Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

A Little Pecha-Kucha for my NTC ROI of Social Media Panel

For the NTC ROI of Social Media Panel, the awesome panelists will do a case study slam.  I had read about the "Ask Later" format used at Ignite Seattle, but on the plane back from my travels last week I got a chance to read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and discovered that the format is called Pecha-Kucha.

I wanted to put together some quick links for the panelist (who I hope don't kill me) of some examples and tips.   Here's an excellent example of a Pecha-Kucha on signage by Daniel Pink, a writer at Wired.  Here's what Garr Reynolds had to say about his presentation.

The case study presenters will include representatives from nonprofits using social networks or other web2.0 tools -- Eve Smith, Danielle Brigida, Carie Lewis, and Wendy Harmon.  Each case study will focus on a different aspects.

Have you ever presented Pecha-Kucha style?  Have any advice?
 

Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN!

Photo from my flickr stream
View the Tagging Screencast
Presented by NTEN

I'm pleased to announce that my screencast about tagging has been released and showcased by NTEN!  I created this screencast back in September/October of last year, so this release has provided a great opportunity to meta reflect on the whole screencast creation process as well as consider how my views about the use of tagging have evolved.

I've thought long and hard about how video editing amplifies my compulsive nature and how I need to  reduce my ratio of video minutes viewed per hours of editing time!  I hope to share some simple and fun ways to create "shoulder-to-shoulder" instructional media for the panel on Screencasting at NTC I'm doing.

While I'm still very much passionate about screencasting, I've come to dislike the term.  I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social.  Maybe it is more like moment capture.  How do you create good instructional media in a reasonable amount of time and do a good enough job that helps people learn something by viewing it?      

That's enough meta for now.

If you're still with me, let me share some tidbits about that photo.   I created it for the screencast to illustrate the definition of tagging.  What is really interesting to me is that the photo - which I composed and uploaded into flickr is my most commented, favorited, and viewed photo!  (It was even favorited by this guy I don't know named Joshua)  I've also had many requests from folks to use in their tagging presentations.  Again, shows me the power of open content and open source thinking.

Here's the script from the screencast written back in October.  Some of my thinking has definitely evolved ....

Introduction

These program notes will help you implement some of the ideas presented in the screencast. If you have questions about tagging or want to share your organization’s experience (good and bad) with social bookmarking,  the NTEN Affinity Group, NpTagvocates, is a great place for discussion with your peers on these topics.

Act 1:  The Problem

Many nonprofits professionals have to manage a lot of information on the web and share it with their co-workers or clients. In many smaller organizations, where there are not enough resources for a high-end knowledge management system, people end up using their browser favorites or forward links to one another via email. Unfortunately, these methods make sharing and managing information resources difficult. 

Here’s why:

(1)  The folder structure of your favorites list is not always flexible enough to allow for easy cross referencing
(2)  Bookmarks can’t be accessed from different locations or computers
(3)  Links can get lost in email
(4)  Knowledge management is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.

Act 2:   Definitions

Tagging and social bookmarking can be useful techniques for smaller nonprofits to easily share their information resources. But first, some definitions.
 
Tags

Users add tags to describe online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks or text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. For a more detailed definition of tags, see the Wikipedia entry here.

Here are the examples I showed you in the screencast, using the tag “sharpie.”

Photos
Web Pages
Event
Videos
People

For an excellent primer on tagging, see Andy Carvin’s PBS LearningNow essay.
 
Social Bookmarking
 
Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and describing them with tags. You simply register with a social bookmarking site, typically a free service, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate your individual bookmarks as public or private. You can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that users have created and saved.
 
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking published by Educause is an excellent introduction to social bookmarking for non-technical folks.

There are many social bookmarking services available on the web. The ones most often mentioned by members of the nonprofit technology community include this short list:

Del.icio.us

Ma.gnolia

Furl

Diigo

If you want a detailed comparison of these and other social bookmarking services, you can read one at Consultant Commons.  If you want to find out who else uses what social bookmarking service in the nonprofit tech sector, check out Social Source Commons.

