Tag Archives: Web 2.0

Why do we love lists?

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

Lately, I’ve been making a lot of lists. (Well, I’ve always been rather obsessed with lists — just more so, lately.) Lists of books to read, lists of movies to watch, playlists on my iPod. If there were a job that entailed making lists all day, I would be the perfect candidate.

But that only makes me human, doesn’t it? Because we humans love our lists. We love to name things (even going back to the Bible!), then put them into categories, and then make lists of them. Tag, cross-reference, organize. This is pretty much what we do, we humans.

Umberto Eco has said, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” I get that. Lists bring order to the chaos. They constrain the infinite. They name the unknowable. We live in a vast universe, and we will never be able to enumerate everything. But doesn’t it give some purpose to our lives to at least try? And so we make lists.

Lists also set boundaries. When there is so much out there — so much to read, hear, see, do, eat — lists give us a place to start and, perhaps more importantly, a place to stop. They let us know when we are finished. There is such a satisfaction when the last item is crossed off. Even if we turn around and start another list.

By the way, don’t search for the word “lists” on Google, if you want to know about lists. The Internet is full to the brim with lists. It’s like we invented it just so we have a place to make and share our lists. Here are a few useful list-making sites: Ta-da list; Listography; Lists of Bests.

Here are some lists of lists: 1001 before you die; Wikipedia’s lists; Flashlight Worthy book recommendations; McSweeney’s lists; Lit Lists; Listverse; my lists.

It seems obligatory to finish this post with a list of my own, so here is a list of 10 great list makers:

  1. Benjamin Franklin
  2. Thomas Jefferson
  3. Peter Mark Roget
  4. Oskar Schindler
  5. David Letterman
  6. Santa
  7. Roger Ebert (Great Movies)
  8. David Wallechinsky (Book of Lists)
  9. the guys in High Fidelity
  10. Umberto Eco

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Notebook

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

How can we bring a Web 2.0 sensibility to international development work?

Posted on May 30, 2009 | 3 Comments

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Global Health Council 2009 Conference, where the theme was global health and technology. While I heard many things that excited me (you can read my thoughts here and here), I couldn’t help but notice that the traditional approach to international development still prevailed. As someone who has become immersed in social networking and the tools of Web 2.0, I had to wonder how we could bring that kind of sensibility to our development work.

As I see it, this would mean:

  • Build from the ground up rather than the top down.
  • Start by sharing and making connections.
  • Then let a community emerge that can collaborate to solve the problems they identify as important.
  • Large institutions (donors, big NGOs, government) need to facilitate this process or get out of the way.
  • Above all, we have to let go of our need to control.

Working this way would certainly require a fundamental shift in mindset. No longer could we design every step of a project in our comfy offices, take them to the field and work the plan, measure and report our results, then leave when the funding cycle is over. But there are already successful models for working in a different way — Kiva and OpenMRS come to mind.

Web 2.0 has exploded because it fills a human need and fits in with natural human behaviors. That makes it less like work and more like fun, and people who are having fun can accomplish a lot. I think we could too, if we don’t let fear of change or of trying something new stand in our way.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Notebook

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Can social networking hurt your job prospects? Or help them?

Posted on December 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Over the weekend, I saw yet another non-story on the morning talk shows about how careful you should be about what you post online because it may come back to bite you. The story was filled with warnings about how everything you put on the Internet is permanent, and all potential employers are spending their days combing Facebook searching for stupid photos of you.

These stories pop up periodically like mushrooms, but I think they are largely overblown. If you are foolish enough to post drunken, naked pictures of yourself or blog about how much you hate your boss and the company you work for, then you’re only doing potential employers a favor. They deserve to know about your lack of judgment and common sense before they hire you.

But as social networking tools become more ubiquitous — and as decision makers become more comfortable with using them — the bar for acceptable online behavior will get lower and lower. Stupid stuff you did in high school and college will be forgiven; we all did stupid stuff in high school and college. In some industries, foolish photos may not only be okay, but even expected.

What might hurt you even more when job hunting is not being online at all. The resume is a terrible way to learn about a job applicant. I hope resumes become entirely obsolete in 21st century business, replaced by the URL. As a potential employer, I can learn much more about you from reading  your blog posts or checking out your LinkedIn profile or browsing your photos on Flickr. Or all of the above.

