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.