Dear President-Elect Obama,

Let me be approximately the 60 billionth person to offer you congratulations on your victory in the presidential campaign - and to make a request of you.

Please blog!

As you may have noticed, the blog looks a teensy bit different today.

You can now subscribe just by clicking that Subscribe to the blog! link on the left.

You can also import this RSS feed into Facebook. Here's how:

1. On the Notes page, select the "Import a blog" link on the right side of the page.
2. Enter http://www.youngpeoplefor.org/blog/feed into the text box.
3. Click "Save Settings".

Wondering what the heck an RSS feed is? Demystification:

So I know what the blogosphere is, but I've never really become entirely familiar with the bloggosphere, as they like to call it. I do enjoy writing, though, so I'm going to try to utilize this feature throughout my YP4 fellowship year.

If anyone knows about good progressive womens issues blogs, please holler and let me know.

I've really enjoyed myself this weekend- The energy and passion with this group of fellows is contagious, and I've met some invaluable connections to progressive mentors.

Do not adjust your television set (or computer monitor).

YP4's website is being transferred to a swanky new system at the end of the week. Soon you'll be able to easily post without knowing a lick of HTML, receive notices when someone comments on your blog entries, read bios of contributors, and more.

To make the magic happen, though, we'll have to turn off the blog — I know, it hurts me too — for a few hours starting tomorrow morning.

Thanks for your patience during this transition. See you on the other side!

The weather`s hot already meaning that it`s summer time! You woke up late and your hand's permanently glued to the remote control. It works for a couple of days, but now that's over....and you're bored. What are you going to do between now and that amazing vacation of yours? How do you stay active in the progressive movement when the summer sun is just telling you to go out there and have fun? These are the questions that I have asked myself as well. No worries though, here's a couple of things you can do to stay in the game:

1. Think small. - Do you have an overwhelmingly big vision that you want to get started but don't know how to? Do you want to have results by the end of the year or the start of next but simply don't know where to begin? Think small and start now. Make a few phone calls to organizations or people that you think share your dream. Make a list of groups you can collaborate with so that once the summer is over and everybody else is ready to work, you'll have people that are ready to work with you. A couple of phone calls or letters a day can really make all the difference.

    I just returned (ok, it was Thursday and I finally posted this on the blog now) from Demos, where they held an excellent discussion of social networking and social change. I would have blogged live but I much prefer to check my spelling and grammar on Microsoft Word and balancing a laptop actually on my lap, is well, awkward. So instead, I am semi-live blogging; coming to you slightly after the fact - but with hopefully limited grammatical errors and chock full o' analysis. Call it a compromise. Besides, I didn't have the network key to log on to the Demos network.

    So grab yourself a latté and cancel all prior appointments, because we have a lot to discuss. Read on, after the break.