With all due respect to Kevin Smith, the web is no longer only for complaining about movies. In fact, there are a large number of very helpful sites that teach you how to do things. These are do-it-yourself sites, but we're not talking about building a deck or baking a cake -- the web is full of more general interest sites that give quality instruction on all sorts of fun and useful projects. Including, sometimes, how to build a deck or bake a cake.
In this horribly-titled, but hopefully useful round-up we will specifically focus on such general purpose sites that include some sort of rich media instruction (generally video). We also might throw in a tech-focused site or two, since this is after all, a tech-focused blog.
If you know of any instructional sites that are missing from this list, please mention them in the comments below.
University of Massachusetts researchers Nora Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson have released preliminary results of a survey of the largest US charities regarding their adoption of new social media like blogging, podcasting and wikis. The researchers concluded, based on similar research their Center for Marketing Research has done with Fortune 500 corporations, that the charitable sector is exhibiting more substantial adoption of social media than its corporate counterparts.
This directly contradicts the widely held belief that the charitable sector is tech-conservative, risk averse and focused only on using proven methods to raise money.
The study focused exclusively on big players, the Fortune 500 and the Forbes 200 top charities. Small businesses and nonprofits are another matter all together. When big organizations with strong brands adopt a technology in a visible way, though, it can't help but lend that tool-set some credibility.
It's interesting to see that video is the most widely used social media on the list. In as much as charity work is dependent on communicating emotionally with potential donors, this shouldn't be a surprise.
Corporate America can hang its head today for being surpassed in innovation, risk taking and communication with constituents. In theory the corporate world is where the action is supposed to be, and the charitable sector is in charge of making sure that life is tolerable for the most marginal among us, right? I think we could all benefit from more blogging, though, whether it's directly lucrative or not. Thanks to Nedra Weinreich in LA and Beth Kanter in Massachusetts for unearthing the study. Just look at those nonprofit bloggers go! We were very fortunate to have a guest post from Beth about the challenges of nonprofit social media adoption here on ReadWriteWeb in September.
The world's second largest stock photo firm, Corbis, will soon begin giving away free some of its high quality stock photographs to bloggers via a partnership with newly launched site PicApp. PicApp is a new startup that aims to give bloggers and small media producers legal access to previously unaffordable stock photographs for free, in exchange for displaying advertising.
The PicApp system, which is still in closed beta, works by embedding overlay or popup advertising in images that bloggers can then run on their sites free of charge. Further, bloggers can reportedly earn a slice of the revenue on those photos based on how many people click on the ads in the images. Corbis is the first major content partner revealed to be working with PicApp -- the company promises that more are coming soon.
Philipp Lenssen and Tony Ruscoe of the excellent Google Blogoscoped blog have put together a very fun collection of screenshots and information about the Google Intranet and related pages. The post discusses the intranet homepage, called Moma - Inside Google, the experimental intranet search called Moma Next, projects like Google Dogfood (as in use new versions of our apps and eat your own dogfood) and more. Below is a leaked screenshot of Moma, with specific information politely grayed out by the Blogoscoped team.
We can only imagine what kind of information about genetic cataloging, brain implants and the search for sustainable energy sources in outer space are displayed on these pages. I kid, it's probably fairly mundane. I'm sure Larry and Sergey have an entirely different interface for all the really creepy stuff, like the most damning images captured by the Google Street View car.
In order to get into character further, your pretending to be a Google employee may be even more informed by a read through of Nick Carr's widely discussed article this week titled The Google Enigma.
In 2004 Chris Anderson wrote an influential book called The Long Tail. In it,
he argued that the future of business is to sell less of more. The main premise is that collectively, things that are in
rather low demand can amount to quite large volumes. This is because there is a large number of people who belong to the long tail and they encompass a wide rage of tastes.
A classic example of successful long tail sales is Amazon. A substantial subset of the book sales for the largest online retailer comes from obscure books. Amazon itself could afford to stock up on rare books as well as offer these via numerous online partners. The net effect is that a lot of book sales occured in the long tail. This phenomenon is captured nicely in a quote from an Amazon employee: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."