As mentioned in the screencast, Del.icio.us, which was purchased by Yahoo, is a good place to start. It has a critical mass of users, is fairly easy to use, and it is free. You’ll want to read the Del.icio.us Getting Started Guide as a first step and review other help documents as needed.

Act 3:  The Benefits

  Findability
  People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things.
  It is more straightforward than choosing a folder.
  The information is one place
 
  Social Aspect

The social aspect is a very important benefit. If you are skeptical, think about having 24/7 access to your co-workers, bosses or a subject matter expert’s bookmarks. Wouldn’t that be useful?

With many people tagging, the social aspect exposes us to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making the resource even more findable. You can read more about how tagging makes knowledge management a more social experience in this paper by Rahmi Sinha, researcher. I like the article and diagram so much, I included it in the screencast.

Marnie Webb’s bookmarks are here. She has also written quite a bit about tagging over at her blog.
 
Easily Share What You Know With Others

Tagging and social bookmarking make it easy to share what you know with others or a community by simply exposing your delicious url. As a trainer, I let people know my del.icio.us url when they ask for additional resources. For example, I’ve tagged lots of nonprofit tagging examples with “nptag” and you can find them here: http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag

Many organizations use social bookmarking services to share resources more informally with clients than through a web site. A few nonprofits are using socialbookmarking to track resources or follow particular topics for trend analysis for strategic planning. 

Sometimes you may not want to expose all of your bookmarks. Most services offer a “tag as private” feature. (Look in the “settings” to enable this feature in del.icio.us)

As I mentioned in the screencast, you can use RSS and javascript to publish your del.icio.us links on your blog. The Craft Emergency resource list that I showed you in the screencast is done just that way. There is a write-up of the project here.

This article will give you a more detailed description of the benefits:Tagging Gives Web Human Meaning
 
Act 4: Getting Started

I presented a very easy template for using tags and social bookmarking services to share internal information with a team, committee, or a few staff members. There are different ways you can design this project, but this is a very simple approach that you can build on later.
 
Step 1: Discuss Tagging Policy

Tagging can get sloppy – spelling errors, verbs v.s. nouns, etc. You probably noticed that about my tag stream. This can make trouble down the road if you want to publish your resources to a web site using an RSS. So, come up with a few standard tags. But don’t get bogged down – you’re not creating a formal taxonomy, rather it’s a folksonomy. Also, people can add whatever additional tags they want so they can remember the item as well as a description.

If you want to understand more about tag strengths and weaknesses, I recommend the following articles:   

  Tags Strengths, Weaknesses And How To Make Them Work by Robin Good

  Tips for Effective Tagging from TechSoup

  Tips for Tidying Tags by Alexandra Samuel

 
Step 2: Set up an organizational account and get everyone set up

If you are using tagging to manage internal information sharing, it is probably best to set up one account and let everyone have the userid/password. Set up everyone with a bookmarklet tool and show them how to use it.

You can find the FireFox bookmarklet here and the Explorer bookmarklet here.
 
Step 3: Teach people how to start bookmarking!

It is very easy to get started bookmarking as I showed you in the screencast. The most difficult part will be to switch from your habit of using the browser favorites list to the bookmarklet tool. 

 

Step 4: Share the bookmarks

The simplest way to share your bookmarks is to publish or share your del.icio.us url which your username. For example, my username is kanter and my url is:
http://del.icio.us/kanter

You can also share a particular tag such as “tagging” as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

And, you can share any combination of tags as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging+nonprofit

If you want to share a resource with a single individual outside your organization and who also uses del.icio.us, you can use the “for:username” tag to direct the resource into that user’s in-box.)
 

