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At the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco, ForeSee has released a report saying nonprofit websites score a mediocre 73 out of 100 on their quality scale, a point behind E-government sites.
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April 30, 2009 • 3:02 am 0
links for 2009-04-29
April 29, 2009 • 3:03 am 0
links for 2009-04-28
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Pamela Slim writes "This interest in what makes people tick, and curiosity about what keeps them from realizing their dreams, drove me to become a business coach 13 years ago. I never tire of hearing people’s stories, or of learning ways to help the creatively oppressed come alive.
Crumbling markets, huge layoffs and widespread financial panic have unleashed a giant wave of creative yearnings. People from all walks of life are realizing that a time of economic turmoil offers a great opportunity to reinvent careers."
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From entire conferences to unconferences to new government appointees to full-scale social networks, there’s no doubt that “Government 2.0″ has become the latest and greatest buzzword. Agencies and departments from across the government are jumping on board, starting their own blogs, creating YouTube channels, and tweeting their days away. It’s also been grabbing all the headlines – in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and myriad others. But is all this talk about the next generation of government really all that new?
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April 28, 2009 • 3:04 am 0
links for 2009-04-27
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On Remote Revolution (Working. Differently.) "…had a long chat with Ross Runkel, Professor of Law Emeritus at Willamette University College of Law and specialist in employment law. He is the founder of LawMemo.com and has extensive experience as an arbitrator and advisor on legal employment issues ranging from employment discrimination, labor law, and labor-related arbitration. Given his track record, distinctions, and experiences, I was honored to have the opportunity to talk with him as he was able to provide clear, pertinent insights about the intersections between employers, rights, responsibilities, and the law."
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Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester
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World Health Org. is coordinating global response
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One of the great challenges for anyone who loves Twitter is to show other people why they should love it too. Often it’s like explaining something you find funny: “You had to be there.” The contextual, ever-changing, and high-volume nature of Twitter makes explaining it difficult. Here are ten tips to help you demo Twitter to your friends, family, and colleagues.
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Dell announced recently that they made 1 million dollars in revenue using Twitter over the last one and a half years – using one simple strategy.
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April 27, 2009 • 3:06 am 0
links for 2009-04-26
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These are Twitter use cases; things we’re doing with Twitter that we used to do (and still do) with other technologies:
* Chat
* Discussion boards
* Email
* Identifying trending topics
* Broadcasting breaking news
* Marketing and brand building
* Mining consumer sentiment
* Providing status updates to friends and family
* Communicating location, activity, mood, and other personal information
* Engaging in customer service
* Finding information on topics of interest
* Finding people who share an interest -
You can also keep up with updates on the swine flu investigation by signing up for email updates, subscribing to RSS, or following us on TwitterExternal Web Site Policy..
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Small Libraries: resources from Jessamyn West librarian.net/talks/ncls
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With every birthday reminder, bill confirmation, new friend, direct message, password recovery, and mailing list, the content of our inboxes becomes less and less a means of communication and more and more a record of all we do online. Email is the lowest common denominator of digital identity. It’s our web keychain. It’s the catch-all of our online lives.
But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete.
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Managing staff who participate in social networks. This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on. I’ve done a few press (radio, print) interviews this week re: Telstra so I thought I should have another look at how Enterprise, Government, Corporates, Not for Profits are handling the fact that their staff are members of social networks too.
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Our newest usability study — in preparation for the new Writing for the Web 2 course — tests how well users understand the first 11 characters of a website's links and headlines. For example, we'd represent this article by the "First 2 Wor" string. (Note how the guideline to show numbers as numerals lets me squeeze more meaning into this tiny stump of text.)
Why test text that's so severely truncated? Because online reading is often dominated by the F-pattern. That is, people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the "F" — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text's left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list.
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Terry Jones wrote "In a pandemic, or something that looks like it might be one, wild rumors sweep through the population. That will happen on an unprecedented scale this time round.
The virus has, as far as we know, not spent much time in humans yet. Once it does, it will begin to adapt itself in unpredictable ways. It may become more virulent, or less virulent. It may develop resistance to the antivirals that are currently effective. Antiviral resistance has been a topic of great concern for at least a couple of years. The current virus is already known to be resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine, though oseltamivir is still effective."
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April 26, 2009 • 3:13 am 0
links for 2009-04-25
April 25, 2009 • 3:05 am 0
links for 2009-04-24
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New-media tools dovetail with the requisite skills for a corporate gig
The nearly 150-year-old Colorado newspaper, Rocky Mountain News,shut its doors Feb. 27. Almost simultaneously, University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication reported an 11 percent increase in graduate applications.
Around the country, top-tier and lesser-known journalism graduate schools saw similar increases: Columbia’s applications increased 38 percent, Stanford’s rose 20 percent, and University of Maryland’s were up 25 percent, according to a recent Forbes article.
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Now Twitter is taking on a distinctly political bent, with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom using the service to announce his bid for governor of California. On Tuesday, he wrote: “It’s official- running for Gov of CA. Wanted you to be the first to know. Need your help. Check out video: http://tr.im/iOCN and ReTweet.”How do his tweets stack up to the musings of the would-be Republican candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman?
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Over the course of a week, we see plenty of RTs and information passed along from person to person across the Twitterverse. Great blog posts, articles and other information are passed along and we all benefit from sharing.
