Follow Friday 001

Follow Friday has become a tradition for many Twitter users, who take time each Friday to point their followers to at least five other Twitter feeds worth following. Now John Hawkins of Right Wing News is launching the same idea into the blogosphere. Here are my five for this week:

Right Wing News: Frequently updated commentary and links by team of insightful conservative bloggers, led by John Hawkins. (Hey, this was John's idea, why shouldn't he get some links from it?)

news from me: Mark Evanier has spent a long and varied career as a writer in Hollywood for comedy shows and cartoons. Each day he shares anecdotes and clips from classic TV and movies. Here's a clip of the Cone of Silence scene from the pilot episode of Get Smart.

Ida Red: The owners of Cain's Ballroom launched this "rock and roll boutique" in Tulsa's Brookside District last year, specializing in the works of local musicians and local artisans, classic sodas and classic candy. Their blog will tell you about special events and special items on offer, but more importantly they have video from their weekly Thursday night artist sessions. Here's Rockin' Acoustic Circus from April 9 performing "Bethany," "The Tracker," and "A Filly and a Pack of Mules." Here's a bonus video of "The Little Man."

Fear an Iarthair: "Man of the West" offers intelligent commentary on culture and politics. He often shares excerpts from what he's reading; today he offers an excerpt from Russell Kirk's six canons of conservative thought from The Conservative Mind.

New Geography: A website about the economy, demographics, and politics of places. Today the site features the movement toward greater public participation in local land-use decisions:

We have found that the best engagement efforts invite the most diverse and representative group of residents possible, give them information from a variety of perspectives, and facilitate discussions in such a way that forces participants to wrestle with the issues in the same way planners, city managers, and city councils must.

At their worst, such "participatory planning" campaigns are pre-ordained and, therefore, manipulative. Organizers can hold this control whether they're inside government, or, like environmental groups and developers, outside of it. Explicit stakeholders, from developers to environmentalists to city officials, are most effectively engaged in the early stages, serving as an "advisory group", helping to formulate the information packets and option sets that will be presented to the general public.