The morning news shows shouldn’t be spending time telling us what not to post online. Instead, they should be telling us how to manage our online reputations and use our presence on the web to sell ourselves to employers. Here are a few links that can help with that:

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Notebook

Tagged , , , , , , ,

New social media integration in popular Web 2.0 tools

Posted on November 3, 2008 | Leave a comment
Image representing Google Alerts as depicted i...

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a flurry of improvements in integrating social media tools lately, which I wanted to tell you about. I’ve tried all of these new features. They all work great and offer a lot of value to users, particularly if you use more than one Web 2.0 tool.

First, if you use Google Alerts, you’ll see that they now support RSS feeds. No more having to clutter up your email inbox with alerts. Instead, you can read them at your leisure in your favorite RSS feed reader. But the RSS feed integration also makes it possible to integrate Google alerts into any application that can read and display the feeds, such as FriendFeed or your blog. Go to the Manage Your Alerts page to switch your alerts from email to RSS.

Second, LinkedIn profiles now support a lot of Web 2.0 tools, including WordPress and SlideShare. I’ve modified my LinkedIn profile to show the latest posts from this blog, for instance. It’s very easy to do; open your profile and click Add Application. These new features give you a lot of options for showing your professional network what you’re doing and helping them learn more about you.

There were some other applications that I haven’t tried but looked to be helpful if you use LinkedIn as a platform for browsing the Web and managing your Web content. For instance, you can create a reading list via Amazon and then get recommendations on similar books based on what your colleagues are reading. You can also monitor twittering about your organization or other keywords. There’s a lot of new stuff to explore, so if you haven’t dropped by LinkedIn lately, I think it’s worth a return visit.

Finally, FriendFeed has introduced backward integration with Twitter, so you can automatically tweet items from your FriendFeed. Fortunately, you can limit it to any one or more of the services in your FriendFeed, so you can choose not to tweet every Delicious bookmark or Netflix addition. But you can tweet your new blog posts, for example, without any extra effort on your part, which is what I am now doing. See this post to learn more.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Geeking Out

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to get started in the Web 2.0 world

Posted on October 2, 2008 | 1 Comment
Web 2.0

Image by Daniel F. Pigatto via Flickr

I have a colleague who’s interested in bringing some of our organization’s knowledge management efforts into the Web 2.0 world, and she wanted to know how to get started. My advice was, before getting an organizational blog or setting up a wiki or something like that, that she — or ideally everyone on her team — get involved on a personal level. Because I don’t think you can get Web 2.0 — and therefore your organization can’t get Web 2.0 — unless you’re doing it. It’s all about participation and collaboration, and that means you have to dive in.

So here are my suggestions for the steps you should take before you even think about setting up an organizational blog or wiki or anything like that.

1. Start bookmarking. You are soon going to be touring all over the web, and you need a way to remember the best blogs, videos and other stuff you find. You can use your browser’s bookmarks feature, but the Web 2.0 way is to share. So I suggest getting an account on a social bookmarking site. I recommend Delicious because it is so clean and easy to use, but StumbleUpon is also a good option. Both provide toolbar buttons so you can bookmark as you surf. Get in the habit of bookmarking the sites that interest you and tagging them in meaningful ways.

2. Read some blogs. Blogs are the heart of the social web. Somewhere out there, someone is writing about something you’re interested in or working on. Use Google’s blog search to find 5-10 blogs on those subjects and start reading them. Take a look at their blogrolls or the blogs they cite often, and start reading them too. Of course, there’s an upper limit to the number of blogs you can read, but you do want to be keeping up with at least 20, probably more if you can handle it.

RSS feed readers make it a lot easier to keep up with all those blogs, because they deliver new content to you, instead of you having to go out on the web to get it. I like Google Reader myself, but there are many  other choices. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer have RSS feed readers built in, as well. To find the feed, look for the orange RSS feed icon and click on it: RSS feed icon

The most important thing, though, when reading blogs is to comment on what you read and like. Web 2.0 is all about participation, and commenting is one of the main ways to join in. Once you start commenting on blogs in your niche, you’ll meet the bloggers and other commenters and begin getting to know the community that you’re joining.

3. Jump into Twitter. It’s time to up the interaction a notch, and Twitter is a good way to do it. You can start out small and build up as your confidence increases. Find a few people to follow; first check the blogs you’re reading, as bloggers are typically on Twitter too. See who they are following and follow any of those people who seem interesting, as well. There are plenty of Twitter applications that make following tweets easier.

Why are you on Twitter? You will get in the habit of sharing: what you’re working on, what you’re reading, links, whatever. And you will have a ready-made community to ask questions and get feedback from. What’s more, it’s fun.

