(1.31) Or, the ProBloPoHo for short. Attention readers and fans, you are invited to the blogosphere holiday party which we all throw in January when there is nothing to do.  Bloggers will be in attendance from Greater City Providence, RIFuture.org, I {heart} Rhody, In Downcity, Get Along and Go, and more.

Everybody come mill about and buy yourselves some drinks.

6pm, Thursday, January 31, The Salon, 57 Eddy Street

Last week, our neighbors to the north got to celebrate Super Tuesday, while we remain booth-free until April 24th. However, we do get a vote of sorts: the Providence Phoenix has extended voting of its “Best of ‘12″ until Friday, March 16th. Go here to pick your favorite foods, bars, shops, arts, and more. The Providence Daily Dose is once again up for Best Blog, but we’re poor campaigners. Last year another Dose writer and I were chatting and realized we’d both been throwing our weight behind Greater City Providence instead of the home team. But as you know, the Dose community gets awful excited when this blog wins awards, or gets mentioned in general, so there’s that.

I spent the weekend in Minneapolis at the annual lefty online activism shindig called Netroots Nation, where I had the pleasure of watching Sheldon Whitehouse announce that the 2012 conference will be held in Providence.  That means around 3,000 politicos, journos, and geeks descending on downtown in the summer of a presidential election year — a prime chance to showcase our hip, diverse, tech-savvy town.

Making it even more exciting — NN almost chose Providence for 2011, but chose to abide by the worker-driven boycott of the Westin, which was docking pay and benefits and canning workers left and right.  Now that the boycott’s up, NN wants to come to town to celebrate the end of the dispute and demonstrate their support for Providence’s hotel workers.

Congrats to all those involved in securing the conference — we swiped it from the clutches of San Jose at the last second, which will have to wait until 2013.

Here’s the announcement:

Well done Greater City: Providence! We here at the Dose have been huge fans all along, and now Providence Phoenix readers have voted it the 2011 ‘Best Local Blog’. It is certainly deserving of the honor. The writing, layout, and photography are always first-rate; and Jef Nickerson et al. are actually providing a public service. In their words,

Greater City: Providence promotes the growth and development of the greater Providence region in as urban a pattern as possible. Special focus is placed on the development of more walkable, affordable, and vibrant neighborhoods that are served by more robust mass transit and fueled by greater economic opportunity. We hope to see the Providence of the future is an urban environment and not a city plagued by inconsistent, uninspired, automobile-centric, and suburban-style development.

So, while we would also like to thank any Dose readers who took the time to vote for us, we are quite content with the outcome. The other nominees were IndieArts, ecoRI News, and RadioProv, all deserving of your attention.  So, pat yourself on the back Jef. We know how much work goes into what you do. It’s a fantastic blog.

[Great Turnout! Let's do it again next year!]

Hey!  We’re teaming up with the Geeks, GCPVD, RIFuture, Not for Nothing, On Politics, and maybe some others, for what we think is the second annual blog holiday(ish) get-together.

It’s at The Salon, the new bar downtown behind City Hall (57 Eddy St.).  More details and wittier posts to follow.

There’s a Geek Night beforehand — Geeks are encouraged to attend both events.

(Old photo of 57 Eddy St re-borrowed from Art In Ruins.)

That’s Weds, January 19th @ 8pm.  Free.

That would be us! Third year in a row! Rhode Island Monthly held its annual ‘Best of 2010′ gala at the Providence Performing Arts Center tonight, and the Providence Daily Dose was named ‘Best Local Blog’! Again! (Our judicious use of exclamation points has not gone unnoticed.) Fox Television carried the special (our award at the 4:34 mark). Big thanks to Rhode Island Monthly!!!!!

Nolan Treadway of Netroots Nation just posted this diary to Kos, as the 2010 convention gets underway in Vegas.  They’re standing with the Westin workers, but would love to come to Providence — and the Westin — after the dispute is resolved:

As I’m sitting in Las Vegas, ready to start the last prep day for Netroots Nation 2010, we must address an open question regarding Netroots Nation 2011….

You may recall a few months ago when Netroots Nation made the unprecedented decision to go public with our venue search in the hopes that we could show the management of the Providence Westin that being good to your workers is not just the moral thing to do, but it also makes good business sense.

We would all love to have this convention in Providence in some future year, AFTER the Procaccianti Group wakes up and negotiates a fair contract with it’s employees.

Sadly, things at the Westin have gone from bad to worse.  In June, the owners of the Providence Westin, The Procaccianti Group, announced that they would be cutting 50 union jobs (of the 200 at the Providence Westin) and that those jobs would be outsourced to a (presumably non-union) subcontractor.  It’s clear that the Procaccianti Group has no interest in bargaining in good faith and, in my personal opinion, it’s end goal is to break the union at the Providence Westin altogether.

There’s been a lot of buzz online and in the mainstream media about Facebook’s increasingly serious invasion of its users’ privacy in support of private profit — even spurring massive Facebook “groups” urging the social networking site to relent.