Publishing an RSS Feed of Your Bookmarks onto Your Web Site

If you want to publish on your blog or web site, it is a two step process. First you have navigate to the RSS feed scrolling down the to bottom of the page and clicking on the orange RSS icon. For my account, my RSS feed is located at:
 
http://del.icio.us/rss/kanter

You can also navigate to a particular tag, and then find the RSS feed if you want to just publish resources that have been tagged with a particular tag. For example, if I wanted to publish the resources that I’ve tagged with tagging. The URL would look like this:

http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

Then you need to sign up a for an account with feedburner. Next cut and paste the URL into the Feedburner tool and follow the instructions. When you get to the options for refining your feed, select “Publicize and Monetize” and then “buzz boost” and follow the instructions. At the end, feedburner spits out some javascript code that you cut and paste into your web page or blog.

For additional project designs and ideas, see the following case studies:

  Craft Emergency Resources

  Nonprofits and Tagging: Two Case Studies

  Dutch Nonprofits Collaborate With Del.icio.us

  Sharing Interesting Web Sites: Development Nonprofits

  Tagging in Art Museums

  Tagging Nonprofit Missions

  Examining Tagging in the Nonprofit World

  If you want to see more, you can find them in my del.icio.us account:
  http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag+casestudy
 

 

: The Tips

 

  It’s much better to watch these than for me to write about them, but for a quick reminder, here are they:

  1. Edit and clean up your bookmarks
  2. Review your collection by navigating by tag
  3. Browse the bookmarks of colleagues and subject matter experts
  4. If you don’t know their account URL, ask them
  5. Browse by tag and other users when beginning to research a topic
  6. Use in combination with search
  7. Browse the NpTech tag

  Here are some more advanced tips and tricks:
  Seven Habits of Wildly Successful Del.icio.us Users

  Consultant Commons: Blogging and Tagging How-Tos

  Absolutely Del.icio.us Tool Collection

  Complete List of Tools for Del.icio.us

Photo Credits:

Act 1:

Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyfoo/103060741/
Dogs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42857758@N00/74905059/in/set-684524
Solitary Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/

Act 2:
DefinitionsComputer café users: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maebmij/123180774/

Act 3: Benefits

Chocolate Lab: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbgb/42499133/
Dogs Sniffing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethan_wuds/
Poco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessiesan/51310260/

 

Act 4: Getting Started

Meeting: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/85332783/

Katya's Five Minute Guide to Social Networking

The above powerpoint is from 1999 and excerpted from day-long workshops I used to lead when I worked at NYFA and design and ran a program called "KIT: Knowledge in Technology - Technology Planning for Arts Organizations."   

Before we jumped into the technology tools, I always covered technostress.  It is really about how  individuals within the organization could be more comfortable with adopting technology tools.   It got at the human barriers around technology adoption in the early days:  stress, fear, anxiety, frustration.  What happens when you don't have the time to experiment or play so you feel comfortable?   

Since the participants were from arts organizations, we made them draw pictures of what techno stress look like.  I would scan the pictures and embed into my presentations to do the debriefing - and overtime would have user-generated content in the curriculum!   One of my favorite drawings was the metaphor of being in a foreign country and not being able to speak the language.

I went searching my harddrive for that visual after reading Katya Andresen's Five Minute Social Network Guide where she used the analogy of travel in a foreign country to explore social networking tools.

"to most of us (including me), social networking—using the web’s latest and greatest ways of connecting to people—feels akin to being a stranger in a strange land.  People have their own customs online, they act differently, and it can be hard to find your way around.  It seems so foreign and intimidating.  At least it did to me, until I figured out I should simply apply the same skills of assimilation I’d apply anywhere else outside my experience."

She goes on to introduce her travel analogy and link it to exploring social networking tools.

I've been reading Henry Jenkin's book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide" - I ordered after I heard him speak at the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning briefing (Nancy Schwartz recently wrote about it here) and read his white paper on participatory culture.   He defines participatory culture as a culture:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they
care what other people think about what they have created)

Our conversations here in the blogosphere are participatory, although it would be nice to have multimedia conversations.   After listening to both Katya's and Michael's comments about fundraising widgets, it made me realize that they enable a participatory culture ...

Somehow that's connected to what Nancy is talking about in Second Wave Adoption and what Michelle from the Bamboo Project refers to do in her recent post about technology adoption and nonprofits.

