Howdy-
You're receiving this e-mail because you contacted me at some point about Project PM. If you'd like to be taken off this list, simply reply telling me so.
Anywho, I've just got a couple of brief notes for everyone this week.
1. Project PM is about to announce its first sub-project, the Science Journalism Improvement Program. This effort entails matching up freelance writers with scientists and those who work in science-related fields in order to promote the publication of accurate and readable science articles for sale to various publications. The announcement will appear in my Skeptical Inquirer column, which itself will appear later this week. If you or someone you know fits into either of those categories, get in touch with me.
2. Thanks to Campbell Vertesi, we now have an IRC channel in which we congregate throughout the week to plan and implement our objectives. Vertesi has also composed a guide for those who aren't familiar with IRC, which I'll just leave here for your potential perusal:
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it is one of the oldest communication methods on the 'net. As such it's an appropriate venue for our talks, and to some extent, an appropriate example of a successful distributed information system (it was IRC networks that reported through media blackouts during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt and the first Gulf war). Basically, it's a network of chatrooms all across the world. You connect using a special IRC client, just like you used to have to have an email client to use email. You connect to a public IRC server (in our case, irc.freenode.net), which hosts thousands of "rooms" and users jumping around between them. Once you're connected to freenode, you join our room, which is called #projectpm (all IRC rooms start with a #).
Here are some specific instructions for those of you who are new to IRC, on either a PC or a Mac:
1) Download and install the Firefox (http://getfirefox.com) web browser if you haven't already.
2) In firefox, navigate to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16/ and install the Chatzilla plugin. Chatzilla gives you IRC within the browser. Firefox will prompt you to restart the browser.
3) Once the browser comes back, navigate to irc://chat.freenode.net . Note the irc:// at the beginning of the URL! This is what tells firefox that you are connecting to an IRC server, instead of a website. A new window will appear. It takes a few seconds to connect, and it will give you a lot of text while it does so. Once it gets to
End of /MOTD command.
Congratulations, you're connected to an IRC server!
4) Now join our chatroom, by typing
/join #projectpm
into the bar at the bottom of this new window, and hitting enter. Note the "/" at the beginning: this is what identifies it as a command for your IRC client instead of just a regular message. Your screen will display:
[INFO]Channel view for #projectpm opened.
And that's it! You're now in chat. Type hello and hit enter. :)
If you're brave, you can try this yourself with some more full featured clients. Really what you need to know is that you want to connect to Freenode (irc.freenode.net or chat.freenode.net), and join the channel #projectpm. For PC: I would recommend Xchat or mIRC. For Mac: I recommend Colloquy, hands down.
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If you haven't heard from me lately and would like to get more involved with Project PM, log on to our IRC channel when you get a moment. Of course, you can also send me an e-mail or give me a ring at any time.
Thanks again for your interest in Project PM.
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302