4. Get a blog. It’s now time to join the conversation. And I don’t mean starting an organizational blog. That should come later. First, you should start your own personal blog where you can write in your own voice. You may choose to write about your work or about some other passion. What matters is that you’re adding your voice to the conversation.

Starting a blog is easy and takes less than five minutes. I recommend WordPress.com as the best free blogging platform, because even if you don’t know the software, it’s easy to learn and get started on right away. If you’re intimidated by having a full-fledged blog or don’t have the time, you can start a “micro-blog” on Tumblr and share interesting links, video, quotes and other short snippets. Remember to keep commenting on other blogs and leave a link to your blog when you do. You’ll soon find that folks who read your comments are stopping by your blog and commenting on what you’re writing.

And before you know it, you’re part of Web 2.0.

If you follow these steps, more or less, and get involved in the online community on a personal level, you’ll probably find it much easier to think of creative and worthwhile ways your organization can get involved.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Geeking Out

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to use tagging to make connections in the nonprofit web

Posted on October 1, 2008 | 4 Comments
A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.

Image via Wikipedia

Probably one of the best innovations of the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon is tagging. A tag is “a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information” (source). Tags can be used to identify blog posts, bookmarks, photos, videos, presentations, events, etc., and are supported by pretty much every Web 2.0 tool. Tags are generally assigned informally and without regard to a structure of categories; they are more like annotations and are often assigned in addition to categories, such as on blog posts.

The genius of tagging is that it organically builds connections over time between seemingly unconnected content. If my blog post and your video and his bookmark and her photograph all have the same tag, then we can start to see how they are related in some way. This leads to a bottoms-up classification system for web content that is often called a folksonomy.

The problem is that tags are arbitrarily decided on by the content creator, and with language being what it is, one tag can mean many different things to many different people. Take the word development, for instance. In my own little industry, it can refer to the process of creating software or giving aid to low-resource countries. In other contexts, it might refer to child development or personal development or a large and ugly subdivision.

The nonprofit field has bypassed this limitation by coming up with some unique tags to identify our content. If we use these tags consistently, we can easily locate a wealth of content in our particular niches. Here are some of the most useful tags I’ve come across:

nptech: Short for “nonprofit technology,” this tag refers to nonprofits’ use of technology, mostly internally rather than as part of the program offerings.

Examples:

ict4d: Stands for “Information and Communication Technologies for Development.” Refers to groups that are using technology in their development programs, usually international development.

Examples:

web4dev: Using Web technologies, mostly Web 2.0, for supporting international aid and development.

Examples:

km4dev: Stands for “Knowledge Management for Development.” Using knowledge management tools and techniques to support international development.

Examples:

m4dev or m4d: Using mobile technology to support internatonal development.

Examples:

I’m sure I haven’t discovered all of the tags being used by nonprofits using technology, especially in international development. If you know of any other good ones, please leave a comment.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Geeking Out

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Identifying a personal brand

Posted on September 11, 2008 | 3 Comments

I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do next. I think I’ve been trying to figure this out for years. One tool I am using to help me answer this question is blogging. I have a semi-private blog that I use as a journal, where I can record my ideas, wants and frustrations in relative safety, since it isn’t widely read. The purpose is to try to sort out what I really want to do.

The Web 2.0 Wednesday post this week at the Bamboo Project Blog was about personal branding. I think I am one of those people who doesn’t really know what my personal brand is, or what I want it to be. One of the exercises suggested was to put my blog into Wordle to see what brand emerged in the tag cloud. Well, I didn’t like the results. I think that’s because this blog reflects what I am doing now, rather than what I want to be doing.

Then I put in my freeform ideas blog, and things became clearer.

Try it yourself, and see what emerges.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Notebook

Tagged , ,

What are blogs? And how can we use them? Resources list

Posted on December 17, 2007 | 6 Comments

This is a list of resources I have collected to supplement a presentation I’m giving at work on the subjects: what are blogs, how can our nonprofit blog effectively, and what is Web 2.0 anyway? These resources include many of the examples in the actual presentation as well as supplementary reading materials.