My YouTube Interview with Steve Cliff: Part 1 - Six Tips for Community Tagging Projects

I did a post about the Steve Cliff and the Voterss Project and it reminded be that for over a year I've been attempting to do multimedia conversation and I have only been able to talk to myself!

So, I posted the video below as a response to Steve's introductory video, asking him for some tips for success in a community tagging project:

Here's the response I got:

 

Here's a transcript of the answers:

Hey there Beth. I was excited to get your video question.  Almost as excited as I was when I got the call from YouTube founders about a $1million grant!

Interrupted by a call from his wife.  Steve’s buying an Ipod Shuffle!

Actually, we didn’t get a million dollar grant.  We’re out there in the wilderness doing our grassroots thing, using tools like Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, etc.

I have six tips on how to start a community tagging project:

1 Pick a compelling theme

Don’t make it so narrow and obscure that only one or two people are interested in the topic. 

2. Connect with natural behavior

There are people who are already bookmarking particular resources.  Seek out those people first.   Don’t make tagging extra work or add on.  Find the people who are already tagging information in your topic area and work with them.

3. Pick your tags carefully

We had a problem with mno06 as tag, because it brought up all the YouTube users with mn in their name.   If you use a tag that has a date in it, like mno06 – it becomes dead.  We became more generic and used mnpolitics.

4. Display the results

Make sure people can see the results of what they are doing.   Our aggregation page allows people to see what we’ve collected.

5.Go beyond your known community

You are going to go to those already tagging or doing videos in your content as a first step..  Use the contact and social networking tools built into the tools to find them and connect with them.  Ask them to add your tag to the items they are already connecting.  That’s how we seeded our project.  For example, we found someone who was tagging photos of election themes.

There are people now beginning to contact us and are interested.  There are people creating new flickr accounts to join our efforts and we're teaching them how to tag.   Then shift to the new people who aren’t tagging or creating video.

6.  Tools, particularly video, need to be become easier

The biggest challenge is that I have to record in video and then upload.  YouTube needs a flashbased video recorder built into the interface.  It has to be one click and easy to do it.  Also, with flickr, people need to realize that they you need more than 5 photos to be live.  Also, YouTube has a delay.

I posted a video with a follow up question and Steve says he will answer it next week.  So, stay tuned!

It's Harvest Time for Networking and Tomatoes

It's harvest time and we're enjoying a huge crop of heritage tomatoes from the garden, more than enough to share with the groundhogs.  Pictured above are the fruits of my conference networking over the past few months.  It's a huge pile of business cards. 

I did follow up in a triage sort of way, but not comprehensively with everyone I met or exchanged cards with.  I'm going to Podcamp in two weeks where I hope to do some networking.  Am I going to just let t collect more cards for my desk to create nice arrangements, and take photos of them?  Can I improve my networking technique?

Chris Brogan, co-founder of Podcamp, has offered up some post conference networking hacks, so I think I can do better.  I liked this little trick:

I play “shuffle up and email” often. I take my cards from past events, and then send someone a random email (hopefully with value to what they’re doing, and mindful of what I’d want to do with them). The email is a “ping,” a chance to show them that I’m still out there, and that we might still have business. Further, it might just be the thing that gets someone thinking of me for another opportunity.   

Chris also suggests making links between you met.  Perhaps online tools like You Should Meet might also help with efficiency ...

Chris's reflective questions at the end of the piece "When you finish a grueling 3 day event in a foreign city, what do you do after reconnecting with your family? How does it relate to what you do for work?"  Great questions to think about it.

As I looked at those cards today, I was reminded of a post by Marnie Webb called "Networking Your Networked Network" where she points to a ChangeThis Manifesto called "Care and Feeding of Your Network" written by Bob Allard, an entrepreneur developing software tools for connectors and businesspeople (www.youshouldmeet.com / www.referralmonitor.com)  He offers five steps to greatness in Networking:

1. Know what he/she is working on.
2. Think creatively about how to help
3. Make a meaningful introduction
4. Follow up
5. Keep your network informed about what you are working on.

