Just a heads up that NetSquared.org will be down tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th from 7-8 AM PT for maintenance.

Photo Credit: Men at Work by Luca Masters.

I'd like to announce a new website that I'm starting up called The Open Municipal Geodata Standard Organization Website, or OMG Standard for short, at www.omgstandard.com. The idea behind it is to have an open forum to discuss and collaborate on how to involve governments to effectively release their public data to communities.

The goals at the moment are to:
1 create an open standard for the structuring of municipal data
2 convince governments it's in their best interest to make the data easily available
3 provide tools to let this happen efficiently

"The language barrier is the only remaining barrier on the Net, but in a way, the most significant because comprehending human language is something only people can do. Breaking the language barrier is more about finding a successful organizational structure and economic incentives, than it is about technology."

Does your organization's work serve people who speak a language other than your own? Do you wish there was a way to translate your web site or blog's content so that you could reach a more diverse population?

Worldwide Lexicon is an open source, collaborative translation system for websites and publishers.

in the following e-interview, Brian McConnell, the project's leader, talks about how you can use Worldwide Lexicon with your nonprofit's blog or web site. Brian is an author, inventor and entrepreneur. Prior to WWL, he founded three telecommunications companies. He often writes for O'Reilly Media on topics ranging from programming to science and technology.

How does Worldwide Lexicon work?

The Worldwide Lexicon is a collaborative translation system, similar to Wikipedia, where people can view, create and edit translations. The translations are all created by people, not computers, so the quality can be quite good. The key idea of the system is that websites with a loyal audience often have bilingual readers without knowing it. With WWL they can organize their own users to contribute translations, for free, or for a small fee, or other incentives. WWL is usually integrated into participating sites, so they can promote it to their user communities who, in turn, can contribute translations. WWL is open source, and we are producing a wide variety of tools that can be embedded in virtually any website or web service.

If you tried to log on to the NetSquared web site today to post a comment or a blog post, you probably got a message like, " Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page."

Sorry about that.

It took us a little bit, but it's fixed now.

Photo Credit: Repair Bug by AZRainman/Rainmaker

Last week at the BlogHer Conference I had the pleasure of meeting Rochelle Robinson, the Online Program Manager for Ms. Magazine. Rochelle specializes in online advocacy using technology for positive change in public consciousness, law, and social policy.

One of the cool things on her site is a link to Social Change Websites, a directory of nonprofit, grassroots and advocacy campaign web sites. The site is Rochelle's brainchild.

You can submit your social change web site here. (Check out the guidelines before you submit).

Google:
1,310,000 for little +fish +big +pond
Ok, I make websites for a living. Well, I do a lot of other stuff too, but one of the things I do is make websites. I make these sites 90% of the time for small to medium sized companies, and of course these days everyone knows (well just about everyone, I do occasionally still run into a person who thinks just cause they have a website for their TOTALLY off the wall widget they are going to instantly sell a million of the dang things and retire on an island they buy with the money, anyway…) almost everyone knows if you build it, it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Enter SEO, Search Engine Optimization that is: SEO, SEM, META-Tags, Pay-Per-Click, etc.

Over the last few months, I have been researching blog software. I have narrowed it down to two options:

www.drupal.org or www.wordpress.org

WordPress support other options besides just blogging. I am looking into this.

Drupal is connected to NetSquared. That's a plus. It is actually a CMS program Content Management System. This means I could actually build an entire website ustilizing this program. I am very tempted to do so. I will need one or two volunteers to assist me though.

The problem is that the WYSE website is currently hosted on a Windows NT server at www.prohosting.com. Both Drupal and WordPress are built on PHP. Our website is currently built on ASP. Don't ask me to explain. Bottom line: we have to switch to PHP in order to have a blog at www.wyse.org. OK, maybe we don't HAVE TO, but my vision for the site can only be actualized if we are on a Unix server.

This blog will cronicle the process of building a new and innovative web presence for Women and Youth Supporting Each Other.

We have a website. www.wyse.org However, it is outdated and our forums are under utilized becuase they are too static.

The goal is to create a modern website for WYSE that incorporates a blog, chat capabilities and many other available social networking tools to bring us into the 21st century.

My vision is a mutli-level web community that serves the needs of our constituents(girls in 6th through 12th grade), our volunteer networks(ranging from college students to professional women), sponsors and foundations as well as other non profits who have a cyber footprint.

On my project website, www.makingthesite.com, I've put up a poll where you can vote on what the name should be for the decentralized charity website I'm building.

• charityreactor.org
• charimo.org
• helpalot.org 

If you don't know the project, here's a quick summary:

Taking inspiration from the openness of Wikipedia and adding social network aspects, I’m going to build a website that has the potential to be a chartiy guide, that not only contains every charity in the world, but also is the home of an energetic community that will change the world for the better.