Woohoo! Tivo! Over here!
.20.10 | No Comments »
October 20th, 2006 by Alex
I wanted to send people a direct link to Tivo in my post about our home media server, but Tivo’s refer-a-friend tools don’t include a web badge! If I had a little snippet of code that let me put a trackable link to Tivo into a blog post, I’d be motivated to blog more about Tivo as a way of getting reward points. OK, maybe I blog too much about Tivo anyhow, but when I invite everybody over to our place to watch an ad-free episode of Grey’s Anatomy in HD, timeshifted so we can watch it two hours before it airs in our time zone, they’ll be glad I earned points for my referrals. My point is, making it easy and valuable for bloggers to talk about you is an easy, low-cost way of encourage positive referrals from trusted peers.
Conference tracking in real time
.30.5 | No Comments »
May 30th, 2006 by Alex
A number of folks in the conference hallway have asked about options for tracking conference notes in real time.
If you are looking for blog posts from NetSquared, you can find links to all the blog posts about the NetSquared conference here.
And if you want to participate in real-time note sharing via wiki, Erin Denny has set up a pbwiki space here. (The password for the wiki is "net2".) We'll move those notes onto the NetSquared site once the conference wraps.
Conference tracking in real time
.30.5 | No Comments »
May 30th, 2006 by Alex
A number of folks in the conference hallway have asked about options for tracking conference notes in real time.
If you are looking for blog posts from NetSquared, you can find links to all the blog posts about the NetSquared conference here.
And if you want to participate in real-time note sharing via wiki, Erin Denny has set up a pbwiki space here. (The password for the wiki is "net2".) We'll move those notes onto the NetSquared site once the conference wraps.
New from NetSquared: Net2Learn
.17.4 | No Comments »
April 17th, 2006 by Alex
Today we're launching a new feature on NetSquared: Net2Learn. Net2Learn (http://learn.netsquared.org) is a collection of resource centers on topics that matter to nonprofits: topics like Online P.R. for nonprofits, Managing an online community forum, and 10 tools you need now. Best of all, Net2Learn makes it easy for you to contribute your favorite web links, resources and examples to each resource center -- or to create a new resource center yourself.
New from NetSquared: Net2Learn
.17.4 | No Comments »
April 17th, 2006 by Alex
Today we're launching a new feature on NetSquared: Net2Learn. Net2Learn (http://learn.netsquared.org) is a collection of resource centers on topics that matter to nonprofits: topics like Online P.R. for nonprofits, Managing an online community forum, and 10 tools you need now. Best of all, Net2Learn makes it easy for you to contribute your favorite web links, resources and examples to each resource center -- or to create a new resource center yourself.
Alex 2.0: Now with extra civic-mindedness
.8.3 | No Comments »
March 8th, 2006 by Alex
Yippee! Today Corante launched its new Civic Minded blog on Internet politics, e-democracy and online engagement. This is a little project I cooked up with co-conspirators Steve Clift, Marnie Webb and Stephen Coleman.
I’m thrilled to be working with such a great team, and really looking forward to what we cook up. Come on over and join the conversation!
Web 2.0 glossary
.1.3 | No Comments »
March 1st, 2006 by Alex
I’m looking forward to the upcoming Nten conference, where I’ll be part of a panel on Blogging, tagging, flickring for the cause. As background info for Nten participants, I put together the following glossary of “Web 2.0″ terminology.
What’s Web 2.0? Well, it’s really just a buzzword summing up the latest generation of Internet technology — a generation that encompasses the tools and technologies described below.
aggregation: Gathering information from multiple web sites, typically via RSS. Aggregation lets web sites remix the information from multiple web sites, for example by republishing all the news related to a particular keyword.
blog: Originally short for “weblog”, a blog is just a web page that contains entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top. But blogging has taken off because the explosion in blogging software and services — like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress — has turned blogging into one of the easiest ways for people to maintain a constantly updated web presence. In addition to the classic text blog, we now have photo blogs (consisting of uploaded photos), audio blogs (a.k.a. “podcasts”) and video blogs (which consist of regularly uploaded video files).
blogroll: A list of recommended sites that appears in the sidebar of a blog. These sites are typically sites that are either on similar topics, sites that the blogger reads regularly, or sites that belong to the blogger’s friends or colleagues. The term “blogroll” also evokes the concept of political logrolling (when legislators promise to vote for one another’s pet bills) — which is not unlike bloggers’ habit of reciprocating links by posting links to blogs that link back to their own blogs.
mashup: A web service or software tool that combines two or more tools to create a whole new service. A leading example is ChicagoCrime, which merges Google Maps with the Chicago police department’s crime tracking web site to offer a map of crime in different parts of Chicago.
moblogging: Short for mobile blogging, moblogging refers to posting blog updates from a cell phone, camera phone or pda (personal digital assistant). Mobloggers may update their web sites more frequently than other bloggers, because they don’t have to be at their computers in order to post.
newsreader: A newsreader gathers the news from multiple blogs or news sites via RSS (see below), allowing readers to access all their news from a single web site or program. Online newsreaders (like Bloglines, Pluck, or Newsgator) are web sites that let you read RSS feeds from within your web browser. Desktop newsreaders download the news to your computer, and let you read your news inside a dedicated software program.
podcast: An audio blog, typically updated weekly or daily. You don’t have to have an ipod to listen to a podcast; although you can download podcasts to an ipod, you can also listen to podcasts on a desktop computer, or many other mp3 players.
