Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Frank Barry, Guest Post: 4 Keys to Building a Successful Nonprofit Web Site

Courtesy of Frank Barry, moderator of NetWits Think Tank

We recently launched a new blog here at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. It’s been an exciting endeavor and given us a lot of insight into using social media for nonprofits and fundraising! Our main goal is to help you learn how to leverage our technology and the tools that make up social media. With that in mind I’d like to share 4 Keys to Building a Successful Web Site based on similar tactics we’ve deployed on this blog.

Before we go too far, let me start by saying, “Content is King.” Without great content, the following tactics and tools are limited at best. Focus on producing great content all the time. Put these tools in place. Then use what you learn from them to grow your site! Off we go.

1) Learn From Your Content

If you’re not learning you’re getting dumber! Use Google Analytics (GA) to see things like how many unique visitors you’re getting, what content is being viewed the most, what keywords or phrases people are using to find you and where people are coming from when finding you. This information is invaluable to your nonprofit – Giving you the ability become more effective with your online efforts. You may not know exactly what to do with this data all the time, but to be without it is to let opportunities slip through your fingers.

Think about how you could use Google Analytics – learn from the content you’re publishing to promote your nonprofit's fundraising event. What content is being viewed for the longest time? What content is producing the desired action of registering, donating or taking action? How can you optimize, modify and adapt?

This is only a glimpse into what you can do with analytics. For real meat check out some of the below posts by Avinash Kaushik – this dude will make you drool over the possibilities!

Check out:

• Google Analytics Maximized: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You by Avinash Kaushik
  8 Great tips and the resources to educate you on each of them. Plan on spending some time on this and blow your boss away next time you bring her your web stats and action plan!
  
• How Thick is Your Head and How Long is Your Tail? by Avinash Kaushik
  Once you’ve digested this article check out the rest of his site. There’s loads of geeky data stuff here that will make you look like an analytics rock star!
  
• Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success by Avinash Kaushik
  You say you don’t have a blog, I say you should REALLY consider starting one. Either way, this post will give you things to think about.
  
• 17 statistics to monitor on your blog by Darren Rowse
  I know you may not have a blog, but the info still applies and there is a lot of useful information here.
  
• Get this Google Analytics FireFox extension – Great additions to what you can already do with Google Analytics.

2) Make Your Content Easy to Consume

Remember, “Content is King” so provide an easy way for readers to subscribe to yours. More and more people are reading content, your content, via RSS through tools like Google Reader so make it easy to find on every page of your site.

Tip: Use Google FeedBurner which will allow people to subscribe via RSS or email. You will also get some great statistics which will help you with number one above.

Another Tip: Not sure how to get RSS from the Blackbaud Sphere CMS. Check out How to Use RSS in Sphere.

Not sure what RSS is? Check out a great video by Common Craft: RSS in Plain English

3) Make Your Content Easy to Share

Use a social bookmarking plug-in like Add This so people who like your work can easily share with their network. Make sure to put this in an easily seen and easily accessed area of every piece of content. You don’t want to make it hard for your readers to share, do you? As with number one and two above you get additional statistics from Add This which further helps you to evaluate the impact of your web site and how you can continue improving.

Not sure what Social Bookmarking is? Check out a great video by Common Craft: Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Why Add This? See some of the reasons here. or just think about their current usage:

"AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages."

4) Make Yourself Easy to Find on the Social Web

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (know about the new nonprofit call to action), LinkedIn and Flickr are becoming exceedingly important to any nonprofits online presence. It’s likely your organization is already using one or more of these social networks to engage with supporters, spread your message or raise money. Chris Brogan likes to call these places “outposts”. Your main website should highlight your presence on these sites so that your readers can connect with you in social ways online – they want to get to know you and they want to see that you are doing creative things in fundraising.

Check out:

• Creating Social Media Outposts on Luis Grays blog by Mike Fruchter
• Social Media Outposts: Maintenance on Luis Grays blog by Mike Fruchter
• Using Outposts in Your Media Strategy by Chris Brogan
•  Home Bases and Outposts - How I use Social Media in My Blogging by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger

Bonus:

Use a URL Shortening Services!

