On April Fool’s Day 2010, I posted a fake story about Republicans using Farmville to reach out to young voters. It turns out, 17 months later, that story has become true.

Imagine my surprise when I started seeing my Photoshopped RNC FarmVille screenshot on Games.com, GamaSutra, and GamePolitics.

Unfortunately my other April Fool’s Day posts have not been realized, like the album and video games.

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I get asked a lot about where I find the links I clip to every day. Inspired by The Atlantic’s What I Read feature, I decided to post my own.

The main source for my clips is Google Reader, where I subscribe to around 500 active feeds. The feeds are triaged into folders based on the likelihood that they will contain something clipworthy and by topic. I use the ‘J’ and ‘K’ keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through the posts until I see a relevant headline.

Some of my must read sources are Future Majority, obviously, Campus Progress, CIRCLE, Drum Major Institute, e.politics, Higher Ed Watch, Inside Higher Ed, Millennial Makeover, Navarrow Wright, New Policy Institute, New Geography, Peter Levine, Pew Research, Rock the Vote, National Journal’s Tech Daily Dose, TechPresident, The Bivings Report, and ThinkProgress. The spreadsheet of all of my feeds is published as a Google Doc if you want to check them all out.

On my second laptop I have a number of news sites bookmarked so I can scan the homepages.

I have two folders for news proper, including at least one newspaper from every state and major city and the national outlets. I have a folder for international news sources like Al Jazeera English, Le Monde Diplomatique, and EuroNews. Other folders are for youth organizations, think tanks, official government sources, entertainment news sites, polling firms, literary journals, and tech sites. I also have aggregation sites like Google Fast Flip, Newsmap, popurls, and Alltop.

I am also on a number of email lists, including Politico’s Playbook and Morning Money, Council on Foreign Relations Daily Brief, The Hill’s E-news, Washington Post Morning Fix, McClatchy Washington Bureau Newsletter, CNN Political Ticker, Gallup News, Rasmussen Reports, Morning Joe’s Morning Minutes, Nonprofit Quarterly Newswire, ECA Today, Foreign Policy Daily Brief, Netted, the NY Times and Washington Post lists, and the press lists for a number of federal agencies. I also use Summify and Trove to round up stuff that has been shared on social media.

That, combined with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, is where the articles from my clips lists come from.

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Here are the top posts from the fourth year of KevinBondelli.com. The posts from March and April dominated the list.

November 11: Student Skills for the 21st Century

September 30: Peer-to-Peer Organizing Guide

April 25: Photos and Video from April 25 SB1070 Protest

April 23: Photos and Video of #SB1070 Protest Yesterday

April 08: Millennials, Work Ethic, and Life Ethic

April 07: Bank of Mom and Dad? Try Bank of Students

April 01: RNC Using FarmVille to Reach Out to Young Voters

March 12: The Social Psychology of Facebook Events

March 11: GOP Youth Fear Ad

March 05: An Example of a Bad Job Posting

March 03: Get More from Your Email Data

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Just a quick call to action, but over at Future Majority we have our 2011 Reader Survey up. Please take a moment to head on over and let us know what you want us to cover in the next year.

2011 Future Majority Reader Survey

Also please retweet my tweet asking for submissions to your own followers. It will help a lot.

Thanks everyone. Looking forward to a new year talking about young voters and youth civic engagement.

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I will be back in Los Angeles until Saturday night for the American Idol finale and a little vacation, and for once I am not bringing the laptop with me. There will be a link post tomorrow, but there won’t be any posts after until I return to Phoenix.

Until then, keep checking out Future Majority. See you next week.

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As you may have noticed, there have not been many original posts over the last two weeks. This is because I have been focused on putting together Future Majority’s Guide to Winning With Young Voters with fellow FM editor Sarah Burris, which is a time-intensive task. The guide will be released in the near future for your youth-organizing enjoyment and then I will be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I’ll still be compiling the links posts, so keep coming back to see what articles are hitting the internet tubes about young voters and technology.

Thanks for reading the site. Here are a couple videos to brighten your day. (Warning: they include the occasional naughty word)

Merton’s Piano Chat Improv

Ben Folds Tribute to Merton at NC Concert

And remember to thank your Democratic member of Congress if they voted for reform yesterday.

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I set up my laptop’s webcam to randomly take a picture while I was working on stuff. Which reminds me: I should probably get a haircut.

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I’m happy to announce the launch of the new KevinBondelli.com forums, which I hope will be a place that visitors can discuss the youth vote, online organizing, share best practices, and more.

You can reach the forums at KevinBondelli.com/forums and through the button at the top right of the sidebar.

The forums were created with Vanilla, an open-source forum framework.

I hope you will find the forums useful as well as provide your feedback on potential categories and other improvements.

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Apparently I have reached “Did you mean?” status on Google. Unfortunately to discover this I had to do something embarrassing like make a typo in my own name during a vanity search.

It’s the small things in life…

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Yesterday I reached the 1,000 post mark here on KevinBondelli.com and I want to thank everyone that has been reading and sharing over the last couple years.

It’s also that time where I ask you all to make a contribution to the blog to help cover hosting, domain, and other associated costs. You can donate to the blog via PayPal through the button below.

Thanks again and hope to see you around for the next 1,000 posts.

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