What are the essential tools for blogging and online conversation in 2009? Social Signal friend and advisor Leda Dederich recently asked me for an update to the post I wrote on this topic four years ago. Happily, SoSi staffer Karen Fung recently wrote an excellent post that ran through the specific tools I reviewed in 2005. But I thought I'd step back and offer an answer to the underlying question: what tools do I need to participate effectively in the thriving world of social media?

Do you need a blog?

Four years ago, blogging was the premiere way to publish content or engage in online conversation. Today, there are many easy and lightweight ways to express yourself online and converse with old or new friends. While a blog is still a terrific way to have a more informal organizational voice, or to create your own niche site on the web, you may find it easier or more rewarding to engage through some other established channel. Here are some options to consider:

1. Facebook Post frequent status updates and notes on Facebook, and voilá, you have something not-un-bloglike. It's free, it takes no configuration or setup work, and your friends are much more likely to stop by and see what you've written. The downside: Facebook makes some pretty interesting claims on your posts, and you can't do much to customize how it works.
2. Twitter If you're primarily interested in sharing news or engaging in online conversation, Twitter may be easier, more effective and more fun than blogging. You can post really quickly and frequently (how long does it take to write a 140-character message?) and you can reach specific people (via mentions or direct messages). The downside: You can't write the next New Yorker-worthy essay in 140 characters, and even if you do, your friends may or may not see it given how quickly Twitter conversation unfolds.
3. Niche communities Instead of posting all your thoughts in one place, why not post them in the context where they're most relevant? Join a handful of online communities or social networks that correspond to your various professional and personal interests, and you can enjoy all the benefits of personal expression -- in exactly the context where they'll find interested readers. You might blog about your family life on CafeMom, share your political rants on DailyKos, and write about your business adventures on the Intuit business community site. The downside: Your online relationships will be very role-based; people will likely know you with your mom hat on, or your activist hat on, but not both. If you want to write about topics that cross over your various roles -- or don't fit into any of them -- you don't have a home for it. My solution to these problems is to treat alexandrasamuel.com as an aggregator for my posts on a variety of sites; that way I have both niche conversations and a one-stop, anything-goes presence.
4. LinkedIn Answering questions on LinkedIn isn't the same as blogging, but it is a great way of establishing your topic-specific expertise in front of a large and relevant audience. I monitor LinkedIn questions in my fields of expertise using iGoogle (see below) so that I can answer questions while they're fresh -- which means my answers are higher up and get seen by more people. Then I post my LinkedIn answers back to the Social Signal blog using old-fashioned cut and paste.
5. Flickr, YouTube, 12seconds et al. Not everyone expresses themselves best in words. Maybe you're more of a talker, or a photographer, or a video person. Create an account on a multimedia site, and post your outpourings there.

So, you still want to blog: platforms

6. Tumblr Four years ago I recommended Blogger as my newbie option and WordPress as my choice for more advanced bloggers. Today, I recommend Tumblr as a great blog for folks who want something easy-to-use, especially if they plan on uploading lots of photo or images (Tumblr has great upload tools, and is very user-friendly). I used Tumblr to set up a simple personal blog for family posts.
7. WordPress is still my choice for higher-end blogs, but now even a newbie can use it: WordPress.com offers turn-key blogs and make it easy to get up and running and do a decent amount of customization, even if your tech skills are very basic. Better yet, if you think your blog could grow over time, you have the option of moving your hosted WordPress.com blog to another webhost where you'll have more control over your configuration. From there, WordPress can support you in expanding from a basic blog to something a little more nuanced, or even let you grow into a fairly complex and elaborate website by using WordPress as a content management system. I use WordPress, hosted on DreamHost, for alexandrasamuel.com.
8. Drupal My 2005 post pre-dated our immersion into Drupal, a content-management system that includes a powerful blogging platform and many interesting ways of aggregating and republishing RSS feeds. Within a year, we created several Drupal sites: telecentre.org (now on Ning), NetSquared and our own Social Signal site. Today, many of the blogs I contribute to are on Drupal -- not only ours, but those of ChangeEverything, NetSquared, and happyfrog. I wouldn't recommend Drupal as a platform if all you want to do is set up a blog (though there are many pure-blog sites that run on Drupal), but if you're creating a more extensive presence in which blogging is a key part -- or if you want to create a blog with multiple contributors -- Drupal is a great choice.

