My name is Brenda Hough and I'll be one of the guest bloggers at next week's NetSquared Conference (N2Y3). I'm a librarian and currently work for the MaintainIT Project as the Library Training Specialist. I'm also a doctoral student and my dissertation topic is Wikipedia usage. I'm looking at the conference agenda now, trying to decide which sessions I'll attend, and it's a tough call!

In response to Britt's post about NetSquared's "2007 Best of the Nonprofit Social Web" awards, I humbly submit my own organization, The Nature Conservancy, as an entrant in the Best Use of the Social Web for Raising Awareness by a Nonprofit category.

2007 has been a breakthrough year for The Nature Conservancy's web marketing efforts on the social web, particularly on social news and bookmarking web sites. After about nine months of building up trust and credibility in some of the major social news and bookmarking networks, we finally saw results in a big way this year, including:

In looking at the first moments of being an official part of the wikipedia community (in that i now have an actual account on wikipedia's site) i am left with a feeling of false excitement... ready to create articles about all the subjects/people/etc i can't wait to see on wikipedia, i am left with the huge burden of worrying about being sued, or boo'ed, while i read the huge guideline section.

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.