Flickr Has Integrated Geotagging!

Flickr has added a new feature to its organizer - the ability to add geotags to your photos.  And best of all it is done visually.   There is now a map tab where you can navigate to a location and then automatically add the geotags to that location to a flickr photo or batch of photos.   The feature also includes privacy controls so you can make the geotag private independently of the friends/family privacy codes.

But it gets better:  flickr is now using screencasts!

Here's the how-to information in the FAQ
Here's the screencast: Geotags

Next thing I did was geotag some of the photos from our vacation.  So for example, if you were looking at my photo set of Lucy of the Elephant and clicked on the map you will see where the photo was taken!

You can also use the geotags and the map in flickr to explore photos. Here's a screencast that explains how. This has some wonderful potential for educational projects, think 4th grade geography.

Nonprofit Book Shelf: Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andresen

I met Katya Andresen, a social marketing expert and well respected nonprofit leader at the Netsquared Conference.  She offered me a review copy of her recently published book Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes. It arrived at my home office before I even got off the red eye!   

So, what's this book about?  As Katya herself explains in a May interview with fellow Blogher Nonprofit Contributing Editor Britt Bravo

"It lays out ten sound principles (I call them "Robin Hood Rules") behind some of the most successful marketing campaigns in history, and shows how anyone can use them to advance their cause by leaps and bounds. I wrote the book to demystify marketing so everyone from a PTA mom to a nonprofit executive could use marketing to accomplish more good in the world."

This book is definitely a must-have on the nonprofit professional's bookshelf.  It's not just for the marketing director, but it is also a essential reading for those who run small nonprofits and have to do or oversee "everything" or board members.    

When I met Katya, we discovered that we both had a personal connection to Cambodia. She worked as a journalist there in the 1990s.   In fact, it was a Cambodian experience that gave her one of the "ah ha" moments that helped crystalize some insights that lead to the book --  an encounter with a giant, smiling condom!   

A journalist, she was covering a World AIDS Day event in Phnom Penh.  She saw how the giant condom-shaped balloon emblazoned with the words "Number One" was attracting attention and scores of people were grabbing up free samples of condoms.  This was a time when people were not abstaining from risky sexual behavior or lining up to use condoms.   

As she writes in the introduction of her book, "For once, I heard no doom-filled message of fear or shame.  In its place was an appealing sense of pride and fun."  As it turned out the giant condom was part of a business-minded marketing approach by a nonprofit organization, Population Services International (PSI).    She also observed first-hand the entire marketing machinery in action as she accompanied PSI staff selling highly discounted, but high quality condoms to brothels, a segment identified as critical to halting the spread of AIDS.

She points out that PSI condoms are now available in virtually every brothel in Cambodia, helped by a law that has since mandated condom use in sex establishments.  She also notes that PSI also sells abstinence and fidelity with the same results approach.  PSI has done everything from creating soap operas to campaigning with religious leaders and celebrities to convince people to change their behavior. (For more about Soap Operas and Social Change - see Nedra Weinreich's article here.)

 
This story, like the many many examples in her book illustrate the power of the combination of good intentions and customer-centered marketing.  She offers ten principles on how to do just that.

Each principle is illustrated with a range of examples implemented by large corporations to shoestring nonprofit organizations, and the entire book is organized around a familiar narrative story (Robin Hood).   I appreciated how the book is designed for quick scanning as well as slower deeper reading.  For busy  professionals (like me) who may not the luxury of free time, each principle/chapter gives you a summary  in the beginning as well as a content diagram, followed by  the detailed text. 

The heart of Robin Hood Marketing is to focus on our audiences and not just our mission and our organization and to get people to do something specific.   The point she makes is that we need to think of our audience as customers rather than converts to our cause - we don't need to strive to for a shared worldview, but rather get people to take action.

