I almost got suckered into believing all of the naysaying about Twitter "just being a waste of time."

In order to doublecheck my insecurities, I flipped through the past 24 hours of tweets so that I could audit whether or not I am actually learning anything from the time I spend there.

Yesterday morning, 1.2 million people in 6 major US cities read a morning edition of the New York Times that was a little…different. The Times was dated July 4, 2009, and announced that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had ended; global warming was fixed; and the economy was on the upswing. Good news! Or was it news?

Of course, this wasn’t actually the staid NYT. Instead, a collective of activists had created the spoof, with the intent of encouraging President-Elect Obama to keep his election promises.

I just sent a memo to Change.gov. Hopefully the Obama administration will use web tools to keep a dialogue open with the public and keep the administration more transparent.

The Obama campaign harnessed to talent and enthusiasm of many internet techies to put together an internet infrastructure and strategies to win. Here's a video interview by Technology Review with one of the head technologists with scoop about how Obama's get-out-the-vote worked and what might happen in the future.

I think it might be possible that nonprofits will benefit from this burst of tech development for their own operations in the near future.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1460879066/bctid1902591156

What can we learn from the unstoppable Obama PR machine that just rolled over the country? Never mind the politics: the campaign was the smartest publicity siege that’s been seen in a long time. It’s particularly worth paying attention to how Obama and his crew of merry techsters paid attention to the net. They pulled a bunch of cool tools from their utility belt: social networking sites, twitter, text messaging, and even virutal advertising in video games.  Find out more about their strategy and how it could work for your non-profit...

We have seen it and heard about it time and again, but the Obama campaign is capitalizing on social media use and setting some great examples for nonprofits and other social change campaigns looking to try something new.  Without any candidate endorsement, we can look at the success the Obama camp has had and try it out in our own work!

Newest in the playbook: iPhone app

On the official Barak Obama website ,supporters can now download and use the Obama iPhone application.  As the site explains, the features include:

When putting together a social media strategy, be it your initial plan or a revamp, please (except in a few - very few - exceptional cases) stop offering me another movement to jump onto.

A while back, I worked for a woman for three months as a contracted employee - something of an odds and ends outreach person - and after finally putting some thought into her mission, she finally came up with an overarching objective: "I want you to use the Internet to start a movement around [the release of my book]."

The publication in question, which read like a textbook, was a heady and conceptual description of a particular element of global economics. Her goal was radically unachievable and immodest.