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17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You

I am asked every week or more about how an organization can get bloggers to write about them. My first answer is always to suggest that they identify the bloggers in their midst and dive right in. But sometimes they don't want strategy, they just want tips. In which case, I can now direct them to Cory Doctorow's 17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You. Here they are in brief (but you really ought to go read them for the full effect): Have a link. Have a permanent link. Have a link for everything. Use real links. Use links that go to pages. Flash sites stink. PDFs stink. Streams stink. Put your URL on your images. Linking policies are ridiculous. Don't worry about "bandwidth stealing." Offer high-res images. Forget the "copyright protection" Javascript. Enough with the legal boilerplate. Let bloggers know how you'd like to be attributed. Creative Commons licensing takes the guesswork out of blogging. Send suggestions by the preferred means. Posted: 3/18/08; 7:19:10 PM #

Verizon Blocked Messages of Abortion Rights Group

What if your organization had to pay extra to your ISP in order for people to see your website? That's not an unreasonable scenario if we don't achieve some sort of net neutrality policy about the Internet. Just look at the story of how Verizon Blocked Messages of Abortion Rights Group last year. What can happen to a reproductive rights group with text messaging can happen to any of us. Posted: 3/18/08; 7:08:59 PM #

Antisocial: Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio
	I must be feeling particularly curmudgeonly this week, but here's another hype busting piece that I particularly enjoyed: Antisocial: Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio, by Bob Cringely. Posted: 3/18/08; 7:00:21 PM #

Simplicity

A colleague of mine once called the relationship management platform that we developed at Social Ecology "the Emacs of nonprofit software". This was both a compliment and an insult, since Emacs is a notoriously powerful and far from intuitive text editor whose proponents tend to use it for just about anything. I had a painful moment the other day when I looked at this comic by Eric Burke: Simplicity. Does it ring a bell for you too? Posted: 3/18/08; 6:43:59 PM #

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0

I have wondered for some time if we didn't need to renumber the web in order to feel ok about indulging in another anxious hype cycle. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in my thinking that the term "web 2.0" is, at best, just another name for the web in general. Even Tim O'Reilly admitted that "Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what's happening". In his First Monday article entitled Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0, Trebor Scholz takes apart the claims of this conveniently fuzzy concept. I recommend you read this piece before you ask (as I recently saw someone do on a mailing list) if you and your organizations are "web 2.0" enough. Posted: 3/18/08; 6:34:34 PM #