Having just finished immersing myself in Andy Goodman's  book "Why Bad Presentations Happen To Good Causes" and attempting to put into practice everything I learned from his recent N-TEN Webinar training, I was particularly keen to read chapters related to honing and delivering your message.    Katya gives us an acronym - CRAM -  Messages should establish a Connection, promise a Reward, inspire Action, and stick in Memory.    Read how the NpMarketing Blog is applying this concept to marketing the LLS for its Team in Training program.

The books also talks a lot about  the techniques for 2-way communication and building relationships,  "At the end of the day the personal connection, not the grand concept, grabs our attention."     Diva Marketing Blog asks, "Why aren't more nonprofits blogging?" Perhaps this books provides some good reasons why an organization would set up a blog.

I see a strong connection between Robin Hood Marketing and what Tara Hunt defines as "PinkoMarketing."   (See video presentation from netsquared conference here.)

The book is available at Amazon where there is a product plog Katya is updating regularly.

Photos from Jossey-Bass

Deep Web 2.0

Under Pressure
Originally uploaded by [ CK ].

I'm busy researching TCO for how-to guide and I keep bumping into very interesting, but non-related articles and resources.  So, gotta take a minute or two to capture the concept of the Deep Web, particularly as someone who is on the hunt for good resources - and not just North Americancentric ones.

I also want to ponder the concept of the deep web and whether or not Web 2.0 is deep - or just shallow, disjointed, and random.  It gets back to the Trees versus Leaves.  And, also reflecting on my recent foray into helping my son with his "planet" homework doing Internet research.

I found this article on the Deep Web at my once all-time favorite web site, From Now On by educational technologist Jamie McKenzie, whose work I've been reading for the past dozen years or so.  Here's the intro on why the Deep Internet is important:

Despite the ease of locating information on the Internet, the value of that information is often suspect. Much of what we find with search engines may be unreliable, untruthful or irrelevant. Schools must teach young ones how and where to cast their nets in order to realize a rich information catch. If we aim for research that probes beyond the obvious, avoids superficialities and reaches for deeper insights, we must coach students on the fine art of locating good sources.

(Remember now that blog entries seem to appear at the top of Google ...)

The Deep Internet refers to, according to McKenzie, "partially hidden sites that offer rich digital collections. They are virtually hidden from the general crowd of Internet users because their contents are not subject to search and indexing by the major search engines. They block the "spider" programs sent out by these search engines to find and catalogue the contents of sites around the globe. They are databases that must be searched by query at their own site."  He goes on to recommend Noodle Tools to help navigate deep Web internet resources.

Noodle Tools also has a "search strategy" tool that helps you figure out how and where to search for information.  It's designed for young kids doing homework.

Flickr How-Tos

With the arrest of a leading advocate for freedom of expression in Cambodia the last night, there were scant few photos available in flickr.  It made me wonder about training materials available for using flickr and the extensions available. 

Here's a few:

Nonprofits & Flickr
Moveon and flickr
Relay for Life (American Cancer Society) - Flickr Group
Planned Parenthood's Target Photos SaveRoe.Com (ok, it isn't flickr, but gives you some ideas about some interesting ways to use photos for netadvocacy)
Net2 - I Want Change

Flickr 101: Techniques
Basic Guidelines for Tagging on flickr
Flickr for Beginners: Tips from LifeHacker

Flickr Official Documents
How to get the most out of flickr
FAQ

Flickr Tools
The Great Flickr Tool Collection

Backgrounders
Interview with Flickr Founder

Technorati Tags: ngo, flickr, net2, nptech

Newsgator Note

One of my personal resolutions for 2006 is to be less sloppy with tagging and organize my rss feeds. 

I use newsgator for my Cambodian feeds and wanted to consolidate and organize in bloglines.  So, had to figure out if there was a way to export them from newsgator and import into bloglines.   You have to save the "OPML" file from program onto your hardrive and then upload/import it into the other.   However, I had a heck of time finding how to do that in newsgator because the interface isn't intutitive or I'm stupid.

Luckily they have fairly quick email tech support.  Here's the instructions for later.