But, every week, due to the sheer volume of tweets, we sometimes miss out on the insightful and sometimes controversial tweets that start meaningful and interesting conversations around topics in PR, marketing and social networks.
So, each week I will attempt to capture what, in my opinion, were the "tweets of the week"–hope you'll do your part in helping me fill in what I've missed. -
* 1 What you can do right now
* 2 Personal stories and inspiration
* 3 Perspectives, Experiences and Anecdotes
* 4 Workshop, Talks and further resources materials
o 4.1 Ideas
o 4.2 Workshop notes
o 4.3 Research resources
+ 4.3.1 Books -
If you want to know what's happening to the billions and billions of dollars in the economic stimulus plan, you could start at recovery.gov. That's the Web site where the Obama administration is tracking the money.
It's an enormous task — publishing a real-time, reliable accounting of what the government is doing — and it wouldn't have been possible a decade ago. Call it Government 2.0
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Avinash Kaushik speculates that Bounce Rate might be the sexiest Web metric ever. Scott Brinker has a whole blog dedicated to post-click marketing. I believe it was Craig MacDonald at Covario who said bad landing pages are where good leads go to die. And I've been quoted as saying (categorically, no less) that the single most important thing we can do for the client happens after the search click.
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April 24, 2009 • 3:03 am 0
links for 2009-04-23
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It seems unthinkable today — but more than two decades ago, when personal computers were still new and everybody listened to music on a Walkman, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the world of computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, appeared to be foundering. And Jobs, the guiding force at Apple from the beginning, seemed not just expendable but a threat to the company he’d built. In West of Eden — a national best-seller when it was first published in 1989, now updated in a new edition available on Amazon — Wired contributing editor Frank Rose tells how it went down.
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Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.
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What can one green entrepreneur do? Business author Paul Hawkins attributes one entrepreneur, David Gottfried, with the founding and building of "the most important green trade organization in the world…where thousands of people and companies are playing inside it, creating the best standards in the world," producing global levels of energy and material savings, toxins elimination, greenhouse gas emission reductions and human health benefits.
Gottfried is the entrepreneur dynamo who founded the U.S. Green Building Council and its LEED program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which has emerged as the standard for an industry seeking to satisfy growing consumer demand for green buildings.
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t was an easy prediction to make: that the recession would end talk of corporate social responsibility. Faced with the fear, or reality, of losing their jobs or homes, consumers would rush past the Fairtrade shelves and pick up something the family could afford. Companies, meanwhile, would concentrate on saving themselves rather than the planet.
That easy prediction has turned out to be wrong. Mars, the world’s biggest confectionery company, has announced that its entire cocoa supply will be “produced in a sustainable manner” by 2020. Mars will work largely with the Rainforest Alliance, which encourages farmers to preserve their environment.
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April 23, 2009 • 3:03 am 0
links for 2009-04-22
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Ever since a friend of mine once claimed – very late and after many drinks – that "Twitter is the death of humanism," I've been regularly thinking about how a simple note-taking technology could inspire such apparent dread in so many people.
First, on the most obvious level, Twitter needs to be differentiated from what people write on Twitter. The fact that so many people now use Twitter as a public email system, or as a way to instant-message their friends in front of other people, is immaterial; Twitter is a note-taking technology, end of story. You take short-form notes with it, limited to 140 characters.
The clichéd analogy here has been with Japanese haiku, but perhaps we might even reference the Oulipo: in other words, Twitter means that you are writing, but you are also writing within constraints.
Second, the comparison I often make here is with ball-point pens.
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April 21, 2009 • 3:05 am 0
links for 2009-04-20
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As communicators who are fighting to change the world, we need to write passionately and tell stories that connect in order to motivate them to take action and donate some of their hard earned money. Often though, action alerts and fundraising appeals are written for senior management’s approval and just use their own wonky, boiler plate language. This needs to change ASAP. Remember the people on your list are not Members of Congress; they are everyday people who took the time to sign up to your list because they care about the issues you are fighting for. So speak to them.
Just this week MoveOn.org and Moms Rising sent out two great action alerts and online fundraising appeals that captured my attention and got me to take action. Here’s what hooked me.
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One of my favourite ’styles’ in web design is one that takes inspiration from traditional media such as paper and cardboard. Using scans and images of paper provides an informal, cut-and-paste collage feeling to the design giving the site more of a personal and hand-crafted image – quite opposite to the clean and shiny trend of other web design styles. Here are 25 good examples of this super cool paper based effect put into practice.
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Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto.
Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.
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April 20, 2009 • 3:04 am 0
links for 2009-04-19
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While designing a blog theme isn’t entirely different from designing any other type of website, there are some unique challenges that blog theme designers face.
There are plenty of sources available for designers who are seeking inspiration from high quality blog design, but it’s also important to understand specifically what will influence and determine the success of a blog theme design. In this article we’ll examine 13 characteristics that separate great blog themes from the rest.
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Would you like your local and state governments to offer iPhone apps? We can see some reasons for it and some reasons why it might not be such a good idea.
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Aided by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal, in other words, isn’t so much to explore theories about how people relate to nature, which has been a longtime pursuit of some environmental psychologists and even academics like the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Rather, it is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.
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