Weblog
Oct 11, 06:11 am: A little ubiquity experiment
I’ve been pretty enamored of Ubiquity since installing it a month and a half ago. Tonight, I decided to play around with writing a command.
So, in just a few months and with (oh, trust me when I say this) virtually no skills whatsoever, I wrote my first Ubiquity commands: Social Actions Ubiquity Command.
You’ll see the full disclaimer there (and the things that I’d like to figure out how to add). But it was interesting to me to see how genuinely easy it was to do this.
Any feedback is, of course, very welcome
(and big fat thanks to the fine kids at Social Actions for making this swell API. They were a winner at NetSquared Year 3 — an effort with which I have some involvement)
Sep 5, 10:00 pm: Do me a favor...
Go to Amazon and look down the left side of your screen. Low down. To the part that’s headed “Make Money.”
Click through on those things. Try them. How easy is it? What is Amazon’s benefit?
Now, how does that apply to what you are doing.
Discuss.
tagged: partnership, amazon, models
Aug 30, 03:29 pm: Microformats and disaster relief
In Disaster Preparedness, Deborah Elizabeth Finn uses the opportunity of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to reflect on the progress we’ve made toward a Recovery 2.0. She laments that we haven’t done more to prepare for the inevitable.
There is, I think (I think!), a simple way that we can be better prepared to assist when the next, inevitable, disaster hits: microformats.
During Hurricane Katrina, a lot of hours went into taking all of the unstructured, missing persons data that worried individuals were dumping into newspaper message, church and school message boards. Microformats, which provides a way to identify information that’s more commonly associated with a database, could be a way around this.
hCard is a format for marking an individuals contact information so that applications know what the data is. For example, add Smartzilla to Firefox and then jump on over to Chris Messina’s contact information. A simple right click and the information gets dumped into all the right fields in Microsoft Outlook (or the address book of your choice). You can even (easily!) set this up on your own website using the hCard creator.
So, what if we make something like the hCard creator but specifically to capture missing person data? What happens? You distribute to all the places people turn up to look for their loved ones — newspapers and other community-based websites — and ask them to put it on the side of their message boards. Something like “Posting information about a missing person. Please use this to get the proper code.” Or something better written. In an emergency, the promote the hell out of that link so that everyone uses it.
What’s needed to make this work? Well, am I right? Is this a way of structuring the data and pulling it all into a central repository (or just providing a way for the folks at the Red Cross and other helping orgs to search for names of people lost and found)?
So, if my understanding is right then someone needs to make the version of the hCard creator that provides structure for missing persons data.
Any takers?
tagged: microformats, hcard, hcardcreator, recovery2.0
May 25, 04:24 am: How will end up with a web os?
By buying into a familiar interface. That’s how Windows did it, right? An interface that applied to the internal applications so that the users knew what to expect. So much so that that familiarity as become a reason to keep using the same products. When an interface is made ubiquitous, that company will be the one who has built a Web OS. How is that going to happen? Well:
tagged: google, microsoft, yahoo, library, developer, tools
Mar 10, 05:14 am: And the connection between Myspace.com and nonprofits?
They have a whole category for nonprofit and philanthropy. Are you connecting with these users?
tagged: myspace, network, nptech, net2
Mar 8, 04:21 pm: Trying to grok OPML
(or, how the Internet works to give help when help is needed)
Yesterday, a bunch of things added up.
I had an early morning conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick and we spent some time (not incidentally because of his recent interview with Lisa Williams) talking about OPML and Marshall’s fascination with it. I had to admit that I didn’t really get it. Except as a way of importing and exporting feeds, I just didn’t get it. I’d downloaded the OPML editor a couple of times and prepared to give it a game shot but I just didn’t get it.
Because I was working at home which means I have room to think and not just go from meeting to meeting, I had time to stroll through my aggregator. And, because of my recent conversation with Marshall, things about OPML stuck out for me and I said, in one of the comments, that I wanted to understand. Lisa Williams noticed the comments and tried to explain.
I get the explanation in an intellectual sort of way and so I’ve downloaded the OPML editor and am trying again.
I’ll be honest: I’m not interested in another blogging tool or bundling feeds. Or, rather, I am but I’m always interested in those things. What I’m interested in is the ability to create a distributed directory. What Lisa calls a Web Worldview. She writes:
A Web Worldview is a lightweight, distributed directory that can be maintained by one person, or a million people. Each person maintains an outline, in which individual nodes on the outline point to a resource. The resources could be anything: a page on the web, a feed, a file, a picture, a podcast. Anything that can be on a network.
