ReadWriteWeb

Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed today to tell me about some new research they've just published. It's a report entitled “Out There” and surveys the attitudes of people who participate in online communities. Here is the report as a PDF.

I'd not heard of them before, but the Attention Company is made up of smart people - and they've written some good books about the Internet in the recent past.

The main findings of the report were that people who are “Out There” are more likely to:

• Value fame as an “asset”
• Willing to share certain types of sensitive information on the web
• Believe it is appropriate to criticize their organizations on the web
• Believe that “organizations need to be more transparent to succeed”
• Believe “there’s no harm in openly discussing the work I do inside my organization with others”

The Product (RED) campaign is sweeping the world, thanks to some heavyweight backing from celebrities (Oprah, Bono) and brand names (Apple, American Express, Armani). It's a great cause, because for each (RED) branded product or service sold, a part of the profit goes to the fight against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Africa.

Some prominent Web brands are getting behind it too - MySpace and AOL are the two media sponsors currently listed as "donating space on their various platforms".

Also the (RED) website itself is a great example of how the Web can contribute. For example the YOU page asks people to submit videos detailing what (RED) means to them:

"In the coming months, we will be launching a "video wall" that includes streaming video of people talking about what (RED)^™ is. Some of the people featured will be world leaders, others will be people involved in creating some of the products, and others will be passionate people like you!"

There is also a (RED) blog, hosted on blogger.com. It's an interesting blog outlining the seemingly normal lives of RED's core team. Well, I say *seemingly*, because how many normal bloggers are able to write something like this...

"I heard news that the Oprah taping the day before was amazing, received a phone call from Bobby about the important encounter with President Bush at the airport (see previous post (RED) Force One), readied our servers for the influx of launch-day web traffic, sent newsletters announcing the U.S. launch of (RED) to everyone on our mailing list, and exceeded my tolerance for caffeine many times over – things were in order."

...you know, hum-drum blog stuff like being on the Oprah show and meeting the President.

So an excellent cause and very nicely done too with the website and blog.

Today is the first OneWebDay, a global awareness event to "create, maintain, advance and promote a global day to celebrate online life." It was founded by Susan Crawford, associate professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Some big Web names have been lined up in support - including Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Craig Newmark of craigslist. Virtual celebrations will be held in Second Life and there will be real-world celebrations around the globe.

I can certainly get behind a message like this:

"The idea behind OneWebDay is to tell the story of how the web changes lives around the world. We're making the web visible so that we don't take it for granted."

Fred Wilson does the Al Gore thing and riffs on the ecology metaphor:

"The web is like planet earth. It's an amazing resource that we need to value, respect, protect, and celebrate."

Even skeptical tech news website The Register gets into the spirit:

"The idea behind OneWebDay is to remember that the web is not just a jumble of machines, but also a social environment."

The About Page of OneWebDay lays out the message in detail:

"The Web is worth celebrating.

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom.

By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly."

Pic: jonasgoldstein

Suggested activities include: Collective art projects (see yourself as a pixel); Music mashups; Contributing to a slide show of flickr images of people doing the onewebday hand signal (see above); Teach your grandmother to blog; Make a website for your club, church, school; Employees: teach your boss to IM; Doctors: Set up web-based self-scheduling for patients.

I'm all for this (well, except maybe the hand signal...). The thought behind it is a great one, so Read/WriteWeb encourages you to get out there and celebrate the Web!

One of the more ambitious and innovative Web apps I've heard of recently is InnovAlarm, a Web-based platform for security, safety and health monitoring services. Although their website has little information about the product, InnovAlarm CTO David Albert sent me more details. He told me their aim is "to 'Skype' the security monitoring and home monitoring businesses."

The overall goal for InnovAlarm is to create a large Internet community around free PC-based security, safety, and health monitoring services. As for the technology behind this vision, the disruptive part is Voice over IP telephony, which InnovAlarm thinks has the potential to usurp traditional alarm communication methods.

InnovAlarm is currently pre-beta - their beta testing will start in the Sept -Oct timeframe. The service roll-out is slated for Q1 2007.

InnovAlarm will get a cash injection of $10 million in Series B fund in Q4 2006, so they have money to spend on their big plans. One of their target markets, residential security monitoring, is a big one - with $7 billion in revenue in 2006 according to their estimates. $4 billion of that goes to ADT, the largest security monitoring company in the world. InnovAlarm estimates that, due to demographics, most of the 40 million homes with security systems have broadband. So they see a way to connect security services to the Internet.

How does it work?

You install a small, Internet-downloadable application on your home PC, which then communicates with InnovAlarm's monitoring center servers. The trick is that your PC must be turned on for the monitoring to take place. The "Sentry" app monitors for alarm sounds and communicates to the central servers - which sends email and text message alerts to selected recipients. When there is an alarm detection, the Sentry application initiates a call via a free VoIP service (from Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or AOL). This then leads to an audible alarm to:

• The homeowner
• Family Safety Circle designated persons
• Central Monitoring Station

Aggressive Marketing

InnovAlarm will deploy a wide-ranging marketing schedule for their product, including attempting to get it installed by manufacturers on new PCs (e.g., Dell, HP, Lenovo, Gateway, etc.). They'll also look to distribute the app via viral marketing, partner bundling and the establishment of the concept of Family Safety Circles. So potential partners include portals (Yahoo, Google, etc.), retail companies (First Alert, Kidde, etc.), insurance companies, etc.

