You're welcome, Britt.

Just realized I'd neglected something important -- for me, the key to sifting through unknowable masses of information and zeroing in on ideas and practices I really want to add to my social-web toolkit has been having a big-picture notion of what the social web might enable nonprofits to do (I posted "Social Web 101 for Nonprofits" today -- long), and developing some basic principles about what to actually do and how to do it.

Blogs are process-oriented, for the most part -- you're reading ideas in development, usually not completely settled and thought-through. There are a number of books (or at least more settled tracts) that have really helped me get a handle on things:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Scoble and Israel's Naked Conversations
• Seth Godin's "Flipping the Funnel" (Amazing, and read the business one first, then the nonprofit and/or politics versions)
• Yochai Benchler's The Wealth of Networks
• Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail"
• Danah Boyd's essays

Re principles, here's a couple:

Empower your constituents. Just donating and sending form-letter emails is beyond stale. The social web offers ample opportunities for constituents to make truly meaningful contributions to your enterprise -- marketing for you, fundraising for you, creating content for you, etc. (See "Flipping the Funnel" and Kathy Sierra's blog)

Use tools that are built to integrate and evolve with the social-web ecosystem. You need web technologies with wide-open architecture, easy inclusion of sharing tools (send to del.icio.us, etc), full APIs. One day it's Twitter; the next it's Pownce -- don't get locked in, open architecture and structured data (I love microformats, OpenID, etc) will save your bacon and allow you to adapt swiftly to change.

Start small if you have to, but set sights on enterprise-wide adoption. Depending on the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of your npo's management for social-web engagement, you may need to start with low-profile experiments with Flickr or YouTube. But for an organization of, say, 75 people doing many kinds of work to limit themselves to just one little blog or YouTube account would be to cap the potential payoff of your social-web experiments way too low. Not everyone's a blogger, but almost everyone uses IE Favorites or FF Bookmarks and also emails interesting articles to colleagues -- del.icio.us does these things and can do so much more for internal knowledge management and for public-facing communications.

• So look for tools that scale -- if you start with one Flickr account, you might eventually encourage all staff to get their own account, tote a camera around with them, and when it seems worthwhile take pix of what they're doing out in the field; you can then aggregate all or parts of the content posted to those various Flickr accounts. There are similar content-sharing services for video, text, pdf files, powerpoints, etc.; all the decent ones can scale up in this way through APIs or rss feeds.
• And look for tools that are drop-dead easy to use -- nontechies hate learning new software, so you definitely want to provision them with tools that simply get out of the way as quickly as possible and allow staff to use them. (Do not use anything that requires anyone to learn a single bit of html or other markup.)
• Also, look for tools that respect the user and allow him/her granular control over all data that their interaction with your site may produce. Not sure what's happened since YouTube became GooTube, but prior to acquisition it had lousy terms of service for uploaders. Blip.tv, on the other hand, allows users to specify what sort of license they want applied to their content. Another example: del.icio.us allows user to export their bookmark data to a file, which they can then upload to another service -- there's no lock-in, and that's the way you want to treat your users.

Adoption is the hardest part. Don't underestimate the time you'll need to put into training staff and encouraging adoption of social-web tools.

Enough rambling! :-)