My organization, jerseyarts.com, is a nonprofit program cosponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and ArtsPride NJ. Our mission is generally to increase the awareness and participation in the arts in NJ, more specifically to make it easier for the field to get their message to the people of NJ.

I just got hired as the Marketing and Communication Associate mostly I think because of my history of following the nptech conversation over the years and trying my best to stay ahead of the curve. Alas, I feel as if I am falling behind. The internet age seemingly makes young people old before their time.

It seems like the internet is evolving to match it's ever growing potential as a processor of knowledge, opinion, information all tailored to the individual. And it seems the the way to do all this is by aggregating feeds. I'm a web designer of sorts and wish sometimes there was a Karin feed that would tell people everything I was accomplishing online. But alas, that is harder than it sounds. But Friendfeed comes close for sure.

But, enough about me, lets talk about my cause. My question is this, we have a lot of content in our organization's calendar and changing content online. We use facebook and flickr and will be using youtube. We also are thinking about a blog page. Is friend feed the answer? Could it be?

I have here a picture of what the tags for the Hope Meter project could look like.  As a quick reminder for someone who wandered onto this blog, the idea is that items would be rated according to whether they make the user feel more or less hopeful.  In this case, I have given positive-rated items a blue color and negative ones a red color.  The spectrum of things tagged would in most cases result in some shade of purple, assuming that most pages tagged would be a mixture of positive and negative things.   I think if you look at the example you'll get a better idea of what I am saying.

 Please remember that this is only an example and not neccessarily  representative of my personal opinions.  

Here's the link for a larger picture:

Slide from a slideshare called "Death by Powerpoint"

Flickr Photo from Julie K In Taiwan

Tags are keywords that describe digital resources such as blog posts, photos, videos, bookmarks, or anything on the Web. Tags can help facilitate knowledge sharing, particularly during conference events or an entire field (take for example the NpTech Tag) because information can be aggregated and easily scanned via an RSS feed or Yahoo Pipe.

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.

Would you like to participate in the NPTech attention stream but feel like it's too overwhelming? Is the whole idea new to you? Before describing the drastic measures I took to lighten a reader's load, here's the basics on what it's all about...

NPTech is a tag used by people to designate an item they find online as being of interest to the community of nonprofit technologists. People use nptech as one of any number of tags to describe an item online and that item is entered into the nptech attention stream, subscribable by RSS or email. Since it's in RSS format, you can do all kinds of things with it - see for example the feed of the tag net2 syndicated automatically in the sidebar of this site. ("Net2 elsewhere" is what it's titled.)