Summary

As I mentioned, InnovAlarm is definitely ambitious. Their goal is to have more residential and small business accounts monitored than the current security monitoring market leader, ADT (6 million as of now). They don't say what their goals are in the health monitoring market.

I think we'll see a lot more 'real world' applications of Web technology in the coming months. Monitoring the security of your home and the health of your body are obviously very important matters, so it's great to see Web-enabled solutions beginning to appear.

Sometimes we all get so wrapped up in the latest Web 2.0 calendar, rss reader or search product, that we forget that some things labeled 'Web 2.0' are actually doing social good in the world. This is the case with NetSquared, which is a non-profit organization that aims to "increase nonprofit effectiveness through the use of web-based social tools." NetSquared was created by TechSoup and is a project of CompuMentor - which has been active in the non-profit tech scene since 1987 and has a staff of 110. So there are great credentials behind NetSquared, plus already there is a strong Web 2.0 spirit on the relatively new NetSquared site.

Recently I spoke to Marnie Webb, one of the key people behind the NetSquared initiative. She told me that version 1 of NetSquared went live in October 2005 and has since reached 350 registered users. But around 700 people are actively engaged in the community, thanks to Structured Blogging-like activities. For example people in the NetSquared community are encouraged to tag content on their own blogs, as well as del.icio.us, Flickr, Furl and other apps.

Marnie told me that infrastructure is still the biggest issue for non-profit organizations, but that there are other ways to solve problems using the Web 2.0 platform. That's where NetSquared comes into play. Currently NetSquared has a US focus, but Marnie said they hope to reach out to non-profits internationally in the near future. One of the keys to that is to gather local stories of non-profits using Web 2.0 tools. One great example IMHO is the sterling work done by the The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, aka the SEA-EAT blog. I wrote about this last year:

"The focus on this [SEA-EAT] blog has been about how people can contribute. One post entitled Seeking Info? Ask the Bloggers attracted over 200 comments from the date it was published (29 December, 2004) and then steadily throughout 2005. Interestingly, a post entitled Your suggestions and links attracted well over 550 comments from the date it was published (27 December, 2004), which shows the lengths people were willing to go to help. A lot of the comments on the blog were regarding donations and relief work."

And of course similarly inspirational work was done by people when Hurricane Katrina hit. This is the kind of thing that NetSquared aims to help with, utilizing the current generation of 'Web 2.0' tools and services. 

Two other examples, as provided to me by Franziska Marks of NetSquared:

- Community Walk This site allows users to map their communities and points of interest, and post comments about these areas. It has a large base of international users. The most interesting example is the mapping of the Pakistani earthquake and helping with relief efforts by publishing maps of helicopter landing pads in the affected areas. http://communitywalk.com/map/590 

- NY Coalition against hunger They are a citywide umbrella org for the independent soup kitchens. They also have been using Google Maps to actually map out these facilities in the city. This is a great tool to help volunteers see areas of need, to help soup kitchens collaborate, to map the need and analyze the gaps in the actual services.

The list of sponsors for NetSquared is impressive, so if you work for a big corp then do check it out. For individuals, there is a lot of great content on the NetSquared website to explore - and contributing is as easy as tagging your own blogs. But of course, I'm sure there's more you - we - can do if we put our 2.0 minds to it.

Flickr pic by cambodia4kidsorg (nb: that isn't Marnie in the photo).

Quote from Rod Drury, founder and CEO of kiwi web email company AfterMail (which was acquired by Quest Software for US$45 million in January 2006):

"We demonstrate globally from our office in Wellington, install our products remotely and receive funds electronically. We have US phone numbers in our office. The barriers to global commerce are minimal. We don't really even think about, we just do it."

New Zealand is a tiny country of just over 4 million people, on the other side of the world to the US and Europe. We've historically had a chip on our shoulder about the distance we are from all the action, but in recent times Internet technology has improved our lot. As the NZ National Library wrote, when explaining their Digital Strategy:

"For generations we have laboured under the real or imagined burden of 'the tyranny of distance'. With the Internet comes 'the death of distance'. A recent report noted that 'for New Zealand, the Internet is the modern equivalent of the freezer ship that revolutionised our economy last century'."

I share Rod's optimism about the Internet enabling us kiwis to earn a living virtually. Still, I would love to attend some of those TechCrunch parties, or be able to work at a big Internet company in Silicon Valley, or pop round to a local wifi-enabled coffee shop and write my book (there's no free wifi anywhere near where I live). I guess location still counts for something, huh... :-)

I've published a post on ZDNet that details how the Web was used for good in 2005, in very bad situations. It was actually something I wrote for the book I'm working on with Joshua Porter, but it will almost certainly not be used (due to the book having a design focus). So I thought I'd share it with you now, because I learned a lot researching that extract.

The most emotionally affecting memories of 2005 were the two huge natural disasters that struck the world - and how people responded to them. In this post I will review how the Web was utilized by thousands of people to help and to deal with those tragedies.

The Tsunami

When a magnitude 9.0 earthquake caused huge tsunami waves to hit coastal areas of south and east Asia in late December 2004, the public response was one of shock and then emergency assistance on a global scale. It quickly became apparent that the Web was being used in response to the disaster in three main ways:

1) as a constantly updated source of news about the disaster;

2) as a way for ordinary people to respond emotionally;

3) and probably most importantly, to organize aid efforts. [Full story on ZDNet...]