New services such as bit.ly, tinyurl and budurl are emerging. They allow you to take any URL and shrink it! For example you can take the link to this page which is normally pretty long and shrink it to this http://bit.ly/4webways. A couple great things you will love:

1. It’s easier for you to pass out in your newsletters, mailings and other printed publications
2. It’s easier for your readers to share
3. You get more statistics for analysis! (See #1 above).

From Read Write Web:

"We don't want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it's brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web. Bit.ly shortens links so they are easier to share, like TinyURL. The service creates a redirect from a short Bit.ly link out to a longer link on any web page. Allong the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it."

Check out:

• 5 reasons Why URL Shorteners Matter by Mashable
• Why URL Shorteners Might be Bad for the Web by Joshua Schachter founder of Delicious

These are 5 things that you can implement pretty simply. Don’t put them off. Have questions? Please ask below and I’ll do my best to help out.

What am I missing? I know you have some great tips to share with the community here so please take a minute and help us out.

This article was originally posted on NetWits Think Tank at http://bit.ly/HkGc2 by Frank Barry:

Frank is a Consulting Manager at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. At work he helps nonprofits with technology, social media & online strategy. He also spends some time speaking at industry conferences. The rest of the time he enjoys family, learning, sports, food, friends & movies.

Guest Post by Amy Sample Ward: Want a peek at my RSS: Here it is!

Submitted by Amy Sample Ward, publisher of Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech

When it comes to “nptech” or nonprofit technology, there are more blogs and organizations and resources than any one person can find, let alone keep track of! I’m no exception. I’m overwhelmed daily, just like everyone else, by the amount of information that’s available from, for and about our sector of technology and social benefit. So, my response is simple: I want to share my RSS reader with you. What’s in my brain, can be in yours!

Amy Sample Ward’s Version of RSS

Why?

This is just a starting place. There are other places you can go to find more blogs and resources as well, like Alltop and even WeAreMedia. So, why did I do this? I want to help support those just starting to investigate the options of social technologies for social change work, as well as give something back to those already invested and contributing to the community. Opening up my RSS reader (well, except for my mom’s blog and that kind of thing!) is something I have wanted to do for a while because it

1. provides an opportunity for me to offer a bit of value back to the larger tech+change community that is so valuable to me
2. is aligned with my core values of collaboration and sharing
3. creates a chance to improve this collection of feeds by and with my community

What?

My public RSS reader is built on Netvibes, which is a free, web-based RSS reader. This is a place to find blogs or RSS feeds from research or organizational websites - all focused on the large intersection of social technologies and social benefit work. This is free to use and publicly accessible. As you will see, it has many different tabs to try to help with the information overload of juggling so many great content sources. Check it out!

Join me!

I would love for you to visit the public RSS reader, but even more so, I would love for you to suggest feeds that should be part of it! You can either comment on the News & Resources page, or email me with your suggestions.

This article was originally posted on Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech at http://www.amysampleward.org/2009/06/11/want-a-peak-at-my-rss-here-it-is/ by Amy Sample Ward:

Amy is a communicator, collaborator and catalyst in the tech for good sector and the Global Community Builder at NetSquared.

A Social Media Cliff Hanger: Making Sure Your Parachute Opens

I'm preparing for a day of trainings in Chicago on Wednesday at Making Media Connections. Last year, I gave the keynote and a workshop, and this year they invited me back again. I'm going to be teaching two intermediate/advanced workshops, one on mapping metrics to social media strategy and the other on listening.  (The secret sauce by the way is David Armano's Listen, Learn and Adapt)

I read an interesting post called "Jumping Off the Social Media Cliff" which raises a great question, "Are you a lemming or a base jumper?"  In other words, are you embracing social media because "everyone else is ..."

What I mean by that is a question as to whether your organization is following others blindly into the chasm of social web participation or are planning and preperations being made first? Are the right people being educated and given the proper tools? Is there a plan with a specific objective?

Chasing after the competition into Facebook, Twitter and blogging without a plan is the Lemming approach. You can almost visualize swarms of companies jumping off into the abyss following competitors, self serving social media consultants and momentum created by mainstream media hype, each yelling “weeeee, social meeeeeedeeeeahhhh” and then realizing (maybe too late) with wide open eyes that they’re not prepared (no social media policy, no roadmap). There’s no chute, and the ground is coming up fast.

