Quadsville

Here's my weekly column for the QCT, a few hours in advance. This is only half of it. The other half is a recap of the responses to my post about the Davenport Promise.

This year, it's not just the stranger down the street parents have to worry about, it's candy made in China containing the toxic chemical melamine.

The candies affected are a little obscure, so it's not likely you'll find them in your little trick-or-treater's bag. But it's good to know what to look for just in case.

My questions to you:

Where do you let your kids trick-or-treat? Do you stay in your own neighborhood, or go to one known for a good haul? Does your workplace offer trick-or-treating in the building for employee's kids? Do you take them to community events like Fright Night in the District or trick-or-treating at the mall? Or do you just make the rounds to friends and family?

What do you hand out to trick-or-treaters on your porch? Do you let them pick or do you drop a treat in their sack? Are you giving out candy, healthy snacks or toys?

How into the Halloween spirit do you get? Is your house or porch decorated? Are you dressing up to hand out candy? Going to costume parties? Is yours the house that freaks out all the little kids?

Take some photos tonight and this weekend of your Halloween adventures and submit them for our Halloween Photo Contest! We've got prizes! And they don't contain melamine. Promise. 

My daughter's costume is ready to go. In fact, it's been ready for a couple decades. She's wearing the same homemade She-Ra costume that I wore in first grade. She found it in a box in grandma's attic this summer and thought it was "awesome." Gold boots. Red cape. How could it not be? Never mind that hardly any kid her own age knows who She-Ra is. But those of us who spent hours and hours of our childhood playing Masters of the Universe sure appreciate it.

Do you decorate your house? Do you dress up? What types of treats do you give out at the door? What are your kids dressing up as this year?

Share your photos in Quadsville. I need some more costume and jack-o-lantern inspiration!

You should also check out this week's Quadrants video. Quadrants hosts Joe Kelley and Greg Swanson took columnist Bill Wundram up to Gravity Hill to experiment on this haunted attraction.

First is a weekly photo contest. There are a lot of amazing photographers out there in Quadsville. I always enjoy looking at the photos that have been posted each week. The winner would have their photo featured in the Sunday Quad-City Times on the Quadsville page (usually C2) and it would also be featured that week on the site. My question: Should we have weekly themes for the photos or should it just be open?  Who should judge: QCTimes photo editor or residents of Quadsville? Any other suggestions? I am looking into various software to manage the contest.

No. 2: Election Day is coming in 13 days. The Times has a great Election 2008 Web site that is a great place to research the candidates and keep up on all the local, state and national campaigns. But how can Quadsvillagers get involved in telling the story of Election 2008?

I have enjoyed the political posts and I thank everyone who blogged in response to my questions earlier this week. Who's up for forming a Quadsville street team to cover E-Day from the civic media viewpoint? I'd love to see photos and videos from election night celebrations. If you are really into it, you could also conduct video interviews outside your polling place. Or just write about your voting experience: Was there a line? Any issues at your polling place? What are you doing election night as the results come in?

I will be out and about on Election night and also posting in Quadsville. I would love to have company. Would you prefer to post your election day news on your own blogs or should we start a group? Or is there an existing one that wants to be the recipient of all this info?

I will be happy to feature Election Day coverage from Quadsville in print in the Times, too, especially on the Saturday Editorial Page and Sunday Quadsville page. 

OK: Now it's time for you to write in below. This is my personal blog, so comments here should work (and I even disabled the idiot code requirement!). 

This microblogging tool is gaining popularity in bigger cities, and I'm seeing an increasing number of tweets coming from the QCA. I joined several months ago, but I wasn't really active on Twitter until this month when I installed the Twitterfox application to my Firefox browser. But let's start at the beginning....

Originally, I wasn't much of a fan. I didn't want to stay logged in to a Web page all day and I didn't want to get all the tweets sent to my phone via text. But once I installed Twitterfox, which allows me to check in on the latest tweets and send tweets just by clicking the little blue t at the bottom of my browser, I was hooked.

All of a sudden, I'm having conversations with people in the QC and across the US in the news industry. Ask a question, get an answer. Or just keep track of CNN's headlines.

I am using it to broadcast cool links in Quadsville, to ask questions of other people in the area and the industry, and just to give the typical "What are you doing?" personal updates. I also follow news orgs like NPR and Poynter and other bloggers to stay up-to-the-minute on news and hot topics.

If you want to give it a try, go to twitter.com. Make sure to sign up to follow qctimes and me. Damelemin is my Twitter handle. Then tell me how you are using it.

Yesterday, Oct. 15, was Blog Action Day '08 and the topic was: Poverty. The concept behind this annual nonprofit event is that if thousands of bloggers around the world all write on the same topic on a single day, they can "raise awareness, initiate action and shake the Web."