To export your NewsGator Online OPML:

1) Sign in to NewsGator Web Edition.
2) Click the "NewsGtor Manager" tab.
3) Click "Edit Locations".
4) Under "NewsGator Web Edition" click "OPML"
5) On this page you will see your OPML URL.  Right-click on it and choose "Save Target As" to save the file to your computer.  Make sure you save the file with a .opml file extension.

If you're OPML is marked as "Private" which is the default, you may be prompted to enter your NewsGator Online user name and password.

One thing I hate about these two RSS readers is that you can easily organize on the fly which means I need better discipline.

And, in the event I want to export bloglines opml files someplace else.

Ten Bloglines Hacks

I really should be finishing up moving over my files, configurations, and last couple of software programs, but I started woolgathering instead.  I found an article called "Ten Bloglines Hacks."  There's a great hack to add "tag in delicious" instead of a clipping file and a pointer to a windows blogging client called elicit that I must compare with ecto.   However, I can't see why anyone would want to read their feeds in Tivo!

Another article re: how to integrate bloglines with delicious.

Technorati Tags: bloglines, nptech, net2

Teaching Nonprofits How To Bring Relevant Information To Their Desktop

I participated in Nancy White's online facilitation workshop last fall where one of the participants was the thoughtful Nick Noakes who is the Associate Director for the Center for Enhanced Learning and Teaching at a university in Hong Kong.

In reading Marshall's excellent reflection about teaching RSS techniques, I came across a comment from Nick pointing to some curriculum he is developing and teaching to faculty on using RSS for their research work.  The goal he writes is:  "to  help them become familiar, and hopefully, proficient with this as users first."  He talks about the difficulty in removing the "geekiness."

I think he succeeded.  So here's his "Bringing relevant information to your electronic desktop."  Here's the PDF of the slides.

Technorati Tags: RSS, instruction, teaching, learning, adoption, training, effectiveness, nptech, net2

Tag This Post in del.icio.us for Dummies!

Success!  Here are the step-by-step instructions.

Some Advice for Phil Anthropoid

Meet Phil Anthropod from Planet Claire.  He writes a blog called "Hail Sons and Daughters from Carnegie"

I currently work at a medium-sized, east coast foundation. The views expressed in this blog are mine and not necessarily—or even likely—those of my employer. I prefer to write anonymously so I can spare my employer possible embarrassment. Writing anonymously also frees me from the immoderate politeness that often stifles debate in our sector.

A typepad blog isn't necessarily anonymous. (I learned this from having just helped some Cambodian bloggers who want to write their criticisms of the government without an AK47 in their face and researched options for anonymous blogging.)   Read Ethan Zuckerman's Guide to Anonymous Blogging or this chapter from the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents from Reporters Without Borders.

Playground for NPOS to Rip Mix Learn Adopt

Nancy White has a great post about "Blog as Classroom, Playground, Mind Trip"  I went directly to the playground, a place to experiment and learn how to incorporate web 2.0 technologies into teaching practice. that was part of a workshop on Rip Mix Learn, a variation on Rip Mix Feed.

So, where will is a nonprofit playground for npos to learn how to adopt (strategically) Web 2.0 into their organization's missions?  Here?

Technorati Tags: nptech, net2, inventiveness

Blog Metrics Analysis for Global s

Ethan Zuckerman  has been analyzing Global s stats since the site's redesign last month.    The tool used to count total links is Blogpulse (He also shares his worksheet)  In the analysis, he mentions that the average blogger links to Global s 1.86 times. (I earned the distinction of linking the most times to Global s this past month - 7 times, although later I found out that I was tied with Ethan.).  In another post, Ethan writes about the Blogpulse tools he used to do the analysis here.  It would be interesting  to compare the results of this analysis with using an open community algorithm, if such a tool were available.

RSS Side Links & Blogger

How can you stream and RSS as headline links down your sidebar in blogger?

This is one of those stupd questions --- one that reveals your own stupidity .... Since questions are your best teachers .... I posted it here.   I know how to do this in typepad, but not blogger.   If you want to have a stream a RSS feed as headlines on your side bar in blogger, after you create the javascript, where do you put in the template?