The reference is lemmings blindly committing suicide by jumping off cliffs in the Arctic is a bit of an urban myth.    Contrary to what you may think when view the above Disney clip from the movie White Wilderness, lemmings do not  hurl themselves off of cliffs and into the sea.  

The film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.  According to snopes.com, rodents actors were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence. Next the creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was choreographed using a handful of lemmings photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.

The reference to base jumpers is an activity that employs a parachute or the sequenced use of a wingsuit and parachute to jump from fixed objects, with the parachute unopened at the jump.  Based stands for the four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: Building - Antenna - Span - Earth

Community Media Workshop: Chicago

View more OpenOffice presentations from kanter.

So the point is that if you are going to jump off the social media cliff, make sure your parachute opens.  And to tease out that metaphor a bit more, that means having:

• Having a clear objective
• Knowing the audience
• Deploying the right strategy
• Have the expertise/time or capacity
• Understand cultural barriers to adoption
• Pick the right tools

Oh, yeah, there's also the secret sauce:

• Listening before, during, and after a project
• Learning - using qualitative insights and hard data points to understand what is and what isn't working
• Adapting your social media effort or organization based on your learning or experiments

I found a fantastic example of Twitter as a focus group in Nina Simon's blog post, "Everyone's Smithsonian.'  Not only does she illustrate the valuable qualitative insights you can glean from social media listening efforts, but shows how to apply them to a museum context. Nina's secret sauce is:

1. Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
2. Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
3. Develop relationships via any and all useful platforms that allow you to connect 1 to 2.

I like how she connects the dots between objectives, listening, relationships, and platforms.

What's Up With Feedburner?

Flickr photo from Wesley Fryer

Stephen Downes points to this post by Wesley Fryer, "Feedburner Stats Drop After Google Account Merge"

I haven't yet merged my account and all of sudden my counts dropped 1,400 subscribers. I can't imagine that 1,400 people unsubscribed in a day?  I've noticed this from Feedburner on and off for the last few months.   At e-metrics, someone told me it had to do with them dropping counts from different news readers.

At least my drop was was big as Tech Crunch.

Stephen Downes prefers to use his own stats log:

My question: which data is right - the older, high-traffic data numbers, or the new, low-traffic data numbers. Not that Google has any (*cough* *mumble* *adwords*) motive to under-report traffic. And not that Feedburner had any (*cough* *acquired*) motive to inflate the figures. Of course, you can't know - nobody knows but Google.  And that's why I read my sever logs.

So, there's something funky before the merge!  

Last week I started looking into alternatives to Feedburner to track RSS subscribers because Chris Baskind's post, "Is It Time To Let Feedburner Burn?" made me pause and wonder whether Feedburner is still the best option for tracking subscriber growth overtime.

Chris's post gives a condensed history of Feedburner and how the need for its services has changed given the social media landscape over the past 5 years.  In the early days, it was a small company focused on making it easier for publishers to manage their RSS feeds, and for people to use them.  He summarizes the Google acquisition in February, 2007 and how the service has evolved slowly since that time.

Chris notes that FeedBurner is now Google AdSense for Feeds, and says "users is slowly being converted to the new identity. But all is not well. Users have been impatient and frustrated with Google’s lack of urgency in handling what used to be a mobile, customer-focused service."  He points to this post by Duncan Riley from December, 2008 wondering how the backend might change.   He goes on to critique problems with the quality of Feedburner's functionality.   This one point caught my eye:

RSS subscriber metrics: For some sites, this information is very useful. But with the Google/FeedBurner redirected URLs, you’re paying a high price for this service. There are other ways to measure your RSS reach.

His conclusion states:

So perhaps it’s time to let FeedBurner burn, and reconsider self-hosted feeds. This decision may not be easy or even possible for sites which are already heavily invested in FeedBurner. But for those who are willing to give up something to get something back — or for new projects — there are potential rewards for going it alone.

I took a look at some of the "A-List" bloggers with large followings who are still using Feedburner, so wondering whether Chris's post is predicting the future or not.

I tracked Chris down on Twitter (@lighterfootstep) and asked him if there were other free feed management tools available.  No, but there are fee-based services.   Here's the thread.  He suggested MINT which has a module called "BirdFeeder" which tracks your RSS subscribers.   It isn't a hosted service though and not free, but not overly expensive.

• Are you experiencing problems with Feedburner?
• Are you using something different?

