also suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city from insurgents seven months ago.

The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women “in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities,” a military statement said.

Looking for Diablogue?

I’m consolidating blogs: in future you can find my posts about civic engagement, online dialogue and related topics on Otherwise Engaged.

Conference on Social Capital & ICTs

The European Social Capital, Quality of Life & Information Society Technologies project (SOCQUIT) is holding a 2-day conference in Paris (!) this September. The conference will reviw the results of SOQUIT’s research into the impact of IT on social capital, which focuses particularly on work and employment, aging population, local initiatives and migrants. For […]

BC Goes DC

The BC Citizens’ Assembly is taking its experience on the road. The New America Foundation is hosting a discussion next week titled Can the U.S. Take Lessons from a Canadian Experiment in Democracy?. It will be held Tuesday, June 7 at 3:30 PM at the New America Foundation, 1630 Connecticut Ave, 7th Floor, Washington DC. […]

e-Engagement Tools That Fit

Organizations have tremendous cultural variations that need to be considered when designing an e-engagement plan or selecting e-engagement tools. E-engagement will be most successful when it’s based on tools that fit with the way an organization approaches technology and with the way it approaches engagement. Since organizations may approach internal (employee) engagement differently […]

10 tools that tap the power of blogs

Blogging has been a hot topic here at OD2005. While there’s a lot of interest in blogging as a tool of public conversation, there’s also a lot of skepticism about the quality of information and discourse on blogs.
In my own presentations I have talked both about how to use blogging as an engagement tool and […]

The Annotated New York Times

Michael Weiksner of E-ThePeople showed us a site called The Annotated New York Times, which shows what people are saying about the NYT on the blogosphere. It’s a lot like what Salon is doing with Technorati.

My presentations at the Online Deliberation 2005 Conference

I’m presenting on two different panels at OD2005. My main paper (in room 380x at 2:40 on Saturday) is on “Found” Enagement: Lessons from Hacktiivsm and Blogging. I’ll be talking about the increasingly fuzzy boundary between formal consultation and spontaneous activism, and how online deliberation can learn to incorporate spontaneous participation the way offline […]

OD 2005 Blog

I’m heading to Stanford this week for the 2005 Online Deliberation conference. I’m currently setting up a conference blog that puts some of my recent investigations into tagging to work as a tool for collaboration and dialogue among conference participants.
OD2005