It might take me more than 10 minutes

Stephen Downes points to Lisa Neal's "Ten Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes To Be A More Successful E-Learning Professional."   He uses the ten things in ten minutes meme and writes the Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional.   So, I'm remixed this memo into Ten Web2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be A Better Nonprofit Professional 

Then she asked her commentors on the blog to suggest some. And they did.

• 1.  Set up a twitter account.  Go to the nonprofit twitter pack find and follow ten people who may learn something from.  Use your blog or twitter or whatever tool to solicit practical ideas on how to use social media to make connections.  (Lisa Neal)
• 2.  Set up Google Alerts to follow what's being said about your organization and cause online so that you can act on what's being said, join the conversation and build your community. (Deborah Zanke) (Jason Shim)
• 3.  Set up a feed reader for other organizations in your "subject matter area" and comment on a few blog posts a week or the ten most influential blogs in your area. (Gregory Heller) (Sarah Marchetti) (Amy Sample Ward)
• 4.  Create an OPML of blogs your colleagues on staff might be interested in reading and import it into a reader for them, a starter pack. Or use nonprofit.alltop.com (Sue Waters)   (Allan Benamer)
• 5. Truly embrace social networking by encouraging your staff, your volunteers, your donors and your Board to join Facebook or Myspace and teach(!) them how to promote your cause. For many in the boomerbracket, this is all new...but so important to integrate into traditional marketing and fundraising efforts. (Jane Arsenault and Anne Yurasek)
• 6.  Goto animoto.com and create a :30 video using photos of people, logos, and text related to your cause.  Post that video on your website, any major sharing sites, and social networks -- then encourage people to share the videos far and wide!!  (Tyler Willis)
• 7. Convince your team members to set up individual bookmarking accounts, agree on a unique tag and start building a bookmarking collection for your organization.  Don't forget to sign up the feeds on the agreed tag in your RSS reader and to add the del.icio.us application in your Facebook account. Collective bookmarking is an extremely powerful learning tool! (Johannes)
• 8. Want to know buzz? Use tools like Technorati, Bloglines, and Forum Tracker to monitor what people aresaying about your organization as well as to find new marketing leads to contact with your messages and stories of hope. (Jonathon Coleman)
• 9. Want inspiration? Search YouTube and Flickr for descriptive keywords that are part of your mission statement to see what your target audiences might find compelling and inspirational. (Jonathon Coleman)
• 10. Want to learn from the best of the best?  Visit SlideShare and read through great presentations on just about any topic. (Jonathon Coleman)
• Bonus Tip11.  Use new media before pitching new media sources (CarrieBethH)

Okay folks, can we run this up to 100 tips that you can do in ten minutes using Web 2.0 to be a better nonprofit professional?  Here's how you can help:-If you blog, ask your readers to contribute-Leave a tip in the comments-Twitter it at @kanter

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

10:43:51 AM    

Chimps are astute observers

Who's bad? Chimps figure it out by observation: [Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

Chimpanzees make judgments about the actions and dispositions of strangers by observing others' behavior and interactions in different situations. Specifically, chimpanzees show an ability to recognize behavioral traits and make assumptions about the presence or absence of these traits in strangers in similar situations thereafter. These findings, by Dr. Francys Subiaul -- from the George Washington University in Washington DC -- and his team, have just been published online in Animal Cognition, a Springer journal. [More]

Technorati Tags: Science

10:41:06 AM    

A Man With A PhD

There will be duplicate posts here for a little while as I transition. It looks like I will be writing several blogs and the workflow is much easier if they all use Wordpress. It is a little hard to say farewell to Radio, which I began using at Immunex in 1998 or so. I had been following Dave Winer from a long time back through all the different versions of Frontier. Radio became an almost daily experience for me and, if I had remained at Amgen after it bought out Immunex, I would have really expanded its use in research and Development. I had already recruited three others who were using it to write blogs.

Unfortunately, the world moves on. Radio had the combination of a news aggregator, blogging and hosting tool. It was the only one of its kind in 2002. But with so many developers publishing APIs, it is now possible to combine Radio's technology into several different programs, each focussed on doing one thing really well.

What I can do now is use NetNewsWire for my aggregation, ecto for my formatting and Wordpress for my hosting. All three do their thing really well but can communicate and format with each other by a simple click of a button.

Radio is the boom box, with FM/AM tuners, CD player, cassette, and speakers. NetNewsWire, ecto and Wordpress are like stereo components. I got convenience from Radio but now I can get depth, up-to-date development AND convenience.   10:33:16 AM