Resources:

Search Engine Roundtable:  Feedburner Reports Subscribers Drops

Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy

Photo by Dwinton

You need to pick the right hard data points (fancy way of saying metrics) that will help you harvest insights to improve your social media strategy.  For blogging, you have to use a couple of different tools to get the different metrics you need.  The tools include Google Analytics, PostRank, Feedburner, and others. 

Analyzing Your Blog Content With Metrics and Insight

Of course, you need to set overall goals for your blog and understand your audience.  Next, you need to know the right metric(s), the tool or combination of tools to collect the data, and how the tools measure the metric. Most importantly, you need a thinking process - either alone or as a team - to harvest insights.    

If you want to assess reader interest in one blog post versus another, I'd suggest the following process.

Reader Growth:  This is content consumption.  There are two different profiles:  subscribers and visitors. Subscribers have made a commitment to regularly receiving (and hopefully reading or at least scanning) your blog.  Visitors are people who visit your blog.  You should be looking at monthly trends over time.  This will tell you a lot about reader satisfaction with your content.  

• Hard Data Points:  Look at the  Feed Subscribers trends from Feedburner and Unique Visitors Trends from Google Analytics. Understand how Google Analytics calculates unique visitors and how Feedburner calculates subscribers, but please don't get so hung up on geekiness part of measurement that you don't have time to harvest insights.

• Insight Harvesting:  Is the number of visitors and subscribers going up and to the right.  If not, why?  If yes, why?  If no, why?  Think about your publishing frequency, length of posts, and mix of topics.  

Reader Engagement Index:  This how much your readers are interacting with you and your content and sharing your content with others. 

• Hard Data Points:  For this, I use PostRank scores and pick out all posts that scored a perfect 10. It is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking.  Understand how the model works, but don't get distracted.

• Insight Harvesting:  What are the topics?   Are these posts longer more in-depth, or short and focused on on-topic?  Do they have round up a lot outside resources? What's the tone, formal or informal? Are they tips?  What is the quality of the conversation in the comments?   What did you learn from the conversation?  If you have a group blog, are there differences between authors?  Why? Did anything surprise you?

Reader Bookmarking:  This is bookmarked content for later retrieval which is some indication of reader value. 

• Hard Data Points:   You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn't make it efficient to grab data over time.  Remember bookmarked items can also influence your blog traffic (positively).

• Insight Harvesting:  What was the topic of the post?  Are they tip posts, resource roundups, or other formats? Are there patterns?

Conversation Rate: This is the commenting and conversation that is happening on your blog.

• Hard Data Points:   You can get the most commented posts from PostRank.  If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics will give you a post to comment ratio.   

• Insight Harvesting:  What is the style of the writing?  Do posts with more questions in the title and questions in the end generate more comments?  Did you do any outreach to encourage commenting? Is there a conversation happening between people who comment? What do you do to facilitate it?  What's the quality of the commenting - are you learning?  Are the comments positive or negative? 

Authority:  This is the number of links to a post.  This metric gives you indication of the value of the content - that people were linking to it.  It can also influence traffic.

• Hard Data Points:   Do an analysis of the number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer.

• Insight Harvesting:  Pull out the top 25 linked posts. Analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking in referrals using Google Analytics.  Are there any patterns? 

Page Views:  The number of times a page (unit of content) was viewed.  Not sure how much this will tell you about your content quality, but it will perhaps give you some insights about your outreach.

• Hard Data Points:  You can get this from Google Analytics.

• Insight Harvesting:  Why are these blog posts getting higher page views than others?   What is the referral traffic?  What was your outreach strategy? 

Industry Index:    I don't use this one yet, it was suggested by a Kynam Dom in this comment. This is evaluating your performance in relation to other blogs in your space using the same metrics. 

• Hard Data Points:   There isn't a nonprofit or nonprofit technology blogs version of the Ad Age Ranking of marketing blogs, although there are ways to do this privately.  You could analyze your blog using services like compete, commetrics, and Alexa - Alan Benamer has done this. 

• Insight Harvesting: Where is my blog on the index, high or low? What are the qualities that top five blogs have in common? How does that compare to my blog?