Tools for bloggers

9. Amazon associates program If your blog includes references, reviews or recommendations for books, music, electronics or just about any other kind of product, Amazon's associates program gives you a potential revenue stream. Set up an associate ID and use it to generate links to the items you discuss in your blog; if people click through and buy them, you get a small kick-back. I've yet to make a penny off the program -- after years of linking, I've only had a few click-throughs -- but I like the option of creating links that show the products I'm referring to in my blog.
10. iStockphoto Many of the images you see on Social Signal began life on iStockphoto, a low-cost source of online images. Sure, you could snag images for free on Google Image seach, but when you do, you stand a good chance of infringing on somebody's copyright. Buy your snaps on iStockphoto, where $1 gets you a good-enough-for-the-web photo, and you know that your photo is cleared for online use.
11. Skitch If you blog, you likely include images or screenshots in your posts on a semi-regular basis. Skitch is my tool of choice for getting those online; it lets you do quick screen grabs (including grabs of images you've downloaded or created) and then upload them to a web server that makes it easy to drop them into a blog post. Mac users only, I'm afraid.
12. Zemanta Another friend to the frequent blogger is Zemanta, which you can install on your blog or run as a Firefox extension. It uses your draft post to generate suggested links, automatically hyperlink relevant keywords (if you choose) and insert links to related material into the bottom of your post. If you hook it up to your Amazon associates account it will also turn relevant product mentions into Amazon links with your associate ID.
13. Evernote Writing for multiple blogs or networks means keeping a running list of potential blog posts, notes, and drafts. For a long time my prospective posts lived in VoodooPad; now I keep them in Evernote, where they're accessible via web and on my iPhone.

Blog reading and aggregation

Many of the tools I recommended in 2005 were focused on tracking the fast-growing world of blogs. Today, less of my attention is focused on reading individual blogs, and more of it goes to specific social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

14. RSS I'm still a huge fan of RSS, but I hardly ever use it to read blogs. Now that so many web sites publish RSS feeds -- everything from blogs to news sites to task managers -- RSS has become less about news and more about getting the information I want, where I want it. And where do I want it?....
15. iGoogle My personalized Google homepage -- a.k.a. iGoogle -- has replaced Bloglines and Google Reader in my affections. Yes, I still maintain a Google Reader account (I imported my Bloglines feeds into Google eons ago) but once I subscribed to a few hundred feeds, I found the mountain of unread posts of Google Reader to be so daunting that I stopped visiting. Instead, I set up an iGoogle homepage that is my browser's default page -- that means that whenever I launch a new browser window, I see the latest posts on my iGoogle page. It's titles only, but it's enough to keep me up-to-date on top news stories, and about anything that gets posted online about me, Rob, or Social Signal. I'll post a more detailed look at my iGoogle setup soon.
16. Google Blog Search Until recently, Technorati was still my tool of choice for searching blogs and social networks, and subscribing to search-based RSS feeds. But Technorati has missed a lot of what I'm looking for, so I've switched to Google's Blog Search instead. I also recommend the RSS feeds in Google news for tracking mentions in print or broadcast media.
17. Twitter These days, at least 75% of my blog-reading is driven by links I stumble across on Twitter. The people I follow offer a consistently interesting and relevant selection of links -- far more than I have time to read. Twitter is also a great source of inspiration for blog posts I write myself, whether it's a matter of responding to an interesting Twitter thread, or expanding on one of my own Tweets. You can find more tips on specific Twitter tools here.
18. delicious Even in the era of Twitter, delicious remains a key part of my online experience. It's still my tool of choice for storing anything I might want to refer to again, and with its now-large user base, it's often my next stop when a Google search yields a sea of meaningless results. Search the words "social media marketing" in Google, and you get a mix of Wikipedia entries and SEO-engineered hits; look up social+media+marketing on delicious, and you see only the links that someone actually found worthwhile.

Then and now

It's not a coincidence that my 2005 post was tool-focused. Them were the early days of social media -- in fact the phrase had yet to be coined! -- and finding useful, user-friendly tools was key to engaging in the still-new world of online conversation.

I still love testing and reviewing social media tools, and I'm not above the occasional impassioned debate over the relative merits of different blogging platforms. But 2009 offers many more tools, most of them far more user-friendly than what was around four years ago. It's no longer about finding tools that let you engage online; it's about making choices that let you engage meaningfully.

And meaningful engagement gets harder -- and easier -- all the time. Harder in that the volume of conversation, and increasing expectations of connectivity, places more and more demand on our time and attention. Harder in that a world of 500+ buddy lists muddies our thinking about what friendship means, and which relationships are important. Harder because as we post more and more often, our posts contribute less and less -- unless we take the time to think about what we're saying, who we're saying it to, and why we're saying it.

