Monday, November 20, 2006

Bits and Pieces
It seems that in our short-attention span society, there is a growing trend for pushing little solutions to little problems. Yahoo answers, Google answers, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk are all addressing this from a research perspective. Odesk and others are tapping into temporary programmers. It's a great way to have fluctuating on-demand resources and get little things done when you need them. And from the freelancer's perspective, this is the establishment of a new kind of workforce - blind, geopgraphically distributed, and you can take what work you want, do it in your pjs, and leave time to surf...

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Ning

The evolution of social networking tools has arrived. Ning is a social networking platform in a box - plug and play. It's a great concept. And given that Marc Andreesen is involved, its got to be pretty sophisticated. Perfect for the non-profit sector - sleek and cheap. Let's see where it goes....
online fundraising tools

The age of the "build your own flat web page" is over - how do we give people their "my spaces" inside our events? And how 'bout layering in social networking? Imagine... you are at a walk and you find people who are on another team, but live in your neighborhood and have children the same age. Walk as a networking event...

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

WEB 2.0

I 'm blogging about this at the most apt venue, the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fancisco. It's a rather impressive group of speakers and people, still trying to out-cool eachother , evidenced by the very cool Google lounge and the Lou Reed concert sponsored by AOL. But hey, this thing costs a LOT so i'll take it.

The non-profit sector is pretty much not represented here, either because of the cost or the exclusive invitation process (I had to write an essay to get an invite), and thus people look at my badge with surprise. What can a "charity" possibly learn here? Of course, I explain that we, like all for-profit companies, are dealing with the same issues - how to be relevant in this world of social networking, user-generated content, and web services. Ironically, due mostly to ACS' innovation group, many of the big NVHAs have been talking about this stuff for almost 2 years now. Many of us have used wikis, have dynamic communities, pages on myspace, videos on youtube and photos on flickr. In fact, we just released our "Be a Coinstar" contest (http://www.marchofdimes.com/pad/contest.aspx), where we use a flickr API to pull in photos and people vote on our site. Every day at 3pm, the most popular photo gets published to the top spot. Not only is it user-contributed, it is user organized.