The following is a shout-out to all of my peeps in the business of online community management / outreach, many of whom have expressed, in one form or another, a moderate sense of terror regarding job stability in the present financial crisis. Considering I am not an economist, and that I have a mere bachelors degree in political science and philosophy from a state university, one might want to take the following with a grain of salt but... I do have a bit of hope regarding the opportunities provided by this somewhat grim economic environment.

Beth Kanter is experimenting with losing weight and solving the hunger crisis, all by way of putting social action platforms to work.

Kanter, the earliest of all early adopter, is looking to shed some pounds. If she were anything like me, she'd commit to jogging every day, do it twice, get bored, and actually gain two pounds by way of shoving spoon-fulls of Chunky Monkey into her mouth in an attempt to binge away the sense of failure.

However, Kanter is much smarter than I am when it comes to a self-challenge, and she's putting your money where her mouth is.

Your money?

Starting October 6th, the WeAreMedia project participants are going to "unabashedly focus on the tools and collectively build the nonprofit social media tool box."  The strategic framework in other modules is in, so now the real fun begins!  Plus, there will be special prizes awarded for participation!

What's the WeAreMedia project?

Warning: The following inadvertently turned into something of a rant. The point, in the end, is that it is unwise to build a virtual social net without giving people context as to why you're trying to connect with them. In the end, it turned out to be slightly tainted with distain for social network whoredom. I'll be interested to hear about your take on the subject. 

We are all guilty. You too.

We have all used Excel as a database, even though it’s really not a database program. Real database programs take training - Excel, however, can make you that call list in the blink of an eye. So you use it. There’s more: many of us have used Photoshop for making pamphlets and posters, even though it’s not actually meant to do either. Worse, we’ve made pamphlets in Word.

The mind reels! Or maybe it doesn’t, because frankly tech tools are made to be subverted. Especially by non-profit staff who are on a grant deadline, and just need a way to get this poster done, fast.

So you can imagine how happy I was to discover ways that people are subverting our new best friends - Youtube, Twitter and Facebook - for fun and non-profit.

To paraphrase Britt Bravo, Changebloggers are people who are using online resources to raise awareness, build community and facilitate everyone's taking action to make the world a better place. Qui Diaz originally posted the 3 questions that set off the Changeblogging meme and we've reposted them below with our responses - they look easy to answer, don't they?

Well, maybe it's that we're a brother and sister writing this blog. But it took us a long time to formulate a response. I wanted very badly to be able to write "I care about human rights, I write a blog about human rights, here are three ways you can make a difference and support - you guessed it - human rights."

We very recently took a look at what is and is not getting read on the NetSquared blogs and figured that the information we came upon will be as useful to your content development strategy as it will be to ours.

Here are a few things that jumped right out at us (the bold is straight from the report, followed immediately by my commentary):

I was going to write about all the excellent non-profit blogs out there that there are to be read, but Beth’s Blog already made a fantastic entry to get you started on this (granted it focuses exclusively on Gen X/Y/Millennial blogs - but we’re Gen X/Y and it’s just to get you started).

A confession is that I don’t actually read a whole lot of non-profit oriented blogs and sites, mostly because it’s hard to find ones that don’t oversimplify their advice to the point of it being useless. Consider a recent example I came across on the subject of online fundraising:

Staying on top of the best times to email newsletters is imperative in the world of nonprofit 2.0. Also important is knowing which Twitter apps work best for you, as is keeping up with the countless other dos and don'ts of Internet etiquette. Getting overwhelmed by this ever-changing set of rules and compilations of best practices, however, is counterproductive when it makes one forgetful of the importance of maintaining human contact.

I left Australia on Sunday afternoon and arrived in the Bay Area on Sunday morning. I'm here in Silicon Valley for Netsquared Conference and last night the conference got underway... Read more: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/05/im-video-bloggi.html