That's the part that tools can make easier, if we use them thoughtfully and with care. No wonder this post refers to almost twice as many tools as I recommended four years ago; it takes a more powerful toolbox to keep my time and attention focused and organized. But each and every one of the tools I've mentioned has helped me spend my time online in a more deliberate and effective way, for the purpose that matters most to me: connecting with real people.

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So you really, really, really want people to contribute to your new, grassroots, user-driven site? If you want to invite my content in, you'd better let me get it out.

That means offering per-user RSS feeds for all user-contributed content. (If you're new to RSS, check out our rsstocracy.com site for an intro.) If I'm adding content to your site, I need an easy way to suck the content back out for republishing on my site. (In fact, my AlexandraSamuel.com site now consists pretty much exclusively of the content I'm posting on other sites, including this one, and then re-aggregating back onto my own site.)

A useful cautionary tale in this regard is LinkedIn. LinkedIn Answers rely on users to contribute questions AND answers to create a great (and very useful) repository of advice and referrals on just about every business topic imaginable. We often encourage folks to participate actively in LinkedIn as a way of raising their professional profile. But I'm rethinking the wisdom of that advice now that I see there's no outbound RSS feed for my own LinkedIn answers. If I'm going to make LinkedIn the go-to place for my contributions of professional intelligence, I expect to be able to republish the answers I'm writing on my own blog.

And LinkedIn should make it easy for me to do so, for three reasons. First, by making it easy for bloggers to republish their LinkedIn answers on their own blogs, LinkedIn encourages bloggers to contribute more actively, which will help them build up high quality content. Second, by making it easy for people to subscribe to answers that come from their favorite experts, LinkedIn increases the returns to becoming a top LinkedIn expert, which again encourages high quality contributions. Third, by making it easy for people to republish their answers -- possibly as teasers that link back to the full answer on LinkedIn -- LinkedIn could get a ton of topic-specific inbound links, which would bring in lots of visitors directly from blogs AND boost LinkedIn's Google juice on topical Google searches.

If you're creating a user-driven site of your own, keep LinkedIn's example in mind. Seize the opportunity LinkedIn is missing by making it easy for your users to get content out -- recognizing that's the best way to bring content in.

I'm currently at NTen's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on "Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies." Along with Victor d'Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.

I've tidied up my presentation notes and I'm posting them here in the hope that they could be a useful reference for the folks in the room -- who asked some great questions! -- or for those who couldn't make it.

RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration

I want to introduce you to three tools that are basic building blocks for a lot of the most exciting nonprofit technology projects -- as well as for a lot of commercial web sites. These are all covered in the Web 2.0 glossary handout.

These are:

RSS (really simple syndication): 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 (a program for reading lots of blogs in one place). (For more information see

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.

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.

Why should you care about these building blocks?

We'll talk about a few different reasons, but I'm going to focus on one: all three of these tools unlock momentous possibilities for collaboration, both within your organization AND across different organizations. I want to show you a couple of quick examples of how these technologies can combine to help different nonprofits work together effectively.

Example 1: nptech tag

Question: Who here is responsible for solving tech problems, finding new tech tools, or planning tech strategy in your organization? And who here, when you're working on a tech problem, sometimes has the sneaking feeling that somewhere out there is another person just like you, in another nonprofit not too different from yours, who has already been down this road and figured out this problem for you?

NPTech is a very simple way of finding that solution -- that solution somebody else has already discovered. NPtech is a tag that a bunch of people who work in nonprofit technology decided that they'd start using for any web resource, blog post or photo that had to do with nonprofit technology.

Some of those people use del.icio.us -- a social bookmarking service -- to save their web page favourites. If they're saving a web link that's related to nonprofit tech, they use the nptech tag as one of the tags for that link. As a result, there's a del.icio.us nptech page that is a great collection of resources anyone can access.

Some of those people blog, so when they write a blog post related to nonprofit tech, they tag their post "nptech", or pop that blog post into an "nptech" category they've created on their blog. As a result, there's a technorati page that includes all kinds of blog posts about nonprofit technolgy -- as well as weblinks from del.icio.us and photos from flickr.

And thanks to RSS, you don't have to visit technorati or del.icio.us everyday in order to stay on top of all these great resources. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the nptech page on technorati or del.icio.us, these resources will show up in whatever you use to read RSS feeds -- it could be a simple as your google homepage.

