This is Social Blend: Puppy Power [68:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Presented by Greg Davies (cGt2099 from The-TrukstoP.com), Joe Fowler (SilentJay74 from JuicySnake.Blogspot.com), Brian Hill (Bdog2g2 from MixxingBowl.com), and Tamar Weinberg (Tamar from Techipedia.com), the Social Blend examines the latest news and opinions hitting the world of social media. The show’s main focus is on Mixx.com, yet focuses on other sites and contenders in the social media field.

This week we’re joined by MikeonTV and Edie aka TomboysInFishnets as we talk about new NPR Mixx Buttons and remind everyone about the API feedback for Mixx.

From there, we cover the issue of the Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff in Iraq… and the reactions from people around the world – Jay, a Marine himself, has a very strong opinion on the issue.

Stories of the week include a discussion about Gary Gygax (RIP) and Dungeons and Dragons, classic NES 8-bit games you can play right in your browser, more issues with the Digg Algorithm, and few photo stories as well. Greg’s Mail Sack also gets opened once more (which has nothing to do with MuBalls.com by the way).

Our User Focus is PaulaB this week – and as usual we talk of some Comments of the Week and jump into the Mixx Lounge.

User Focus Transcript

This week, our user focus is on the lovely, talented, and outstanding PaulaB. As some of you may know, Paula is deaf, so we’ve transcribed the User Focus here so that she can check it out. We love you, Paula!

Greg: We’ll move on to our User Focus for this week – I want to focus on a particular user at Mixx known as PaulaB. A lot of people know PaulaB from Mixx, but for those of you who don’t know, she contributes to a blog site called Lesbiatopia…

Edie: Lesbiatopia!

Greg: and it is really good, it’s such a good blog. The posts they have there are just absolutely fascinating. Just to give you some background with PaulaB’s involvement at Mixx. She used to submit stories from Lesbiatopia to Digg.com, and I guess they flagged it as porn?

Joe: Right

Greg: They banned the domain from any submissions. Despite appeals from people involved with the blog and people who were interested in the blog, obviously, as with trend happening with Digg, they got no response. So, they moved over to Mixx and started submitting there, and it was a really good move for them because there were a lot of people there that were very interested in the articles over at Lesbiatopia.com. I gotta say this about PaulaB; she has a lot of submissions from Lesbiatopia and related to gay and lesbian culture around the world – but she doesn’t just submit that stuff, she has a wide range of different topics that she brings up and talks about; so it’s well worth checking out her submissions. She’s also a very strong advocate of gay rights, especially within the confines of the United States; which is cool – because I think there’s still too much business like hate crimes and bigoted bullshit going on around the place. I love her submissions; I love everything she puts up

Edie: I love Paula, I think she’s fabulous – and she’s supportive; and she likes to have an intelligent discussion – if she doesn’t agree with you politically, she’ll explain why. I think it’s important to have a gay voice in social networking – I don’t think they should be squashed; and Paula is the gay voice of Mixx.com. No doubt – I think it’s important to have that in place.

Joe: Well, let me tell you something, what’s really cool is Paula’s submits from Lesbiatopia and from Heather the Wishful Writer. The one where she was talking about going to the sperm bank, looking for donors – oh my god, dude, it just reminded me that there was a lot of stuff that you would never think a lesbian would go through. A lot of it is downright hilarious, but a lot of it is also touching and poignant. But, another thing that people may not know about Paula is that she is deaf.

Edie: Someone submitted a video of mine, and she went a got a friend to come over and used sign language for her to understand the dialogue; and she left a comment saying, “Oh my God, my friend did this, and this is really funny.” Paula is a queen in my book as far as social networkers go.

Greg: & just for people who are curious, we are very aware that Paula is deaf, so we’re going to be including a transcript of this week’s user focus on the main podcast page for her.

Mike: Oh Good, well, let me say: Paula, Hi – it’s very nice to meet you, of course.

Greg: You guys should check out her submissions. I was reading one of her articles over at Lesbiatopia.com and it was just superb. It was one where she was recounting where she first came out – and it’s related to a storm and a tornado that nearly tore up the vehicle she was driving – it’s an amazing story and it was really well written as well.

Edie: & she has a great sense of humor. She put up a video of Lesbian Speed Dating. That was hilarious – that was one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen on the Internet. Lesbian Speed Dating – hilarious!

Joe: My favorite submission was the bad lesbian hair. Basically they made the Mona Lisa look like KD Lang.

Edie: I love her

Greg: That’s great. So Paula we love you, you rock – keep up with submitting all that stuff to Mixx, keep it up; we absolutely love it – seriously

Edie: If I can just interject really quickly, and say how cool the Mixx community is. There’s no gay bashing like there is going on over at Digg. They’re open to everybody and they’re supportive – the community just doesn’t do that gay bashing crap.

Greg: You won’t find any discriminatory bullshit going on over at Mixx. If you do see it happen, it’s best to jump on it straight away. We have an amazing community that will jump on that stuff and doesn’t tolerate that kind of thing.

Show Links:

Social Blend and Mixx News
Listen up! NPR adds Mixx buttons
http://blog.mixx.com/2008/03/03/listen-up-npr-adds-mixx-buttons/

Open API Feedback for Mixx – We need your thoughts and ideas!
http://mixxingbowl.com/forums/index.php/topic,513.0.html

StumbleUpon Alerter by Moojj
http://blog.adamant.com.au/blog/software_stuff/stumbleupon_alerter

The Marine / Puppy Incident
Disturbing video of soldier throwing puppy off cliff
http://www.mixx.com/videos/130991/disturbing-video-of-soldier-throwing-puppy-off-cliff

Juicy Snake: Marine pisses off the Internet
http://juicysnake.blogspot.com/2008/03/marine-pisses-off-internet.html

David Motari on Mahalo
http://www.mahalo.com/David_Motari

Follow up on the “soldier throwing puppy” video
http://federalism.typepad.com/crime_federalism/2008/03/david-motari-ab.html

Marine Corps investigates puppy-throwing video
http://www.mixx.com/stories/133059/marine-corps-investigates-puppy-throwing-video

Sister of Marine: Family has gotten death threat
http://www.startribune.com/world/16252016.html

Stories of the Week
Top 100 retro NES games that you can play on your browser
http://nintendo8.com/toplist/more/

Vocal Track Only – Running With the Devil
http://digg.com/comedy/Vocal_Track_Only_Running_With_The_Devil

Gary Gygax Tribute at Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/03/04

Gary Gygax Tribute at XKCD
http://www.xkcd.com/393/

Who is the real blonde?
http://www.mixx.com/photos/131618/who-is-the-real-blonde-

Rarely Seen Shuttle Pre-Flight Activities
http://www.mixx.com/photos/139550/rarely-seen-shuttle-pre-flight-activities

You say tomato, I say Del.icio.us
http://nowsourcing.com/blog/2008/03/07/how-to-say-delicious/

User Focus
PaulaB
http://www.mixx.com/users/paulab

Comments of the Week
Kafka
http://www.mixx.com/photos/131555/slighty-used-rubber-fist-for-sale-

Honest Ape
http://www.mixx.com/stories/134529/youtube-iron-man-theme-song

The Mixx Lounge
http://www.mixx.com/lounge

Greg’s Mail Sack
Send your hate mail to:
socialblend@gmail.com
Or
cGt2099@sbcglobal.net