Closer to home, the Community Caring Conference will be hosting the Study Circles on Poverty Action Forum on Monday, Oct. 27 at 2 p.m. at the Deere-Wiman Carriage House, 817 11th Ave., Moline. They will be presenting findings from study circles held in Rock Island County on poverty. I'm interested to know who participated in the study circles and what action items have come out of those discussions, so I am going to try to attend.

What do you think are the particular challenges presented by poverty in the Quad-Cities? What does poverty look like here? Do you think about it often or only when there is a food drive or winter coat collection going on? Are you struggling with poverty yourself?

We may be a day late, but we don't have to come up another dollar short on this topic. Let's get some discussion going! 

The 46-year-old muses on public policy on his blog, The Washington Note. He spoke to a crowd of about 200, half of which were Austrian students and bloggers, at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna on Monday.

Building on his experience as executive director of the Nixon Center, a Senate staffer and now as a senior fellow at D.C. think tank New America Foundation, Clemons has built an audience of 20,000 to 1 million viewers per day by taking policy discussion into the "national marketplace" of the Internet.

Clemons, however, made a distinction between his goal to "educate but advocate" and inspire "enlightened discussion" on public policy and the desire of other bloggers to have a following. He cited The Daily Kos and MoveOn.org as examples of new media "putting together an army of people who weren't thinking." The bottom rung of political blogs, he says, are those who simply collect stories and items from other new and old media outlets and act as a portal to their readers. That may save time for readers of multiple blogs, he said, but cannot foster a productive debate.

The Washington Note is geared more toward policy wonks and inhabitants of the Beltway, than your average Quad-Citian. Clemons uses his D.C. connections to bring cocktail party insight into some of the decisions being made on Capitol Hill. In this way, he is unlike the majority of bloggers who base their opinions on what is reported by mainstream and non-traditional news sources.

But his approach to blogging is useful to those of us writing from Quadsville. Clemons tries to write his posts based on primary sources and first-hand observation, shutting himself off from the pundit spin until after he's added his two cents. That sometimes leaves him out of line with the general consensus. He called the first presidential debate for McCain, for example.

"All I can do from my blog space is call it as I see it," he said.

He does this by directly contacting commenters when they cross the libel line or personally attack other readers. He also tries to respond to as many e-mails from readers as possible, no easy task given his e-mail-to-comment ratio is 7 to 1.

Clemons' presentation emphasized for me the potential in our own Quadsville online community to elevate discussion on local issues, as well as to participate in national debates. Already I see Quad-City Images taking a lead on local matters. And Fly on the Wall has brought some great foreign policy debate to Quadsville. We need to continue to develop a devoted corps of critical thinkers willing to call it as they see it and take the heat from those who disagree with them.

If you want to see how Clemons does it, visit TheWashingtonNote.com. If you are ready to start steering the discussion, you are in the right place: Quadsville.com.

More about The Washington Note

Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program for the New America Foundation, launched his public policy blog, TheWashingtonNote.com, in 2004. Clemons' posts are often featured on The Huffington Post blog, as well as on the opinion pages of The Washington Post, New York Times, The Guardian and other newspapers and magazines.

Steve Clemons has live blogged the recent presidential and vice presidential debates. His take:

"Joe Biden showed what a steady, thoughtful, capable pro he is. And while Palin didn't have any of the disasters she has had in her recent interviews, she came off as an impressive amateur."

"McCain won the debate in my view -- but I don't think it was a definitive slaughter. Obama held his own on a number of fronts, but he wasn't in control. McCain set the pace, cadence. He provoked Obama and kept saying Obama didn't understand what was going on. Obama hardly attacked McCain with anything memorable at all."

I have made terrific contacts and wonderful friends in Vienna. Karin Czerny and Bob Hugins at the U.S. Embassy helped this American journalist feel at home in a foreign city. The digital video conferences from the Democrat and Republican national conventions and the talks with political cartoonist Chan Lowe and political blogger Steve Clemons were reporting highlights for me. Thanks to Karin and Bob and all the staff at the Embassy for hosting these events for the public and media.

My colleagues in the Außenpolitik department at Der Standard have been terrific to work with. Christoph Prantner, who was a fellow in this program last year, has been a welcoming host. I can't thank him enough for helping me sound more intelligent in German.

This weekend, I will reunite with the other fellows in the program to compare notes on our experiences and say goodbye. It will be tough to leave this city. But thanks to technology, it will not be hard to keep in contact with the people I am leaving behind.

To those of you back home, I will see you soon! Prepare yourself for a slide show. :-)

From left, Christoph Prantner, Julia Raabe, Adelheid Wölfl,András Szigetvari, Birgit Deisting and Josef Kirchengast of the Außenpolitik department at Der Standard. Not pictured is Markus Bernath, who bravely edited my first story in German.