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Nonprofit Online News Returns from End-of-Year Doldrums
	I have yet to share what happened in December to get me to pretty much stop writing for the last few weeks. I still intend to, but I decided that it was better to just write first. So, today I'm sharing with you just a few items that I think you'll like. I don't want to overwhelm you with a backlog, but there will be lots more in the coming days. Posted: 1/20/09; 5:20:36 PM #

Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online

I got a huge kick out of Michael Agger's Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online at Slate Magazine. Part visual experiment, part research report, and part straight up goofiness, he does communicate a lot about how people really behave when they hit a web page. I think he's slightly wrong about blogs and even more wrong about how people read authors and sites to which they have established some loyalty or habit, but for the typical nonprofit website, there is a lot to learn here. Posted: 1/20/09; 5:17:29 PM #

Enterprise RSS: The State of the Industry

Over the years, we've done a lot of work on the use of RSS in the nonprofit sector, particularly its application to philanthropic organizations. Greg Reinacker's recent short piece on Enterprise RSS caught my attention. It's a straight up corporate perspective, but a valuable one to any organization that tracks "enterprise" trends. His team talks to about 50 large companies every week and what he has discovered is that RSS plays a vital role in a number of critical business functions, including portals, alerts, tracking systems, knowledge capture, social networking, and collaboration. Just like email, it's not flashy and it doesn't attract hype, but it's critical. Posted: 1/20/09; 5:02:41 PM #

Social Movements 2.0: Five Ways They're Important and Eight Things We Don't Know

I can barely bring myself to link to anything with the label two-point-oh on it, but Brendan Smith, Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher are writers I truly admire. Their recent piece on Social Movements 2.0 is a solid overview piece, not breathless or defensive in any way. It opens with a "virtual strike" of an Italian company by picketers in Second Life, runs through a range of well-linked stories and resources, and explores what we do and don't know about online organizing. Their five reasons why network communication is relevant to social movements are: (1) the ease of group formation, (2) its capacity for scale and amplification, (3) its interactive nature, (4) its capacity to undermine hierarchies, and (5) the cheapness and ease of its tools. They get some things wrong - the Internet and the Web have been interactive and peer to peer from the beginning - but their key points are important. Their descriptions of the eight things we don't know - and need to find out - are what's really interesting about this piece: (1) What does it mean when individuals begin organizing outside and without the help of traditional organizations? (2) It's easy and cheap for organizations to bring people together into a swarm or smart mob, but what do you do with them then? (3) Will offline social movement organizations be willing to cede control as ordinary people increasingly leverage social networking tools to channel their own activities? (4) How do labor and social movement organizations address the dangers associated with online action? (5) How do we track the demographics of who's online and who's not and what tools they are using? (6) How do we present complex ideas online? (7) How does offline and online social movement building fit together? (8) How can social movements wield real power online? Posted: 1/20/09; 4:41:26 PM #

The Whitehouse has a Blog

The Obama Whitehouse has a blog. Does your organization? I have been watching the blogging conversation for a decade now, from puzzled dismissal to curiosity to scornful dismissal to mixed camps. I suspect this will bring down one more barrier in those nonprofit organizations that, as little as a year ago, were saying that blogs were a fad and if not, that blogs were dying. Posted: 1/20/09; 4:28:45 PM #