Category Archives: Blogging

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.

Amnesty International On Yahoo!

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Good to see that Amnesty International is calling on its supporters to challenge Yahoo! for their roll in the recent imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. From the first paragraphs of the story there:

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is serving a ten-year prison sentence in China for sending an email to the USA. He was accused of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” by using his Yahoo email account.

According to the court transcript of the evidence that led to Shi Tao’s sentencing, the US internet company Yahoo provided account-holder information on him.

Shi Tao was accused of sending an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source. The Communist Party directive had warned Chinese journalists of possible social unrest during the anniversary of the June 4 Movement (in memory of the Tiananmen crackdown), and directed them not to fuel it via media reports.

Here’s a list of articles concerning Yahoo in China over at the very worth visiting Committee to Protect Bloggers. Shi Tao is just one of a number of folks internationally who are in prison for their electronic communication.

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Interview with Nancy White

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Nancy White is an incredible woman. She did a long Skype interview with me for Net Squared last week and I hope readers here will go check it out. Here’s more on Nancy from my intro to the interview:

Nancy White provides strategic communication, online community development, facilitation, marketing, and project management services for the community, non-profit and business sectors through Full Circle Associates, her Seattle, Washington based consultancy.

Nancy is on the advisory boards for BlogHer, Knowledge in the Public Interest and works with many other organizations. She helped set up and has been a key facilitator of the March of Dimes’ ShareYourStory blog community for parents with children in neonatal Intensive Care Units.

From the Garden to the Law Library: Web 2.0 Applied

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I just posted two new interviews over at NetSquared. The first was with Abby Rosenheck from Urban Sprouts, a SF school gardens project with a blog. I think she offers a great explanation of the support-building function a blog can play, especially for a small organization.

The second was with legal blawger Dennis Kennedy. We talked about a whole lot things, but the discussion about OPML was most exciting to me because I’m on an OPML kick these past 24 hours. We also talked about blogging, RSS, wikis, legal research and the law.

Interview with Blogger Trish Snyder

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Over at Net Squared I just posted an interesting interview I did with Trish Snyder, whose Bloggingforacause.com is one of my favorite topic-specific, non-tech blogs. Trish is a networker amongst bloggers and blog readers fighting cancer. As I’m sure everyone knows but may not think about right away, cancer comes in many forms and there’s a large community of people relating to the issue from different vantage points. Trish’s blog is very well done and she has some interesting advice for new bloggers.

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Web Readers Act Fast; Design Key

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A new study described in Nature magazine indicates that web readers may be more fickle than some of us would like to think. Key findings:

  • Site quality impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
  • “Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. “
  • “People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to ‘prove’ to themselves that they made a good initial decision.”
  • These days, enlightened web users want to see a “puritan” approach, Caudron adds. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.

This article has made me look over my site again; some changes will be appearing over the next couple of days.

Related: I go back and forth all the time about whether sidebars look and work best on the left of right hand side of a blog. This “visual attention heat map” from Eyetools Research indicates that blog viewers tend to ignore content in the middle of the right hand side. But it’s hard to know whether that’s indication that the pictured blog is mistaken to put its advertising there or whether the location is ignored because that’s where the advertising is!

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