Photo from Flickr User The Girl - CC "by" License
Put that in your pipes ...
Using a manual collaborative filtering process (eyeballs scan NpTech Meta Feed in RSS reader), this week's most popular topic seems to be pipes. No, nonprofit techies are not talking about those kind of pipes. It's Yahoo Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Say what? It means you can create meta RSS feeds that are more useful and relevant.
Some early reports note that there's still a hefty number of bugs and some features are still lacking, yet still in this current state it offers many possibilities.
Here's some blog posts found in the NpTech Tag stream.
5 Cool Ways To Use Yahoo! Pipes
Piping Hot Mash
Pipes and Filters for the Internet
Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database
Mashups for the Rest of Us
A Milestone in the history of the Internet
Anil Dash on Pipes
Geek to Live
Yahoo Pipes: Blogs about the 2008 election
Maybe we'll see some NpTech mashups in pipes in the coming weeks?
RSS
Quite a few useful articles about RSS this week too.
Probono.net has published a primer on RSS
11 Cool Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers For Your Blog
Democracy in Action's Tipsheet Tuesday is "Why Nonprofit Managers Must Use RSS and How To Start" is a must read.
Gavin's Digital Diner has a post called "RSS Gumbo - A Delicious Googly Moss Stew" that looks at RSS in the nonprofit enterprise context.
Getting good with Google Reader (any one using it?)
Just noticed that ICT Hub Knowledgebase delivered by Lasa has a RSS feed.
NpTech Mashup Meme
Deborah Finn unleashed the NpTech Mashup Meme this week. Michele Martin reponds with a pointer to Swicki and someone tagged this Nonprofit Tech Search. Here's another NpTech mashup. Let's see more next week!
Myth of the Bleeding Edge
Tate Hausman, of dotorganize, in a recent post on the NTEN Blog points to research that indicates that nonprofits and social change organizations should just say no thanks to using bleeding edge tools and focus on basic needs such as donation tools and CRM. He says that any use of bleeding tools without addressing basics first is "building new additions on a weak foundation." This post was tagged in the NpTech tag with the question, "Is it an either or choice?" There's been discussion on the NTEN Discuss list, summarized on the See3 Blog. What do you think?
Technology Stewardship
Speaking of guiding people, organizations, or communities to make (appropriate) choices about technology tools, Nancy White shares her Seattle Ignite presentation on Technology Stewardship. While Nancy is talking about this in a community context, what does it mean for nonprofit organizations? David Wilcox shares some thinking as does Maarten.
Online Fundraising: Best Of Lists
Fundraising Success blog summarizes online fundraising tips shared at the recent DMA Nonprofit Federation 2007 Annual Washington Nonprofit Conference.
Nonprofit Online News shares the Ten Best Online Fundraising Resources of the year.
Web 2.0 Tools and Work Flows
Marc Sirkin of the Nonprofit Marketing blog discusses How the New Web Transforms Your Organization based on his participation in a Seth Godin seminar.
Blogging as Good Investment points to a report from Forrester called "New ROI of Blogging Report)
Non-Profit Tech Blog points us to Glowfish.org, blogging remotely from Vietnam.
David Wilcox has written a glossary of social media and asking for feedback.
Michele Martin has a post called "Blogs vs Listservs: Which is Better for Community Conversation?" The bottom line: There's room for and a need for both to keep conversations going.
Get Xigi with It from Tactical Philanthropy describes Xigi.Net and how it is mapping the emerging philthanthropic capital markets.
Network-Centric Advocacy asks, "Why do we rethink social change and advocacy?"
Cool Cat Teacher Blog, an educational technology blogger, has an article called "The Future Wave of School Volunteerism: Be the Textbook" takes a look at how tools like Skype and YouTube ("YouTeach") are changing community volunteerism in schools.
Whether or you think nonprofits should run screaming from widgets or at least consider whether or not they are an appropriate choice, read this interview with the King of Widgets by Steve Bridger at the nfp2.0 blog.
A new blog on the politics and science of global warming called "Climate 411" and Michael Glibert has a new blogged WITH and has turned the comments on! Here's the first post.
Software in the Tag Stream
Jon Stahl points to Ryan Ozimek's piece "Islands and Bridges, the building has begun" and says it is a great hallelujah to the power and importance of integration via open APIs.
Michelle Murrain's White Paper (with Katrin Verlcas, NTEN) on the topic, "How Open APIs Can Change How Nonprofits Manage Data" has been published on the NTEN Site. This is a must-read.
Laura Quinn has written an excellent article on the three approaches to integrating constituent data. It's written for the non-techie and it is brilliant because it explains some complicated concepts in plain english.
OOOAuthors is a development site for OpenOffice.org documentation. It's being created by a group of volunteer reviewers, writers, editors, and translators.
If you want to follow Nonprofit Software in more depth and you're not attending the Nonprofit Software Developer Summit, be sure to follow what's on the wiki. There's bound to be quite a bit of live blogging of the event. I'm reminded a post from David Gurteen pointed to by David Wilcox about designing more participatory conferences, and it looks like the folks at Aspiration are experts at this.
Michael Stein (East Coast) writes about the importance of testing more thanf eatures in software.
Wild Apricot and iModules were two tools tagged with the NpTech tag.
Read/Write Web has a post that analyzes the Online Video Industry and the various hosting services.
The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology. Many individuals tag hundreds of resources each week. Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.
You can find the columns here: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/kanter. The summaries are released on cc 2.5 license and you are encouraged to use, remix, and forward, with the appropriate attribution!
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