Dave Winer, who apparently hasn’t stopped blogging after all, on why organizations should blog:
“To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.”
Winer was one of the key inventors of RSS, podcasting, OPML and goodness knows what else.
Oxfam maintains the tradition of European NGO’s using witty online video to build support for their campaigns, this one highly interactive and about economic class: Bit Unfair.
My co-worker at Net Squared Britt Bravo has posted an excellent list of 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs. Check it out.
Possibly even cooler than that is Britt’s 7 Ways Nonprofits can use Podcasts.
One of the questions a new blogger or blogging organization has to make is whether to use a hosted service (like blogger.com, typepad.com, etc.) or to rent server space and host the blog yourself. Perhaps the most accurate way to describe this is to call the options a. hosted blogging software and b. unhosted blogging software. Here are some pros and cons both directions, based on my experience and thoughts.
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Here’s something the world needs more of: a workshop on blogging as part of your larger communication strategy. And not just any workshop, but a 4 day workshop in a beautiful location with great food. (Priced quite fairly, I think, given how intensive it sounds.) Alex Samuel and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal are very smart people, I met them and enjoyed their company at recent South by Southwest and NTen conferences. Rob is a politically savvy and very funny guy. Alex has a PHD from Harvard and does online work around blogging, tagging, RSS, the international digital divide and lots of other topics. (And with Net Squared, where we’re both contracted.) This workshop isn’t about the technical side of blogging though, it’s about the strategic side of the medium.
I know that in my consulting practice, and I hear the same from other people all the time, many organizations can have a hard time grasping the ethos and potential of self-publishing on the web – of blogging! I find that the better I understand the whole story myself, the better I’m able to explain it to other people, to make it happen and to get the most out of the medium. That’s why something like what Alex and Rob are putting on makes sense to me.
You can read about the workshop on the venue’s web site and about Social Signal at socialsignal.com
Digg clones (see this one, this one, this one and this one), mapping services (like Community Walk and others in that space) and blog traffic stats services. Any thoughts on any of the above would be more than welcome in comments.
I also need to write a how to use OPML post, but I am just slammed with catch up work right now.
I like this list of tips, it’s thorough and succinct. From Rob Cottingham at Social Signal, a Vacouver consultancy that you should check out if you’re interested in a key example of what people are doing in the Web 2.0 and nonprofit space. I work with Social Signal folks on Net Squared.
From their e-newsletter:
Tips on beginning to blog
1. Serve yourself. Know why you’re blogging: a sense of mission can go a long way to keeping your blog interesting, focused and on track.
2. Serve your audience. Figure out who you want to reach, and what they’re looking for (as well as what they don’t need to hear).
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As promised I’ve posted an interview with OPML blogger Lisa Williams, though we didn’t find much time to talk about OPML! Instead we talked about her community blog project, h2otown, which rocks. And her power use of search and RSS. It was super fun and informative. Hopefully we’ll get to catch up and do an interview about OPML soon, which is why I contacted her in the first place!
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