I’ve been trying to work out a manageable way to track the nonprofit blogosphere. There have been lots of attempts – editable pages, a wordpress site, and – most notably and most energetically – the nonprofit blog exchange – and each has merits and achieves different goal but I don’t see how any of them can sustain a directory. So, maybe OPML is the answer to this.
tagged: opml, lisa_williams, directory, nptech, blogosphere, trying
Feb 14, 05:37 am: Finding a person like me
From the Edelman Trust Barometer:
Trust in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which have consistently been the most-trusted institution in Europe during the six years that the survey has been conducted, has steadily increased in the U.S. (‘01=36%, ’06=54%); and increased significantly in the last 12 months in Canada (’05=45%, ‘06=57%) and Japan (’05=43%, ’06=66%). Despite the survey asking for only trusted global companies, many respondents volunteered NGOs such as the Red Cross in France and the UK and Greenpeace in Germany were also frequently mentioned. NGOs are now the most-trusted institution in every market except Japan and Brazil. The widespread rise in trust of NGOs has now extended to Asia, especially in China, where ratings went from 36% to 60% in last 12 months.
And, from Richard Edelman – 6 A.M., Davos Conversations on the Future of Media. I can’t even pick which of the quotes to point to. Go on. Read the whole thing.
And from his The Me2 Revolution:
Smart companies must reinvent their communications thinking, moving away from a sole reliance on top-down messages delivered through mass advertising. This is the Me2 Revolution. What is now required is a combination of outreach to traditional elites, including investors, regulators, and academics, plus the new elites, such as involved consumers, empowered employees, and non-governmental organizations.The most profound finding of the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer is that in six of the 11 countries surveyed, the “person like yourself or your peer” is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed. This has advanced steadily over the past three years.
Interesting stuff, eh? Indicates we shouldn’t be going hat in hand to corporation partners asking for their support. But that we should be going as equals, with something valuable to give and get.
tagged: net2, platform, outreach, advertising, edelman
Feb 10, 05:52 am: Here's a scenario we're all familiar with
No money, no IT but it has to span boundaries. That describes about every nonprofit technology, community project I’ve been involved with.
Nancy White is doing some interesting work in describing tools that can help communities of practice. Check out her flicker group.
(via Beth Kanter’s post on NetSquared)
technorati tags: cop, image, nancywhite
Dec 31, 06:09 am: Web 2.0 is about mindset
Over at Contentious, Amy Garhan writes about the hype and definition of Web 2.0:
More than anything else, Web 2.0 refers to a mindset. In turn, this mindset yields a decentralized, continuous approach to technology development, and a collaborative way of using tools or creating value.
She then goes on to write about the developer’s and user’s perspective (and it’s so good, I’ll keep quoting):
- Developer’s perspective: Create a user-friendly web-based service or tool and let people play with it. Make sure it allows some user interaction (or at least interaction of users’ data) by default. Be flexible and open about what your creation can become or how people can use it. “Should” is a bad word in Web 2.0. Just watch how people use it, learn from that, and roll with it. This way, the more people who use it, the richer it gets.
- User’s perspective: Find new ways to create, publish, share, and explore with the help of simple web-based services, most of which are free. Use these services (or combine services creatively) to collaborate with other people as much or as little as you want. Whatever you create with those services is yours, and you can take it with you if you want to. Oh, and by the way, even if you’re using a service purely for selfish reasons, with no intention of sharing your contributions or creations, you’re still helping to enrich that service.
Amy’s right, of course, none of this is new. But it is new on the web, I think, at least in this kind of scalable fashion.
technorati tags: net2, definition, web2.0
Dec 22, 12:04 am: I recognize these challenges
Jon Stahl writes about the challenges ONE/Northwest is facing as they work with new tools in a networked fashion:
But the biggest thing I’m learning from all of these experiments is how much there is to learn about how to work effectively in a complex network of poeple and information. And I’m realizing that progressive movements are going to need to invest a LOT more resources into teaching our people how to work effectively in this new kind of environment. It’s not obvious, it’s not intuitive, and while the tools are powerful, it takes some experience to wield them.
Our team for NetSquared is largely out of our office. We’re using a private drupal project space (hosted by the good folks at Bryght), basecamp, email, and IM. And, of course, phones. And it’s been a challenge. Both in terms of learning curve but also in terms of learning which tool best handles what kind of task. There’s also a huge dose of change management. So, we’re using those tools but still falling back on the old standard of having a busload of people attend a meeting every week.
technorati tags: net2, organizational change, tools, distributed work teams