In a recent post here, we examined the reasons that people feel compelled to blog. From the post and the comments it received, it became clear that quite a few people are blogging to make money. The blogs that they started live in the long tail of the blogosphere, however, and the reality is that it is difficult to make money in the long tail - Anderson's point was that the money is to be made by selling to the long tail, not so much by existing in it. In this post we examine why that is and look at other aspects of long tail economics.
A new Forrester report by Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski suggests that rich Internet applications (RIAs) may usurp Microsoft Office and enterprise portals as the front-end UIs for "decision-makers and task-oriented workers". The phrase Forrester uses for this front end is "Information Workplaces (IWs)".
RIAs in the enterprise; source: Forrester
The report states that today, enterprise portals and Microsoft Office are the most common front ends "through which content, collaboration, enterprise applications, and other services are delivered to workers in a seamless, contextual way." However, says Forrester, RIA technology is improving that user experience and is being increasingly used by mid to large enterprises. The report states:
Ok bubble prognosticators, start your engines: the Nasdaq stock market today announced the creation of a new index tracking only Internet companies, the NASDAQ Internet Index. The index (^QNET) will track a diverse range of companies covering "Internet access providers, Internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and Internet retail commerce."
"The NASDAQ Internet Index contains some of the most exciting Internet companies traded on NASDAQ and other U.S. exchanges," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom in a press release. Bloom said the creation of the index was a logical step for Nasdaq, given their brand association with technology companies and large number of Internet companies listed on their stock exchange. Nasdaq hopes that the new index with be a "benchmark" for tracking the progress of the "the second generation Web" -- is that web 2.0?
The Read/WriteWeb Job Board provides job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world. If you're looking for the smartest and most innovative staff, people who are one step ahead of the rest - then you'll find those people in the Read/WriteWeb community! Here are just a few of the latest jobs:
Web Designer for Social Change Projects: The Open Planning Project is a non-profit connecting technology with social change. They are seeking a talented web designer to join their design team.
ASP.NET Web Developer Team Leader: MyTickets, a fast-growing start-up based in the Sydney CBD, is looking for an experienced lead asp.net developer.
Client Solutions Engineer, come to matchmine to DoCoolStuff
Media Developer Programmer Flash
For more great Web jobs, visit Read/WriteWeb Jobs. If you'd like to post a job, click here - it is just $99 for 30 days and there are significant discounts for bulk posting.
Ticketmaster, the formerly IAC-owned events behemoth, went from large to small today, launching an affiliate widget program.
Blogger Rex Dixon caught the release. The company says it's the first primary ticket seller to offer an affiliate program, though there's a thriving economy of secondary affiliate ticket sales online. How many of those affiliate programs have their own snazzy widgets, though?
Affiliate links can be served up in text or through any of seven Flash widgets. The sample widgets appear in a standard size but with awfully small text. I suppose people whose eyes aren't sharp enough to read it are too old for rock and roll anyway.
Affiliates will receive fifty cents for each ticket they sell priced between $20 and $60, $1.50 for tickets priced between $150 and $199, and up to $5.00 for tickets priced above $500. That's a 1% commission on $500 tickets, hardly a generous sum.
Programs like this seem to illustrate the way that a long-tail economy can take the form of countless points of distribution feeding into the same major players that already dominated the old economy. Monopoly is a net-negative in terms of social impact, something that any of countless Ticketmaster-haters can tell you. Now the company will deploy an army of widgets to do its bidding. Can you think of a scarier widget play?
SavvySource, an online parenting site that reviews toys, preschools, camps, and books, and lets parents share activity ideas, will on Wednesday launch a creative way to capitalize on the holiday shopping season. In partnership with a non-profit organization that deals with early childhood education, the web site has put together a quiz that helps parents assess and track the development of their child (aged 2 to 6), and receive a personalized list of recommendations for age appropriate educational toys, books, and activities -- all cleverly linked to Amazon via an affiliate code.
The quiz, though simple to complete, is long. Very long (it takes about a half hour). Not having any kids of my own, I know nothing of early childhood development, so to test out the site I enlisted the help of my mom -- who, as it happens, is an expert in just that. We created a fictional child (based loosely on a real one she works with at her job) and took the quiz.
