Earlier this week we took a look at the non-profit spaces on Facebook and MySpace, as part of our non-profits week. The conclusion was that both were good resources, but in terms of raising money -- they weren't quite succeeding. Which leads us to ask: is this common on the Web? Are non-profits utilizing the Web well?
You only need to read Beth Kanter's guest post today on Read/WriteWeb to discover that there is a lot of great work happening in the non-profit and charity sector, using Web tools. Beth provides an inside look at non-profit Web activity from an experienced practitioner. For example, Beth recently went to Cambodia to take part in a blogging summit there. Beth herself admitted that there is still a lot of work to be done making the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. But her discussion about blogging in Cambodia shows that there is great progress being made.
Google's powerpoint competitor is expected to be released very soon, according to reports circulating. The Inquirer says the product will be called Presently. It wouldn't surprise me if Presently is unveiled at TechCrunch40 next week - TechCrunch was coy about this in their blog post, but they noted earlier this week that Google would be announcing something.
The lead-up to Presently: in June Google announced its acquisition of Zenter, a company that made software for creating online slide presentations. Zenter's technology was added to Tonic Systems, a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. Tonic Systems was acquired in April by Google. In a blog post in June, Google said that a presentations app was due by the end of summer. Well the end of summer is just a week away, so current speculation is almost certainly accurate.
By Guest Author Beth Kanter, who is a trainer, coach, and consultant to Non-profits and individuals in effective use of technology.
I have worked in the nonprofit sector for over 25 years; and in the nonprofit and technology field for the last 14 years as a trainer, coach, and consultant. I've helped non-profits use the web since 1993. So, when Richard raised the question to Read/WriteWeb readers: is the Web still a windfall for Non-profits?. My answer is a resounding yes!
Non-profits that integrate Web 2.0 tools and techniques effectively into their communications and programming strategies are reaping many benefits. While not necessarily raising larger dollar amounts, organizations are reaching new potential donors - particularly younger ones - and laying important ground work for the next generation of supporters.
Started last March, Microsoft's i'm Initiative has enabled people to raise over $92,000 for ten charities by doing nothing more than chatting with their friends. The i'm program lets users of Windows Live Messenger specify a charity to receive a portion of the funds from the advertising that the application displays.
Microsoft has signed up 10 major heavyweight charities for the initiative, including the American Red Cross, the National AIDS Fund, the Sierra Club, and Unicef. Participating users can specify which charity they wish to support with their chatting by entering a text code into the program's set up area after their nickname.
I'm very pleased to announce that Marshall Kirkpatrick is joining Read/WriteWeb as a Lead Writer, starting this Monday. Marshall teams up with Josh Catone in this role, meaning that Read/WriteWeb now has three daily writers (including myself). Marshall will focus on breaking news for Read/WriteWeb, something he is very skilled at and which will complement Josh and I well. Josh's role hasn't changed - he will continue to provide daily news and analysis. My own role will change a bit - I will still write daily on R/WW, but focus more on analysis. Also of course having Marshall on board allows me to spend more time growing the business.
In order to join R/WW and work more on his independent consulting practice, Marshall has resigned from his role as Director of Content at SplashCast Media, a media syndication company.
Many of you will remember Marshall from his previous job as lead blogger at TechCrunch. Before that, Marshall was the editor of AOL's Social Software Weblog and he's also written for NetSquared, a project of the nonprofit tech assistance organization CompuMentor. So Marshall brings to Read/WriteWeb a wealth of tech blogging experience and he will be an integral part of our team going forward.
A note to startups and companies wishing to be covered by Read/WriteWeb: it is even more important now that you use the tips@readwriteweb.com email address to contact us with news. Josh and Marshall will be monitoring that address daily. I often don't have the time to reply to startups who email me directly, something I'm forever feeling guilty about! So please use the tips address, to ensure the best chance of coverage on Read/WriteWeb.
Content Management Systems (CMS) aren't the most sexiest applications in the world. When you think CMS, you probably think Vignette, Interwoven or a similar enterprise-level product. Those systems are usually bulky and difficult to use. At the other end of the spectrum are blogging platforms, such as Movable Type or Wordpress, which are renown for being fairly lightweight and easy to use - but often they lack the high-end functionality required in a CMS (content approval process, version control, reporting, etc).
In the middle of this spectrum (Enterprise CMS -- Blog Platform) lies SilverStripe, an open source CMS system developed by a small company out of Wellington, New Zealand. It has a simple web interface and was built using PHP5, an alternative developer framework to the more hyped web 2.0 framework Ruby on Rails. SilverStripe was recently named as one of 5 finalists in the Most Promising Open Source CMS Award, part of the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards held by Packt Publishing.
San Franciso-based Kiva.org, a microfinance non-profit organization founded in 2005, is one of the best success stories of the charitable web. We first profiled it back in January. In just 2 years, the site has funded nearly 17,000 loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, and last week the total amount of those loans crossed the $11 million mark.
In late March, 2005 Elizabeth Omalla, a woman from the town of Tororo in Uganda, received the first Kiva.org loan for $500 to help expand her burgeoning fish selling business. Shortly there after 6 other entrepreneurs in developing nations received loans from the site, in total worth $2,150. By September of that year, all seven initial microloan recipients had repaid their loans and Kiva.org was launched to the public. The company incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in November, 2005.
We're focusing on non-profits and charities on Read/WriteWeb this week, and with that in mind, we decided to take a look at what web-based tools exist to make running and organizing a non-profit or charity organization easier. It turns out, there are many of them.
We've organized the cream of the crop into the tool kit presented below. It's likely that we missed some tools that could be used by charities, non-profit organizations, or other groups to run their online operations, so please feel free to leave your favorite sites for this type of work in the comments.
deliGoo is a nifty new add on for Firefox 2.0+ and IE 6.0+ that mashes up del.icio.us with Google Custom Search. The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user's del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag, or all of the bookmarks under a single tag from a single user.
This can be very helpful for people who want to find something from among many untagged bookmarks, or for people who don't care to bother with tags but still want to get some utility out of del.icio.us. deliGoo can also be helpful to search among the collective knowledge of a large group of people (i.e., if I search only among sites tagged with "MySQL," I am presumably searching among the knowledge of a bunch of database gurus).
This evening Yahoo! is announcing two new 'hacks' that have been in development since late March. While it is tempting to write them off as two small features being incorporated into the largest Internet Property in the world, we wonder if there is more meaning here - especially given that Jerry Yang announced a 100 day strategy refresh back in July.
This week I sat down with Bradley Horowitz, VP of Yahoo's Advanced Development Division, to discuss both hacks that are launching tonight. You can listen to the full interview on Read/WriteTalk. As we talked, it became apparent that Horowitz was trying to make these hacks more symbolic. Specifically he commented:
"And even at this time, when the media has widely reported struggles and the internal challenges we have at Yahoo, the Hack spirit is very much alive. And I'm really happy to be sharing with you today a couple of innovations that I think are representative of the kind of things that we see coming out in Hack on a continual basis."
With this in mind, it is worth taking a close look at both of the 'hacks' that are launching tonight.