RSS: A format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and web sites feature RSS feeds: a constantly updated version of the site’s latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator.
social bookmarking: The collaborative equivalent of storing favorites or bookmarks within a web browser, social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us or Furl) let people store their favourite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.
social networking: Social networking sites help people discover new friends or colleagues by illuminating shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location. Leading examples include Friendster, LinkedIn, and 43people.
tags: Keywords that describe the content of a web site, bookmark, photo or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource, and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and blog tracking sites (like Technorati). Tags provide a useful way of organizing, retrieving and discovering information.
wiki: A collaboratively edited web page. The best known example is wikipedia, an encyclopedia that anyone in the world can help to write or update. Wikis are frequently used to allow people to write a document together, or to share reference material that lets colleagues or even members of the public contribute content.
Social Signal in nonprofit blogging story
.27.2 | No Comments »
February 27th, 2006 by Alex
Today’s Oakland Tribune features a story about nonprofit blogging. I’m quoted, but what’s really exciting is that this is (I think) the first print reference to Social Signal
Blogs and Dogs
.7.11 | No Comments »
November 7th, 2005 by Alex
For those of you who suspect that I’m having too much fun at work these days, let me note my upcoming participation in the Banff Centre’s Blogs and Dogs workshop.
This is a great chance to learn the basics of blogging, or push your blogging skills in new directions. And in addition to two days of blogging goodness with a stellar faculty of blogging visionaries (and me), you’ll have something to blog about: a day of dogsledding. Really.
For more information visit the Blogs and Dogs website.
Introducing Social Signal: collaboration for communities
.6.10 | 3 Comments »
October 6th, 2005 by Alex
I’m delighted to announce the launch of Social Signal. Social Signal’s goal is to support online communities and distributed collaboration networks — networks of communities that share content and relationships by using the latest generation of web tools. This practice builds on my consulting, research and writing in the fields of online community, public participation, and social software, but extends its value and capacity with the strengths of a new partner: Rob Cottingham, a communications consultant with long experience in online advocacy and web development.
Appropriately enough, the Social Signal web site launched on the same day as our latest project, TechSoup’s Net2. Net2 is an online community and conference that will celebate the achievements of the nonprofit web, while asking the ever-fascinating “what’s next?”
What’s next is a crop of technologies that work the way healthy communities work: decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory. Tech memes like blogging, tagging and RSS — sometimes described as “Web 2.0″ technologies — allow individual non-profits, community organizations and campaigns to work together effectively, while still maintaining their individual identities. Each organization has its own web site and/or blog, but shares content with other like-minded organizations by using RSS to move news, stories and information from one site to the other; tagging provides a way of structuring this information into particular topics.
This kind of decentralized collaboration parallels the best practices that have emerged out of research and experience in the fields of social capital, public engagement, planning, public consultation, and public participation. For the past twenty or thirty years — and gaining ground dramatically in the past decade — public servants and community service organizations have been exploring ways of bringing the public into organizational decision-making. They’ve discovered that decisions that have been meaningfully shaped by public input not only enjoy broader public support, but are more effective and more sustainable. It turns out that the most successful public decision-making processes are — you guessed it! — decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.
Social movements and community activists have found a similar path. You can’t get people to support a cause by offering a laundry list of ideological justifications. You get people to participate in a political movement by listening to them, letting them set the agenda, and providing ways for them to participate wherever, whenever and however it works for them. It turns out that the most successful social movements and political campaigns are decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Web is finally offering tools that match the best practices in public decision-making and community organizing. The Internet grew from the same cultural wellspring that inspired many civic engagement practitioners and many social movement organizers. The 1960s counterculture has been cited as a parent of hacker culture, which gave birth to the open source movement. Open source software development takes a participatory approach to the creation of computer code, allowing many people to collaboratively contribute to one or more related programs. It turns out that the fastest and most secure way of writing code is decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.
Software developers, public planners, collaboration consultants, community organizers — they’ve all ended up on the same page, working from something like the same play book. They all see the power and joy of a decentralized, bottom-up, participatory model of collaboration. And they’re all trying to build the structures — technological, organizational, and social — that will make this form of collaboration the new standard for how to do business, make policy, create art, or communicate.
What’s exciting about Web 2.0 — yes, we really need another name for it! — is that it offers the technological infrastructure for decentralized, bottom-up, participatory collaboration. Instead of creating another community group to compete for foundation funding, like-minded members of existing community organizations can use a wiki to develop a joint proposal. Instead of distributing government surveys, public servants can access spontaneous, focused feedback by aggregating blog-based policy discussions. Instead of focusing on fundraising in order to pay campaign staff, activist groups can create far-reaching information campaigns that are powered by their members’ RSS feeds.
We’re still in the early days of discovering how the collaborative toolkit of blogging, tagging and RSS — not to mention other tools that are just emerging — can transform our organizational, social and economic structures. Net2 is part of this process of discovery. So are the other “Web 2.0″ projects I’m working on, like telecentre.org.
Community-based projects like these — projects that engage with the decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory potential of Web 2.0 tools — are crucial to unleashing the transformative power of the next-generation Internet. We hope Social Signal will help to enable that transformation.
What Google blog search doesn’t have
.14.9 | 1 Comment »
September 14th, 2005 by Alex
Rob highlights its pros and cons. How could he forget to mention its gravest oversight: no rankings! Or is this a desperate hope that the ascendance of Google could change the domestic balance of power?
My kingdom for a link*
.9.8 | 1 Comment »
August 9th, 2005 by Alex
Rob thinks my new comment form is lame and desperate. I say, maybe he would reassert some claim to even participating in our rank war if he actually deployed a little strategy himself.
As any politician knows, you’ve got to ask people for their vote. And any salesperson knows you’ve got to ask your prospect for that sale. So I figure, you’ve got to ask your blog’s readers for that link.
*Note: Actual kingdom may be smaller than it appears. Offer void in Hawaii and Alaska.