Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

Peter Caputa IV is the founder of WizSpark, an events organizing and promotion company based in Westborough, MA. He also writes a savvy blog about Web 2.0 style promotion called PC4Media. In the following interview Peter and I discussed the use of blogs, MySpace, tracking technology and incentives to promote events. WizSpark does some work with nonprofits, helping with a recent walk to raise money for cancer research, for example.

My principles get a little rankled by some of Peter's ideas, but maybe I'm just uptight. In a world desperate for drastic change - agents of change should consider all possible options. At the very least, I hope you will find this interview to be an interesting look inside the mind of an intelligent specimen, a trail blazer, of a type of vendor ready to burst upon the scene: the social media fueled organizer/promoter. I appreciate Peter taking the time to answer my questions.

Ricky D. Taylor calls himself arguably the most controversial deaf blogger in America. At the very least he is one of the most popular and thought provoking.

After almost three years of blogging, Taylor's blog RidorLive has built an impassioned readership that almost every blog on the web would be envious of. Ricky's long, almost daily posts on politics in the deaf community and elsewhere usually get more than 50 comments each from readers.

In the following interview we talked about how Ricky built his readership and the role of multimedia in deaf communities. I'm very excited to be able to post this interview, it was a lot of fun.

US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), was passed by a 410 to 15 vote tonight. If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions will lose their federal internet subsidies. According to the resolution's top line summary it will "amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms."

The rhetoric from advocates was all about MySpace. For example, Texas Republican Ted Poe says, "social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids."

I just covered this in more detail, with links to key resources for ongoing updates, over at TechCrunch.

Michael Silberman was was the National Meetup Director for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and is now the senior strategist at consultancy EchoDitto. EchoDitto provides interactive online community consulting services to a wide variety of high profile nonprofit and business clients. Their client list includes Air America Radio, the U.N. World Food Programme, the SEIU and many more. In addition to helping other organizations use new tools, EchoDitto themselves blog, use RSS feeds and share their social bookmarking archives on the front page of their company web site.

Michael also helps organize Net Squared events in Washington D.C.

In the following short chat, Michael and I talked about bringing new web technologies into established organizations.

Late last month the MIT Media Lab hosted a party for the launch of the Global iNames Registry. The system is one of several aiming to create a long-term way of identifying individuals and organizations across different contexts.

Curious about what it all meant, I knew of no one better to ask than Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin. She told me that the identity standards landscape is forming quickly, with the participation of organizations large and small, and that it's important for nonprofits to engage in the process now instead of struggling to change policies and technologies later.

Seth Mazow is the Communications and Technology Coordinator at Interplast, a Mountain View, California based organization that provides free reconstructive surgery in developing countries for children who suffer physically or emotionally from a congenital deformity or injury.

Mazow has been using a variety of new web tools to advance Interplast's mission, most notably a blog and audio interviews recorded over Skype. In the following interview Seth and I talked about his experiences in bringing these technologies into an NGO that is non-technical in its focus.

Clare-Marie White is the communications coordinator of Never Again International, an international network that aims to alert the international community to both the causes and effects of genocide and facilitate the exchange of ideas between young people - those who have lived through genocide and those who wish to learn from them. (See their case study page on Net2)

This group is very innovative and is really trying to leverage new communication technologies - the main page of their web page is a wiki! Wikis are web sites that any authorized user can edit, where all previous versions are viewable and notification of changes can be subscribed to.

In the following interview I asked Clare-Marie White about Never Again's use of new tools and she emphasized that new users have to be introduced appropriately.

Some readers here may know that I've started writing over at the Web 2.0 review site TechCrunch. One new service that I wrote about this week stood out as something that could be very useful for nonprofits. It's called Wufoo and it's an easy way to make online forms that can be inserted into your web page or used as separate pages. It is very flexible and honestly takes very little technical knowledge.

Pete Cashmore writes a popular blog about new Web 2.0 services at Mashable.com. He's a consultant for organizations looking to leverage the new social web paradigm. Pete frequently covers web services that he says are designed to "feed the MySpace beast".

Along with Second Life (subject of an upcoming interview) MySpace is a topic that many nonprofit organizations are giving some amount of thought to engaging with. The MySpace profile page for the film An Inconvenient Truth has been added to the friends list of almost 70,000 MySpace users. That profile page uses multimedia extensively and if your organization seeks to get into MySpace, you may want to consider moving beyond a simple default page as well.

Other organizations participating in MySpace include Green Peace USA, Philadelphia's Clean Air Council, the World Wildlife Federation and many, many more.  When MySpace users  add one of these groups as a friend, they are notified whenever new items, events or writings are added to the organization's page.