The great lessons of the nptech project are:

1) these tools can make online collaboration CHEAP and EASY

2) you don't need to get everyone to agree on how to play nicely together -- if you have some people who you want to share resources with, just pick a tag and start using it. Others will join in if it's useful.

Now let me give you a more ambitious example:

Example 2: telecentre.org

(full disclosure: I worked on this project)

Telecentre.org is a venture of Canada's International Development Agency that is also receiving support from Microsoft and the Swiss government. Telecentres are community technology centres -- in many developing nations or in rural areas, this is often the only way people have Internet access, and may also be how they get access to phone service, too -- and training in how to use all these technologies. Local telecentres are supported by various regional networks around the world -- like CTCNet in the USA. But until now there's been no formal way for a network of telecentres in Africa to share resources with a network of telecentres in Latin America. Telecentre.org aims to change that by providing lots of training and networking opportunities -- and an online network to support learning and exchange among telecentre networks.

Any telecentre network in the world can create its own web site as part of the telecentre network.

And any telecentre training event can create a web site, too. All these individual web
sites are tied together via RSS and tags.

So for example, when telecentre.org conducted a major gathering of telecentre people at the World Summit on the Information Society, they set up a separate site at wsis.telecentre.org.

The main telecentre site then subscribed to the RSS feed from the WSIS site, and republished selected content onto the main site. This site was tagged "WSIS" so it would be easy to organize and find on the main site, too.

The great lessons of this project are:

1) RSS can provide an easy, low-effort way to tie diverse organizations' web sites into a loose network, in which each site selects the highlights from other organizations' sites that are most relevant to their own members, and remixes them into a fresh take.

2) As RSS makes it easy to add more and more content to your web site, you have to think about how to organize all this shared content so it's useful and accessible. Tagging can provide an easy, low-effort way to organize content on your own site, into loose categories.

I hope BOTH these examples will inspire you to take a fresh look at opportunities for informal or formal collaboration with other nonprofit organizations. It's just become a whole lot easier.

I'm currently at NTen's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on "Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies." Along with Victor d'Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.

I've tidied up my presentation notes and I'm posting them here in the hope that they could be a useful reference for the folks in the room -- who asked some great questions! -- or for those who couldn't make it.

RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration

I want to introduce you to three tools that are basic building blocks for a lot of the most exciting nonprofit technology projects -- as well as for a lot of commercial web sites. These are all covered in the Web 2.0 glossary handout.

These are:

RSS (really simple syndication): 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 (a program for reading lots of blogs in one place). (For more information see

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.

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.

Why should you care about these building blocks?

We'll talk about a few different reasons, but I'm going to focus on one: all three of these tools unlock momentous possibilities for collaboration, both within your organization AND across different organizations. I want to show you a couple of quick examples of how these technologies can combine to help different nonprofits work together effectively.

Example 1: nptech tag

Question: Who here is responsible for solving tech problems, finding new tech tools, or planning tech strategy in your organization? And who here, when you're working on a tech problem, sometimes has the sneaking feeling that somewhere out there is another person just like you, in another nonprofit not too different from yours, who has already been down this road and figured out this problem for you?

NPTech is a very simple way of finding that solution -- that solution somebody else has already discovered. NPtech is a tag that a bunch of people who work in nonprofit technology decided that they'd start using for any web resource, blog post or photo that had to do with nonprofit technology.

Some of those people use del.icio.us -- a social bookmarking service -- to save their web page favourites. If they're saving a web link that's related to nonprofit tech, they use the nptech tag as one of the tags for that link. As a result, there's a del.icio.us nptech page that is a great collection of resources anyone can access.

Some of those people blog, so when they write a blog post related to nonprofit tech, they tag their post "nptech", or pop that blog post into an "nptech" category they've created on their blog. As a result, there's a technorati page that includes all kinds of blog posts about nonprofit technolgy -- as well as weblinks from del.icio.us and photos from flickr.

And thanks to RSS, you don't have to visit technorati or del.icio.us everyday in order to stay on top of all these great resources. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the nptech page on technorati or del.icio.us, these resources will show up in whatever you use to read RSS feeds -- it could be a simple as your google homepage.

The great lessons of the nptech project are:

1) these tools can make online collaboration CHEAP and EASY

2) you don't need to get everyone to agree on how to play nicely together -- if you have some people who you want to share resources with, just pick a tag and start using it. Others will join in if it's useful.

