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

.24.3 | No Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Alex

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.

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

.24.3 | No Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Alex

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.

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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.

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Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation

.28.10 | 2 Comments »
October 28th, 2005 by Alex

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.

2 Comments »

Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation

.27.10 | No Comments »
October 27th, 2005 by Alex

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.

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Aggregation as an endless loop

.10.10 | 1 Comment »
October 10th, 2005 by Alex

Here’s a challenge for wiser RSS-wranglers than I: as aggregation becomes a more widely used tool for populating web sites, how do we prevent RSS feeds from being cluttered with multiple identical posts?

I was just looking at the Technorati tag page for net2, where a couple of my Net2-related posts have each appeared twice. That’s because my blog is being aggregated in full at Web of Blogs, an aggregation set up for the Web of Change conference. Once I get my Social Signal aggregator up and running, that may provide another duplicate of many of my blog posts.

It would be great if Technorati, Feedster & other searches could recognize true duplicate posts, and only show them once — or if there were a way to strip duplicate posts out of a feed when aggregating onto another site (for example, NetSquared’s aggregator page.)

1 Comment »

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.

3 Comments »

Latest project: TechSoup/CompuMentor

.19.9 | No Comments »
September 19th, 2005 by Alex

My latest venture in the fabulous world of Web 2.0 is helping CompuMentor — home of TechSoup — set up an online community in conjunction with an event they are organizing for next spring. Job one? Use this post to check whether the aggregation is working.

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10 ways RSS can help build online communities

.13.9 | 1 Comment »
September 13th, 2005 by Alex

Non-governmental organizations seeking to strengthen relationships with members. Governments trying to reach out to citizens. Businesses hoping to engage and win the loyalty of customers. These are the kinds of challenges that bring people to the field of online dialogue and community-building — and that should encourage them to adopt RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a format for storing online content so that people — or web sites — can subscribe to and receive content as it’s updated. (For a more detailed explanation see my RSS mini-site.) RSS lets individual users “subscribe” to online content (”RSS feeds”) by using newsreaders (”feed readers”) that round up all the news from different sites and put it in one place. But RSS can also serve as the circulatory system for online communities by making it easy for web sites to share content with one another.

Marnie Webb�s great post on the ten reasons that non-profits should use RSS is a great crash course in the value of RSS. But it’s become clear that RSS has particular value in creating online communities — and not just non-profit communities, but potentially for-profit communities, too. So with a big nod to Marnie, let me suggest….

10 ways RSS can help build online communities

1. Start in the middle. The biggest hurdle to creating an online community is the challenge of starting up a site without any content to draw people in. With RSS, you can create a site and immediately populate it with content that will interest the kind of people you’re hoping to engage.
2. Safety in (small) numbers. Small communities are easier to create and sustain — but small online communities can have a hard time generating enough content to sustain their members’ interest. RSS makes it easy and efficient for people to set up sustainable micro-communities by aggregating (subscribing to) content on a given set of topics, rather than creating it from scratch. Fo example, the left-handed trombone players of Wyoming can have a thriving online community populated by RSS feeds about left-handedness, trombones, and Wyoming. (Sign me up!)
3. Go to where the people are. Offline communities have long known that when you’re trying to recruit or build your community’s membership, you can’t wait for potential members to come to you; you have to go to them. RSS lets you apply that insight in the virtual world: instead of waiting for new community members to return to your site, your content can reach them — when and where it’s convenient for your readers.
4. Put your members to work for you. Communities thrive when members participate actively. If your site makes effective use of RSS, your members can contribute content by streaming comments directly from their blogs to your site.
5. Online community in 5 minutes a day. One obstacle to participating in online communities is the amount of time it can take to track a range of conversations across the many discussion boards and threads that can emerge within a single online community. RSS makes it easy to offer members a customizable dashboard where they see all the content and conversations that interest them as soon as they get to your site.
6. Safety and diversity. It’s easy for online communities to become “echo chambers” in which people hear only the views of people who think the same way they do — in fact, one valuable kind of online community is just a safe space where people can talk with others who share their core values. RSS lets homogenous communities bring in content from people who think differently, and then review and discuss it within their safe space.
7. Foster discussion, not chatter. For the same reason that online communities often become echo chambers, they can also become pretty lightweight. RSS feeds can inject substantive content into your community, encouraging your members to engage in meaningful dialogue instead of idle chit-chat.
8. Look around you. Your community isn’t just the people who have registered on your site — it’s the broader community of people whose interests intersect with the interests or values of your members. RSS makes it easy to exchange content (like blog posts) with these related sites, so that your members can find one another.
9. Plan for your demise. Many communities have a limited life span. Conference sites inspire great discussions that peter-out; contests or promotions produce a spike of interest that ultimately dissipates. By creating RSS-based relationships with other related sites, you hook your site into a larger community that can offer your members other possible homes if and when your site reaches the end of its useful life.
10. Plan for your rebirth. Those other sites I was talking about? They don’t have to belong to other organizations. RSS makes it so easy to move content across micro-sites, it’s suddenly efficient for you to run multiple online communities that target different groups, interests or efforts. By the time one community winds down you’ll have another site and community well underway.

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Speed feeding

.22.8 | 4 Comments »
August 22nd, 2005 by Alex

Part of the plan with the telecentre.org ecosystem is to bring relevant content into telecentre.org sites using RSS. In the case of event sites — like the Capetown site that is the very first telecentre event site to get up and running — we’ll use special tags (keywords) to help create our event blogs. That way people who already have their own blogs or web sites can post stories on their own blogs, but have the stories show up on the event site, too.

The challenge is figuring out how to gather all those blog posts together in a way that brings them onto the event site in something close to real time. In other words, how quickly can we move a blog post from a personal site to an event site?

I tested that out today with my first cross-post to the Capetown site. I wrote my post, then included the tag capetowntelecentre, which is the keyword we designated as our “flag this for syndication on the Capetown site” signal.

Next step was to check in — about half an hour later — with the various blog search services that could help us aggregate all these blog posts into a single RSS feed. I had already set up a PubSub search on capetowntelecentre, because PubSub only starts searching for terms once you set up a search; but my PubSub feed hadn’t found my post yet (six hours later, it still hasn’t; nor has it found the test post Rob wrote last night!).

Then I tried Technorati. Technorati had a feed for posts that contained the word capetowntelecentre (where I found my test post), and it had a feed for posts that used capetowntelecentre as a tag (where I found Rob’s post, but not mine, even though I used capetowntelecentre both as a tag and in text. Ah, the enigma that is Technorati.)

Next stop: Feedster, where a chorus of RSS angels opened their throats and spilled forth the whole universe of (two) posts containing the term capetowntelecentre (interesting, pulling mine in indirectly via the Web of Blogs site set up for the upcoming Web of Change conference.) I had a winner! Up went our shiny new RSS feed for capetowntelecentre, which the kind folks at Feedster were good enough to set up (on request) as an ad-free RSS feed, because they thought it was “just the right thing to do” for a “good cause” like telecentre.org.

One more note: Mark tried a test post too, but since he put capetowntelecentre in quotation marks, it didn’t get aggregated; it’s worth noting that you have to avoid quotation marks to make this kind of tag-based aggregation work.

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