Resources

Five Steps Towards A Metrics Driven Company by Andrew Chen
How To Find the Right Chart for your Numerical Data by Digital Inspiration
ComMetrics FAQ
The Chart Chooser

Questions

• What is your thought and reflection process for insight harvesting?
• What reflective questions do you ask while looking at your data?
• What are some insights that you've harvested about your social media strategy?

Using AideRSS as a blog improvement tool

Last week, I did my annual Blog ROI benchmarking and I started to noodle around with the question - How can I use AideRSS as a tool to help me evaluate engagement and improve my blog?

Aide RSS wrote about measuring social engagement on a blog which that looks at a number of different metrics.  You can do an analysis of your blog feed here.  Here's a recent analysis of the "best" posts on my blog and I need to go figure out what the numbers mean.

I didn't get much further on figuring it out, but ProBlogger did in this post "Using AideRSS to Help Identify Hot Topics on Your Blog."

You won’t simply want to repeat past topics that have done well but will probably do better to extend upon them.

AideRSS can be used in lots of ways to track other blogs and help find great content on other blogs but for me this analysis of my own posts has become a valuable tool.

How are you using AideRss?

Is it over for RSS readers?

I don't know if it is over for me, but I haven't been as disciplined lately reading my feeds.   I still use RSS readers, of course, but I'm not necessarily following the same set of blogs in linear way.  I am finding myself keeping up through items shared in google reader or via friendfeed or twitter -- and while I'm writing via Zemanta. 

An interesting discussion going on here.  I'll have to dig in deeper.

What do you think?

Filtering Your Feeds: Marshall's Yahoo Pipes Screencast

Are you using RSS to listen, but want to know how to fine tune your listening skills?   Go no further than this excellent screencast from Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Why would you ever want to use Yahoo Pipes you might be wondering? Let's say that you have mastered using an RSS reader like bloglines or google reader or event NetVibes to read feeds.   And you've integrated reading feeds from blogs and web sites into your daily routine.  And let's say that your social media radar includes using "persistent search"  (plugging in some key words into technorati search or blog search engine and subscribing to it via RSS). 

Now, let's say you've been doing that for months, but  you're finding that your persistent search feeds are casting too wide a net and you're getting a lot of information that you're not interested in reading.   That's where Yahoo Pipes can really help you.

Here's an example of a Yahoo pipe that Marnie Webb put together that tracks nonprofit technology resources. To filter it further, Marnie used AIDERSS to filter the pipe to create the NPTech Popular Yahoo Pipe (with inspiration and help from Marshall)

What are some ways that you are fine-tuning your social media listening skills?  If using google alerts and blogreaders are great entry steps, how do you take your listening to the next level?

RSS Beginners Guide and Video

Michael Pick recently posted this entertaining how-to video about RSS for some client work he was doing for a social RSS application called "Feed Each Other."  I just love the retro clip of the women with her remote control.

His RSS Guide for Beginners is an absolute gem!  A must-read for anyone trying to explain what RSS is and why one should use it. 

I'm also so honored that he joined my Facebook Cause for the Sharing Foundation too! 

How To Make Your Content More Shareable: Screencast

I learned something today from two of my readers, Nick Temple and Michele Martin about to add the "Share on Facebook" and "Digg This" links to your posts automatically on typepad.  These options might be called "Social Media Optimization" (more here)

Nick asked the question.  I replied by email with a cc to Michele.  I saw this on her blog.  She responded with the instructions (I posted here)

I decided to make a quick screencast.

Now, I have some questions. I need to explore whether there is a way to see at glance and side-by-side comparison which of your posts have been added to del.icio.us, stumble upon, facebook, etc.  Looking at the numbers may give you some indication of what your readers thought was valuable.  I would like to see if number of comments correlates.

What I'm really curious now is your behavior.  When you are reading this blog in a reader, to you use the feed flare options?  When you come to the page itself, do you use the feed flare options?  Why or why not?  I'm trying to figure out if this is useless extras on your blog or can be valuable.

If you are enjoying this post,  subscribe for free.

Thank You Chris Blow for Cleaning Up My RSS Mess!

Chris Blow writes a blog called Unthinkingly

If you been following this thread, I was prompted to explore blog metrics in this post after reading what Avinash Kaushik had to day on the topic:  The blog metrics he identified were:

• Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)
• Unique Blog Readers (content consumption – Unique Visitors & Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)

I discovered that I had problem figuring out how many total feed subscribers and the trends over time because I had four feeds (three built into the typepad blogging platform) and another one in feedburner which offers the stats tracking feature. 