Local Attorney Peter Wasylyk — for whom I’m working — has just filed what we believe to be the first lawsuit of its kind in the country, over so-called “Instant Personalization,” which shares users’ data, frequently without their knowledge, with third-party websites like Pandora.

More info follows.  (Below’s some of the press release — read the full release and the complaint over here.)

—

Derrick Rose of East Providence, Rhode Island has announced today that he has filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook over privacy concerns relating to Facebook’s “Instant Personalization,” a social network tool that allows third party websites to access users’ personal information when users visit on third party websites.
more »

Thank you readers!!! Once again you have taken the time out of your busy lives to make us Best Blog in the ‘City Life’ category of the Providence Phoenix Best of 2010 Readers’ Picks poll. We are particularly honored knowing how stiff the competition is. As we make abundantly clear day after day, we are shallow and insecure and in constant need of external validation. Thank you!

BEER! WINE! ICE! What could possibly go wrong?

GC:PVD is taking the lead on a random RI blogosphere hang-out sesh, this Friday. Come hang out!

Impromptu blog meet-up at the Skating Center this Friday (3/19) at 5pm. We’ll be there enjoying the Beer/Wine Pavilion — all of our fans are welcome to join!

In our grand tradition of only bringing you news at the last possible second, we’d like to draw your attention to the second annual New England Art Awards, voting for which ends tomorrow (Sunday).  Lots and lots and Providence artists and galleries got nominated for the awards, which are organized by Phoenix art critic Greg Cook, and this year’s ballot is a lot less unwieldy than last year’s, so you may want to check it out.

While, more than anything, the ballot just made me gloomy about all the shows I wanted to see but didn’t (ie. the ACT UP retrospective at Harvard), a couple of ones I actually saw made the cut.  Michael Bizon’s instillation at 5 Traverse was great, as was Joe Deal’s landscape photography at the RISD Museum.  Shepard Fairey also got two indirect nominations, sort of:  one for the Boston Police Department’s showy arrest, and another for the anonymous artist that spraypainted dollar signs at the AS220 Mercantile Block.  (On a more community-minded note, Lydia Stein’s giant mural on a Smith Hill home was nominated in that same category.)  And Maya Allison from 5 Traverse got a well-deserved nomination in the “local curator of local art” category.

Winners will be announced on February 8 at the New England Art Awards Ball, which will take place at an Irish bar in Somerville.  Er…

[image via One Photo Every Day]

And we were finally able to put faces to some of the names. . . with mixed results. Of course there were some stragglers from the earlier party (lawyers!) so who knows. Big thanks to Chris at ‘The 201′ for helping with the pizza and letting us decorate his walls with all the ecumenical interfaith cheesiness we could afford. Thanks to Eric for lining up the venue, thanks to Matthew for the great music, and thanks to me for picking up the pizza. Oh, and thanks to Dave for ordering the pizza. It was a great crowd of fellow bloggers, commenters, advertisers, riffraff and hangers-on, and we thank you for making it not suck at all.

Of course this note was delayed by the fact that our site was disabled for a considerable time today (as if the blog itself had a hangover — it lives). Turned out our host had us down for routine maintenance, something about an oil change. (And thanks to Tim for fielding my panicky phone call this morning, plus he did some fine balloon work last night.)

UPDATE, 12/6: We’re going to be taking monetary donations for the RI Community Food Bank, and have arranged for a very special visit from Saint Nick. And Kmareka and Not For Nothing are joining the fun!

ORIGINAL: More details, or at least a spiffier promo, forthcoming, but…

Party with a bunch of curmudgeons! Celebrate the birth of thy Saviour with all of us gay Jews!!

As RIFuture, Greater City: Providence, the Daily Dose, and perhaps others, will be co-hosting a Blogosphere Holiday Spectacular at the 201 (201 Westminster St.) on Weds, December 16th, starting at 8pm.

Dose writer Matthew Lawrence will be DJing along with Eric Smith and Kevin Leavitt. The Daily Dose will spring for the vegan butter cookies. (Head on over after Drinking Liberally.)

RIFuture launched a redesign a couple of days ago. (Version 3.0) If asked for constructive criticism, I’d say that it’s quite smart to have made the format increasingly newspaper-like, but that it’s a bit busy and has made it difficult to decipher a sense of the chronology of the posts.

GC:PVD has some typically top-notch posts up, including footage of the Halloween pumpkin catapult at the Armory and some great old-timey photos of Providence, recently uploaded by the Providence Public Library.

No surprise to Rhode Islanders, but notable that the 2010 Rhode Island Governor’s race is already getting some national punditry, from both sides of the political aisle:

…there is one independent candidate both parties point to as not just a spoiler, but as a potential winner: Lincoln Chafee, the former Republican senator seeking the governor’s office in Rhode Island. “In the world of who is real and serious and credible, it’s Chafee,” Nick Ayers, executive director of the Republican Governors Association, said Wednesday at an event previewing 2010 races sponsored by The Hotline. “In general, [independent candidates] are low-impact. In Rhode Island, that’s a very high impact.”

Added Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, Chafee is “who we see as the general election competition.”

Still too early to call, but 2010 promises to be a particularly interesting election cycle.