After successfully introducing free Wikispaces Plus accounts for K-12 education, Wikispaces has decided to give away 2 million free Plus accounts to higher education institutions!

So far Wikispaces have been helping primary and secondary (K-12) educators, but they have decided to "take it to the next level" and expand the programme towards the higher education. Wikispaces are a very useful space for teachers, students, professors, researchers and librarians who need a simple, powerful way to write and work on the Internet.

As a part of the free wiki programme Wikispaces is also planning to develop and release some of the tools and features that educators request most often.

Video is a great medium to inform and inspire our audiences to action. And, in the last few years the barriers to entry have become far lower than ever before. Affordable video capability and basic editing software are now widely available - and easy to use. But, how can organizations and enterprises best use video to inspire change? This month's Net2 Think Tank is asking for your tips and tools for creating effective videos. From choosing the hardware to promoting the finished product, we want to hear from you. Share your tools, tactics, and best practices with the NetSquared Community today!

Over the years my family and I have worked together to help my Grandmother get wired. She now uses Google Search, reads her news online, sends and receives email, and even uses Facebook to check-in with family and friends. Using the internet isn't a new concept to my Grandmother, though it's not really something she finds very intuitive either. That said, she understands the power of these tools, and relishes the opportunity to learn more.

My Grandmother also has a whole network of friends who are at various stages of computer use/online adoption. Recently, she asked me if I could share any resources for her and her friends to be able to network, learn and socialize on the internet.

Looking for a way for your community members to contribute information to an online collective database? Why not consider a wiki? A wiki is a website that allows multiple contributors to easily add, edit, and contribute content, images, web links, and more. Wikis are specifically designed for collaborative editing and are used as public websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and for knowledge management systems.

Introducing Twilio SMS

Has your organization ever wanted to have an easy way to automate your text-messaging services? Last week, Twilio announced a tool that allows you to add SMS functionality to your web apps for about 3 cents a message. At the bottom of this post, I've embedded a video from Twilio explaining how the service works.

Blog posts, news articles, videos, photos, and much, much more!  There are so many ways that people post content online, and that people talk about the issues you are interested in or even your organization!  But, how do you stay on top of it all?  And how do you do it while still having time to do the rest of your job!

How do you stay up-to-date online?

Topic:

How do you stay on top of all your favorite bloggers, news sources, and organizational mentions online? 

N2Y4 is just days away, and we're already cooking up interesting blog posts from the unlikely set of allies participating at this year's event. The 15 Featured Projects competing for cash-prizes; a roster of world-class speakers, and innovators shaping the field of mobile-technology for social change. We designed the N2Y4 widget to ensure you have an entry-point to follow the activities at this year's conference from your couch or kitchen table.

Everything you need to catch the action poppin' at this year's N2Y4 Challenge and Conference can be found right here!

Tomorrow, October 18th, Eric Leland of Leland Design, and I will be presenting about, "Internet Strategy on the Cheap" at the San Francisco Bay Area Nonprofit Boot Camp.

 We've compiled a list of Tools and Resources to share with participants, and thought that you might enjoy seeing it as well.  This is by no means a comprehensive list, so please add your suggestions in the comments!

We very recently took a look at what is and is not getting read on the NetSquared blogs and figured that the information we came upon will be as useful to your content development strategy as it will be to ours.

Here are a few things that jumped right out at us (the bold is straight from the report, followed immediately by my commentary):

Join us at NewsTools2008, April 30-May 3, at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, a three-day conceptual mashup where journalists will work with technologists to create new tools for journalism that matters. The U.S. news media is changing fast. Strip away the legacy platforms, and what remains of journalism that is needed to support participatory democracy and community? At NewsTools2008, we'll ground you on the way news has been manufacturered until now, we'll overview how technology is disrupting the old ways; then we'll ask you to work for up to two days with journalists to build new systems that engage with all the best tools avaiable. The result we seek: The launch of at least a half-dozen new machine-based systems that move journalism outside of the traditional boxes and into our participatory, crowdsource culture.

See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv
or: http://www.newstools2008.org

Registration discounts and stipends availble for day-trippers . . . email for details: Bill Densmore, the media giraffe project at umass amherst
413-458-8001 / densmore@mediagiraffe.org