A social graph if the NpTech tag based on a google search

NpTech Conversations

Gavin's digital diner has written an article about the options that technology gives us for opting out of face-to-face gatherings. He notes with a trace of sarcasm, "“With video conferencing, broadband, and Second Life, well, we can all safely stay ensconced in our own virtual-reality-sensory-deprivation-tanks and just digitally dance the salsa at the next NTEN gathering.” But he does point out that technology is not substitute for face-to-face meetings and the chorus of comments agrees. Nonetheless, he had to write an article. He suggests starting with the context here and then read his article.

Allan Benamer and Holly Ross debate transparency and publishing web stats numbers. Are Web statistics a matter of transparency. Michelle Murrain weighs in with a thought provoking post, "What Do Web Stats Mean, Anyway?" I think web stats are useful when we are using them measure our outcomes. I don't think that side-by-side number counts are all that useful. What does it mean that one blog has three times as many users as another blog in the nonprofit tech space? I think it means nothing. As one person in the comments of Michelle's posts notes, "Holly and Michelle are right to argue for context. Organizing a ommunity and serving it well has a lot of dimensions poorly reflected in webstats alone. Allan, for some reason, is out to pick a fight that is completely misleading (though surely driving his traffic up)." Holly Ross from NTEN has the final word with a brilliant post sharing all the metrics they track and putting them into context.

Ruby found the perfect visual to explain trolls in appropriate behavior online. What do you think?

Social Media Roundup

There are places in the world where YouTube has been banned, including Turkey and Thailand. Here's a growing list.

What should Netsquared's FaceBook strategy be?

Are you suffering from Social Networking Web Sites overload syndrome? Maybe open Social Graphs will help?

Trebor Scholz wonders about Social Networks - Public, Private, or Social?

Trends in the Living Networks blog gives an analysis of the structure of influence and social opinion which offers some insights into leveraging a network effect.

JournaMarketing suggests that posting often increases traffic. So what happens when you go on vacation?

Here's an article that examines how the Salvation Army in Canada is using YouTube

Why do young adults love social networking?

Blog Days, Blog Actions, and GTD for Blogs

Perhaps inspired by Blog Day and Blog Carnivals, lately, I've been seeing coordinated "blog action" projects crop up in and around the nptech space. These are events where a group of bloggers write about a particularly topic on a particular day. Blog Carnivals tend to be topic driven with a smaller number of participants compared to blog action projects that are advocacy or marketing driven and may include larger groups of bloggers. The latter may help boost awareness of the topic or cause and in some cases get picked up by news and other sites that collectively increases traffic. Here's a few:

She's Geeky, an unconference for women in technology, held a blog day on September 19th which generated many posts including a few from the nonprofit tech space (here, here, and here)

Blog Action Day is October 15th. The event is encouraging bloggers around the web to write a post about the environment.

DonorsChoose.org is doing a hybrid blog action and fundraising challenge during the month of October. Adopt a classroom project from DonorsChoose and lead a blog fundraising campaign.

Group Blogging or Writing

I wasn't sure whether to include this link in the previous topic or the next topic, so it's in a topic to itself. Michele Martin has a very useful post about how to use a set of 3 tools to support a group or collaborative blog. Many organizations may not have capacity for one person to be the sole blogger and many times the way into an organizational blog is a team of writers. I love the excel spreadsheet topic calendar, although personally, as an individual I would probably not be that disciplined. Another option might be to use a shared google calendar. How many out there have an editorial calendar for their personal or organizational blog?

NpTech Google Talk

Google Presentations: Tell a Story Together: Network Presentations lets us know about a relatively new feature in Google documents called Google Presentations. Unfortunately, there's a 10 MB limit if you're uploading a PowerPoint file and you can reach that pretty quickly if you are presenting with visuals.

Laura Whitehead of Laura's Notebook highly recommends the recent CommonCraft video on Google Docs in Plain English. The Tools, Thoughts and Things one can Do with a little Time and Hardly any Resources blog lengthy post entitled, Village Green vs Walled Garden, talks about the challenges of getting desktop office applications users to switch.

Recent studies are finding that for-profit workplaces believe that desktop applications and office documents should not have a social life. Read/WriteWeb refers to the Google Apps vs Microsoft Office debate as evidence. Where do you think nonprofit workplaces are in the debate?

OpenSource and Software Communities

Jon Stahl has a thoughtful essay on Nonprofits, Open Source and Leadership. He summarizes his organization's experience with the plone community and larger reflections about the complimentary strengths and differences between nonprofits and open source communities. He outlines what each group can learn from one another. My favorite phrase is "The code isn’t documentation" from the list of what open source communities can learn from nonprofits.

Interesting slide show about the Free and Open Source Software community in Malaysia that tells the story of their community in a visual way. And, if you want the historical perspective of the movement, the entire documentary, Revolution OS is available on Google Video!

Joomla! Day USA East is October 15th.

The Development Seed Blog recaps the multi-lingual Drupal session at DrupalCon in Spain. Mathew Saunders is also live blogging the sessions.

The Nonprofittech Blog has its first guest blogger, Doug Yeager, who is posting reports from DreamForce. (Nonprofittech blog also has a new design and some big banner ads ..)