Now let me give you a more ambitious example:

Example 2: telecentre.org

(full disclosure: I worked on this project)

Telecentre.org is a venture of Canada's International Development Agency that is also receiving support from Microsoft and the Swiss government. Telecentres are community technology centres -- in many developing nations or in rural areas, this is often the only way people have Internet access, and may also be how they get access to phone service, too -- and training in how to use all these technologies. Local telecentres are supported by various regional networks around the world -- like CTCNet in the USA. But until now there's been no formal way for a network of telecentres in Africa to share resources with a network of telecentres in Latin America. Telecentre.org aims to change that by providing lots of training and networking opportunities -- and an online network to support learning and exchange among telecentre networks.

Any telecentre network in the world can create its own web site as part of the telecentre network.

And any telecentre training event can create a web site, too. All these individual web
sites are tied together via RSS and tags.

So for example, when telecentre.org conducted a major gathering of telecentre people at the World Summit on the Information Society, they set up a separate site at wsis.telecentre.org.

The main telecentre site then subscribed to the RSS feed from the WSIS site, and republished selected content onto the main site. This site was tagged "WSIS" so it would be easy to organize and find on the main site, too.

The great lessons of this project are:

1) RSS can provide an easy, low-effort way to tie diverse organizations' web sites into a loose network, in which each site selects the highlights from other organizations' sites that are most relevant to their own members, and remixes them into a fresh take.

2) As RSS makes it easy to add more and more content to your web site, you have to think about how to organize all this shared content so it's useful and accessible. Tagging can provide an easy, low-effort way to organize content on your own site, into loose categories.

I hope BOTH these examples will inspire you to take a fresh look at opportunities for informal or formal collaboration with other nonprofit organizations. It's just become a whole lot easier.

TechSoup invited me to be part of their online event on Web 2.0 this week. Since I was on call for a discussion about social bookmarking and aggregation, I put together a short overview of how aggregation can help nonprofits, and another on how social bookmarking can help nonprofits.

Here’s my quick take on three crucial ways that nonprofits can use RSS and aggregation to work more effectively:

1. Automatically populate websites with up-to-date content: It’s very expensive to create original content on a regular basis. If you set up a series of RSS feeds on a particular topic that can pump useful content onto your organization’s web site; you’re adding value to that content by selecting a particular combination of topics and sources. For example, an organization that advocates for women with HIV might create an RSS-driven news section on its web site that pulls relevant web resources from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr, and blog posts from Technorati (a bit tricky to set up as a RSS feed, but doable; the trick is to set up the search as a “watchlist”, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the watchlist.)
2. Create a media monitoring site: You can create a media monitoring tool for internal use only. Something as simple as a Bloglines account can become a clearinghouse for information that helps with your work. That can include RSS feeds for Google or Yahoo news searches on particular search terms; del.icio.us feeds for resources related to your work; or news feeds for major publications in your field.

   I’d figure that most nonprofits would benefit from setting up a media monitoring site with RSS feeds that cover the following:

   • Search of major news feeds (try Google News or Yahoo News) for the name of your organization, acronym (if any), major sub-brands/projects, and/or name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of major news feeds for keywords on the issues you need to track. Play with the search terms until you get the right volume of news; if you’re an organization that works on a major policy area (e.g. healthcare) you may need to narrow down your search until it gives you a manageable amount of news [e.g. “healthcare policy (Congress or President)”].
   • Search of blogs (using Technorati or Feedster) for your organization and name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of blogs for your issue keywords.
   • del.icio.us, Furl & Flickr tag pages for your organization’s name and key issue areas. Don’t forget that del.icio.us lets you set up feeds that are narrowed down by using multiple tags (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/healthcare+policy)
   • del.icio.us, Furl & blog (Technorati/Feedster) search on your chosen team tag (see below)
   • For a local organization, search feeds that search your issue keywords within the news feeds for all your major local papers and broadcast outlets (you can set up a Bloglines account that includes all your local media, then set up a keyword search that searches all the feeds in your account; then set up a second Bloglines account as your main media monitoring site, and subscribe to the keyword search from the first account).
3. Choose a team tag: Choose a tag that your staff, board and volunteers can use to share information and resources. Encourage your team to use del.icio.us, furl or another social bookmarking service to save web resources they find personally useful or want to share with the team. Encourage bloggers to use that tag on any post they want team members to read. And then make sure your team monitors the tag regularly by visiting your media monitoring site, or adding the RSS feed for the tag (from del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati) to their personal home pages in Google.

I hope this is helpful. Tips on how nonprofits can use social bookmarking will follow shortly.