Monthly Archives: February 2006

Washington Post Integrates Blogs

Did you know that many of the Washington Post’s online stories include a little box showing blogs that are linking to that story? It looks like they have been since this fall. It’s one more way that Technorati is rocking the blogosphere. Why didn’t anyone else think of doing this? Or would anybody else be able to?

I think I’d seen that before but forgot about it until I got some of that link love myself on accident. It sure seems like people interested in crossing over into mainstream media discussion of topics important to them, if there is such a division, could benefit from checking to see if the Post has coverage of the issue they are blogging about! It seems like a pretty reciprocal deal, in fact.

Last month the Post turned off comments on their own blogs, so adding these inbound links is obviously a well thought out way to integrate new media.

I’m going to go post right now over at the Social Software blog about PRNewswire’s adding a “post to del.ico.us” button to all their press releases!

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Sex+Commerce = What?

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The wacky world of blog networks never ceases to amaze. The inevitable has occurred and a network of sex blogs is being launched. I emailed Madge Wienstein about it to make sure she was privy. But you know what? I don’t think I like the tag line on this network. SugarBank: Sex + Commerce. After watching the PBS show “Sex Slaves” last night it seems all the more inappropriate.

I was disappointed that even PBS documentary neglected almost 100% to address the fact that…“Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States…” From Cia.gov

Now I’m sure that a blog written from the perspective of a sex slave trafficker wouldn’t be accepted into the SugarBank network, and I don’t mean to bait anyone by saying that, but where does the line get drawn by readers, writers, aggregators, etc. in this new web world of easy publishing? (Presumably a blog written from the perspective of some one fighting sex slave trafficking wouldn’t be accepted into the network either – and that’s interesting isn’t it?)

I don’t know how much clarity there is around this and related issues at all. Perhaps at some level it’s a personal question, but there must come a point where it’s not anymore. I’ve subscribed to the SugarBank RSS feed and will be interested to see how it turns out.

Related: Check out this blog The Center for Healthy Sex.

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Oh the challenges of multi-blogging

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So I’m exploring a very new work routine this week, having just begun blogging at the Social Software Blog of Weblogs Inc. The idea over there is to write lots of shorter posts, and the short part is a real challenge for me so far. I do want to continue blogging here as well, but we’ll see what that ends up looking like.

Since the last time I posted here I’ve made the following posts over there, all of which may be of interest to readers of this blog.

I do intend to keep writing here for purposes other than just pointing to posts elsewhere, but we’ll see how it all shakes out!

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Kanter and Stein: Two New Interviews on the Changing Web

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This weekend I posted interviews with two long time non profit technology profesionals: Beth Kanter, a tech consultant and trainer, and Michael Stein, owner of a software company for non profit groups, over at Net Squared. Here’s a couple of highlights, I hope they’ll convince you to go check out the full interviews and the Net Squared experience.

Discussing the parralels between Web 1.0 and 2.0, Beth said:

Nonprofits would say in 1994 – the World Wide What? In 1995, they would say — it’s hype. A few early adopters set up simple home pages, but around 97 more and more nonprofits started to put up pages. Then nonprofits moved to the second generation sites – more professional graphics, interactivity, etc. Webmaster became a professional position and there were web specific graphic designers. I think it (Web2.0 for lack of better phrase) is here to stay. There’s still a lot of wild west ideas, but things like flickr and del.ico.us are not going to go away, I think. We had a lot of failures in early days of the Internet in adopting email and web pages, but there were valuable lessons learned. The early failures — while some point to these as reasons why nonprofits should ignore web2.0 — the early failures are important because they pave the way for more widespread adoption.

Here’s my favorite part of Michael’s interview:

Michael

Our clients with the most active websites are adding, in addition to their brochure-ish stuff, various forms of non-profit e-commerce – register for our meetings, make a donation, buy our publications.

But they are not providing information services, which is what all the blogging – wiki – rss stuff boils down to.

Marshall

Why should they?

Michael

In order to raise their visibility in the larger community that exists around their issues. In effect, for the same reason they have static pages about who they are.

I also put this little pop up box in the interview with Michael, it makes me think I should do more things like this.

If you’d like to subscribe to Beth’s blog, Michael’s blog and the feed for interviews at Net Squared – you can do so with this OPML file: nonprofitfeeds1.xml (I explained OPML files in this post. )

I have to sign off and take the next two days off, but when I get back I’ll post a podcast interview I got to do with Doug Kaye of ITConversations.

I got a new gig

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I am thrilled to announce that I have joined the team of the Social Software Blog at Weblogs, Inc. I’ll begin posting in the next few days and will let readers here know when I do. I intend to continue blogging here as well, as this blog and that one are likely to be very different experiences.

I’ll be focusing my energy then towards this, my ongoing work at NetSquared and for The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Five Useful OPML Files

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I’ve been wanting to put together some good OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files all week, inspired by Anne Zelenka’s giant Blogher file and the conversation I had with legal blogger Dennis Kennedy about the incredible potential for this medium.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.

Without further theoretical ado, I’ll tell you how to use these files and then tell you what I’ve put in them.
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