I asked the question on my blog:  Is there some way to consolidate the feeds into so they can be tracked in feedburner and not disrupt current subscribers (make the unsubscribe and resubscribe?)  Chris Blow, one of my readers, was kind enough to send me clear instructions that quickly solved my problem:

The trick is with something called "redirection".

Your blogging platform typepad runs on a server.  The server works like a butler: visitors come to the door, the butler answers, the visitor requests a file, and the butler gives it to them. (or gives them a polite apology and a 404 message).

So if you are doing analytics it means that the butler makes a little note of everything that goes out the door (including the address of who asked for it, and exactly what they asked for). Then you can gather up all those scribbled notes of the floor and make pretty graphs.    And if you are doing redirection it means that you whisper in your butler's ear: "whenever a visitor asks for file X give them file Y."

You can do redirection for any file that you can serve ... including your feeds. ... So we need to tell the server that when someone asks for any of your feeds on typepad, to give them the feed on feedburner.

Based on my research, it looks like there used to not be a way to do this, but now there is one built into Typepad.

 

RSS In Plain English

Click to Play

Lee LeFever and Sachi created this three minute video to explain RSS in plain English and why if you're not tracking web information using RSS you need to do so!   His post is here

This afternoon I'm teaching a webinar called Ten Steps to Extension 2.0 for Extension professionals new to Web2.0 ideas and tools.  RSS is Step 5.    I've been in the searching for best primers in text, photos, and video and this one is definitely a keeper.

I like how they video a diagram on a white board, use printed paper copies of the computer screens, and explain the ideas very simply.   The style is reminds of Michael Wesch's now famous Web2.0 introductory video, The Machine is USing Us.

Show Me Experiments and Realistic Outcomes for Tagging/RSS

My colleague Joitske points out my spelling error in my Tagvocates post -- I spelled it "tagovate."  It also made me realize that it should be tag because of sloppiness.  That aside, Joistke goes on to reflect on the usefulness of tagging and rss feeds for her work with communities of practices (and by extension - nonprofit organizations.)

She describes the value in terms of avoiding information overload for busy professionals.

"Transferring more to RSS feeds (and this can be topical feeds from joint unique delicious tags tagged by colleagues too) will shift the feeling of having to read to reading when you are ready, interested and available. Much more interest driven, user-centric. Leaving professionals to do their work and not mix it with potentially distracting mails. This is a huge shift RSS/tagging can bring into the workspace."

While those who want to use tagging for social change may view that result as missing the point,  Joitske asks:

Going back to tagging for social change: that's a whole different topic: I haven't seen how tagging could really work for social change other than bringing the right information together in faster ways ...

which then helps the organizations do the work that creates the change ... which is exactly the point that several commenters to an earlier post made here and here.

Joitske's other observation about tagging is also important: "The other observation I can make so far on our tag experiments is that it doesn't foster any exchange/conversation, unless you combine it with reading your co-tagger blogs..."     And, I wonder what we are loosing bypassing the conversation and jumping into action - but hopefully the N-TEN Affinity Group which has an group email component may facilitate some conversation (as well as some old fashion phone calls) that might lead to a "Show Me" or Action Learning experiment as a first step.

Now, on the topic of experiments that teach - I have to applaud Cityzen Jane's concept of "Show Me" examples.  She says, "For my non-web, non-technical managers who needed to see something more
than my enthusiasm for technology. It's a given that the geek in the corner office, me - would get excited about web 2.0 for instance, but why should my managers? Concrete examples were needed."  Here's a great example of one of her prove its ..

10x10 from Joistke

Joistke sends me really interesting links, like this one.  Here's how it works:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their  top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and  year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly  evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

Benefits of Blogging

I came across a post from Kevin Lim who writes about social technology and recently posted some information from his Intro to Blogs Workshop. His focus not on the writing process, but the importance of reading blogs and knowing what's going on out there.   He includes an excellent resource list in his post - I like the references to the "soft side of blogging," especially "Why Web Blog?" and Dave Pollard's "The Blogging Process."

Technorati Tags: ntc, nptech, net2

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

Make Your Nonprofit Effective With RSS

Alexandra Samuels has posted a fabulous article with that title.