Check out this announcement for an event I will be participating in later this month. I hope readers here will come and participate as well. Click on the names of the other moderators to see their blogs.

It’s happening in TechSoup, a five-day online event:

The Impact of Web 2.0 on the Nonprofit Community

Join CompuMentor’s community engagement program director John Lorance and a host of leading Web technology advocates as they demystify Web 2.0 technologies and illustrate how using new socially oriented technological innovations can help the nonprofit community. Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, social bookmarking and online social networks, blogging, content sharing through Wikis and RSS, and new Web widgets need not only be in the hands of well-funded developers; but also can be used by organizations to further their missions.

Co-hosts include:

• Marnie Webb of CompuMentor

• Ruby Sinreich two-time winner of “Best Blog” from The Independent Weekly

• Chris Messina of Flock and SpreadFireFox fame

• Marshall Kirkpatrick, trainer and educator on Web 2.0 technologies

• Phil Klein, nonprofit technologist of Pen and Pixel

• Alexandra Samuel, online community consultant with Social Signal

• Michael Stein, nonprofit technology blogger

• Yann Toledano, nonprofit technology consultant and TechSoup forum co-host.

• Eddie Codel, social networking technology advocate and Webzine conference organizer.

These leading voices of Web 2.0 technology will help you bring the ever-changing field of the second wave of Web applications and tools into practical focus. Event hosts will share their real-world stories, demystify the buzzwords, and provide resources. Discussion will focus on exploring the latest trends in Web publishing for all, effective online communications, emerging research and discovery methods, and collaboration tools.

This event will eliminate the buzz and bring into focus how nonprofits can use these tools to learn from other organizations’ Web travels. You will come away with practical tips, models, resources, and tools for bringing collaborative technologies and processes to your own organization.

Save the dates: October 24-October 28

Join us the week of October 24, for a free, five-day online event, in the TechSoup Emerging Technology forum www.techsoup.org/web2event as we discuss issues such as:

§ What do we mean by Web 2.0?

§ How can you use an RSS feed to get pushed information as well as to push your content to others?

§ What on earth is a Wiki? How is it better than the old-fashioned Web site?

§ What is tagging and how is it relevant? How can you learn from others’ Web searches?

§ What are widgets and how can these new tools help you solve age-old problems?

§ How can an online social network help your organization find volunteers?

Technorati Tags: techsoup, web2.0, nptech, net2

For those who visit to find a pile of new posts here, or anyone else so inclined, here’s acouple helpful links:

• Web2.0 – Wikipedia’s Definition
• A summary from me of Web2.0
• The Web 2.0 conference
• My recent bookmarks tagged web2.0Del.icio.us Tag Web2.0 (any web page bookmarked as web2.0)

I’ve got to get some sleep.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, introduction, background,

Updates: 1. Add to this list the rumored sale of Weblogs.com ping service to Verisign. Hmmm…Wonder if they’ll do something about the spam-blogs. Pingoat is great about that. Maybe someone should give them millions of dollars. 2. The Gawker Media Empire (owners of the rad LifeHacker blog, is loud and clear about not being for sale. In fact they’ve made a deal instead to get their content translated into multiple languages to reach more readers. Cool.

A series of interesting developments in the world of corporate acquisitions over the last few days:

• Newsgator (my favorite RSS reader) buys Net News Wire, a Mac-based desktop RSS reader; one of the oldest and most popular desktop RSS readers. You can read about Newsgator’s acquisition of Net News Wire here.
• Yahoo! buys Upcoming.org, an awesome online events calender with tags and feeds. Check out this announcement from the Upcoming.org folks and the discussion late in the long list of comments.
• And the most interesting of all in my mind…AOL to buy Weblogs Inc. You can read about the Weblogs Inc. blogging network in this exclusive story about the acquisition, or just go visit their site and you’ll see what they are doing. It’s rad. There are lots and lots of cool blogs in this network, but The Social Software Blog is my favorite.

So what does this mean for Web2.0? This is certainly becoming the dominant business model – build something cool, get a large user base, then sell to a larger company. (Like eBay buying Skype just last month.) It kind of makes me sad. Isn’t independence a viable business model? What examples are there of such acquisitions not slowing innovation, openness and responsiveness to a crawl? Please tell me if you know.

Technorati Tags: upcoming.org, netnewswire, newsgator, yahoo, weblogsinc, AOL, acquisitions, Web2.0

For some indication of how intense the explosion of web based services and applications is, check out these pages:

• Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0
• Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+apps
• Emily Chang’s fantastic site eHub

What do the things highlighted on these pages have in common?

1. They reley on serious bandwidth
2. cheap data storage
3. storage done on the network and not on your computer
4. user supplied data and network effects( Amazon.com’s users’ book reviews, Craig’s List classified ads, and items tagged in social bookmarking services are some traditional examples)
5. AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) a programming method that loads more into your browser than is shown at any one time, so your clicks can be responded to immediately without sending a signal back to the host server. Slick.

Those are some of the key components of Web2.0 and the number of new tools being created, mixed, mashed-up etc. can be overwhelming. I’m here to help you figure out ones work best together in the service of your non-technological interests.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, del.icio.us, eHub