View the presentation

About Web 2.0

Blogging Tools

Nonprofit Blogs

Blogs About Nonprofits Using Web 2.0 Technologies

The Blogosphere (finding blogs of interest)

Into Web 2.0

  • Tumblr – microblogging site
  • Twitter – microblogging site that integrates with text messaging and instant messaging (IM)
  • del.icio.us – Tag, organize and share bookmarks
  • Stumble Upon – review and rate web content
  • Digg – read and vote on web content
  • NGO Post – read and vote on web content discussing social welfare initiatives
  • Flickr – share, view and comment on photos
  • YouTube – share, view and comment on videos
  • SlideShare – share, view and comment on presentations
  • Wikipedia – world-famous collaboratively written encyclopedia built with a wiki
  • Wikibooks – collection of collaboratively written textbooks written using wikis
  • Facebook – well-known social networking site originally focusing on college students
  • LinkedIn – professional networking site
  • Dogster – social networking site for dogs
  • Causes on Facebook – nonprofits using Facebook to promote causes and raise money
  • IntraHealth Informatics’ Flickr site – nonprofits can share interesting photos to generate interest
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Notebook

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How can nonprofits effectively use social networks?

Posted on October 24, 2007 | 2 Comments

I was asked to put together a list of resources about nonprofits using social networks like Facebook and MySpace, because some forward-thinking folks here are thinking of tapping into these resources. It seemed like a valuable list, one worth sharing, so here it is.

General Resources for Nonprofits Using Web 2.0

Resources for Nonprofits Using Facebook/MySpace

Examples of Nonprofit MySpace Sites

Essential Blogs to Read

The conversation on this subject is hot and heavy, and more are joining in everyday. It’s a good idea to keep up on what others are thinking and doing, and to join in the conversation. I’ve found the following blogs to be great resources for that.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Geeking Out

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

I heart delicious…

Posted on May 4, 2007 | Leave a comment

Of all the multitudes of Web 2.0 tools that are popping up every day, I have found Delicious to be the most useful and the most used. The fundamental basis for its usefulness is a simple idea: one set of bookmarks, no matter how many browsers or computers you use. Adding the ability to tag, bundle and share bookmarks just augments this basic usefulness.

My husband thinks del.icio.us is an evil conspiracy to track every single place we visit on the Web for nefarious but ill-defined purposes. If that’s the case, I say, then track away! If you look down the left side of this page, you’ll see all my latest del.icio.us links. This list is a real-time glimpse into what I’m thinking, reading and writing about. I like to take a look at it from time to time to see what patterns are emerging from my own web surfing and link collecting. Ideas emerge from bringing those subconscious connections into consciousness.

Because every tagged set of links has its own RSS feed, del.icio.us just gets more useful and makes my life even easier. When I am working on a project, I can capture my research links in del.icio.us and give them all the same tag. I grab the RSS feed for that tag and plug it into a feed display on a SharePoint team site or on one of my blogs. Now I can share all my links on the project with everyone else who’s interested, without the hassle of copying and pasting URLs or making sure the links list is up-to-date. I just post a good link to del.icio.us with the appropriate tag, and it appears everywhere it needs to be. It all integrates with my regular work and research habits. That’s a fundamentally useful application.

When I am working on a complicated project, I can create tag bundles with different tags corresponding to sections of an outline or project phases or whatever. As I research over days or weeks or months, I just need to post and tag the relevant links that I find. Then, when I’m ready to start compiling my research, it’s all waiting for me, already organized and labeled. del.icio.us is also useful for creating lists of things to do, such as recipes I want to make, articles I want to read or blog about, or a wishlist of things I want to buy.

David Brewster at Management:Simple recently posted about how he can’t keep up with all that’s going on the wide world of Web 2.0. I don’t think we should even try. Sure, dip your toes in every now and then, see if something that catches your eye is actually going to help you do whatever it is you’re trying to do. And once you find something that really does work for you, stick with it. For me, it’s Delicious and WordPress and Gmail. It’s even Amazon’s Wishlist, which I use in ways Amazon probably never intended — it’s a great tool for a reader like me who wants to keep track of what I’m reading, what I’m going to read next and what I’m considering reading later. My husband gets a lot more use out of Flickr than I ever will, but he’s the one who likes to take photos. Backpack, LinkedIn, Technorati and Clipmarks haven’t proved as useful as I thought at first, but the jury’s still out. Digg, Twitter, Facebook… I cruised by and just kept going.

Sure, there’s a lot going on and more coming online every day. You’ll only burn yourself out if you try to be on top of the latest and greatest all the time. Find what’s useful, use it and stick with it. Chances are, you aren’t the only one, and those are the sites and services that will make it beyond any 2.0 “bubble burst.”

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Geeking Out

Tagged , , , , , , ,