Just a quick note to mention that Eventbrite, a popular event organising web application, has announced discount pricing for non-profits and charities – Eventbrite for causes.
The blog post makes mention of the U.S. requirements, but the pricing extends to non-profits in other countries as well.
Apple’s new iPad seems to have been pretty heavily bagged since the announcement earlier this week. The commentary I’ve read primarily focuses on the lack of support for having multiple applications open, the name, the relatively high cost of the 3G-enabled version.
Over the jump I outline a few of the reasons why I think the iPad will do just fine in a commercial sense.
On Thursday I attended the launch of the Sustainability Challenge programme, being promoted by Models of Success & Sustainability (MOSS). (There’s currently no web presence for the programme, though some information is contained in the MOSS PDF brochure. More info on the Sustainability Challenge website.)
It is quite an interesting programme modeled around a group board game supporting organisations in providing educational material about sustainability, promoting key points for discussion and incorporating anonymous polling (or auditing) tools.
During Thursday’s session we participated in some demonstration rounds of the game within groups. Even though we weren’t able to get the effect of a full workshop (due to time constraints), I was impressed with the promise of the tool.
It is designed to be run in a workshop mode, and it was a well designed tool that incorporated competitive spirit in a constructive way to enhance learning. And while the focus of the session on Thursday was environmental sustainability, the programme itself covers a much broader set of areas, including diversity and other social factors.
The customisation options alluded to by MOSS and Sustainability Challenge International (co-designers of the game, along with input from Swinburne University and Baker & McKenzie) seem quite strong too. There also seems to be a vision of “crowdsourcing” questions and answers for the game as well.
The programme seems ideally suited to larger organisations and CSR departments, though if the costs are reasonable (I’m not yet sure what the programme’s price point is) would also be appropriate for smaller group settings.
In preparation for some workshops earlier in the year, I spoke with Damian Maclennan about his community building efforts with Sydney Cyclist using the Ning platform. Damian has kindly granted me permission to blog the conversation here.
In the interview Damian talks about why and how he went about setting up the community, his thoughts on Ning as a community platform, and he shares some of the lessons learned in building and maintaining it.
Regular readers may recall that I have a initiative of donating 1% net profit to causes I support each quarter.
I spotted in politician blogger Penny Sharpe’s recent email out that the NSW Public Sphere conference, was looking for support to cover the costs of the event.
As a big believer in more transparent and representative government, and of the power of social/web 2.0 tools for helping in this aim, I decided to apply the funds from last quarter (plus a little bit of a “top-up”) to support NSW Public Sphere.
Though not my intention, technically this makes Zumio a “sponsor” of the event. I’m proud to be associated with the event in this context, but my main hope is that NSW Public Sphere will help spark further advancement of what’s being termed “Government 2.0″.
As far as I know the organisers still need further funds to cover costs, so if you think you can help, contact Penny (details on her site) to let her know.
Of course, I’m also looking forward to participating in the event. If you’re going, I’ll see you there :) Otherwise keep an eye out for the #nswsphere tag on Twitter for ongoing commentary throughout the day.
At lunch the other day, Andrew asked if I’d be interested in blogging about my thoughts on Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). What’s interesting about the conversation is that I hadn’t actually given IE8 much thought – apart from keeping on top of some of the features and debates around standards compliance. I certainly hadn’t installed it or tried it out.
Continue over the jump for my thoughts on the IE8 release.
The other day I rocked up to Greater Union on George street with some friends to catch a movie. Forgetting it was “tight-ass Tuesday” there was a long line, so I thought “I’ll jump into OneTap Movies and see if I can buy tickets” – then I could jump the queue using their pre-purchased tickets line.
OneTap Movies is an iPhone application that uses GPS to find the nearest cinema, and then allows you to browse the movies and times for that cinema. You can even preview some movies and see ratings.
It’s a great little app, but it’s missing the killer feature: you can’t buy tickets – as I found out that night. (Certainly this is the case for my local cinemas.)
So I thought “I have a fully working browser on my phone, I’ll have a crack at the Greater Union site”. I quietly hoped they had taken the initiative to develop an iPhone specific interface, but I wasn’t banking on it.
I got to the Greater Union site and waited for the ~500k worth of media to slooooowwwly stream down (the home page rates an F using YSlow). The site also uses tables, which meant that the key interface component didn’t display until the entire page had downloaded.
I then started to use their JavaScript enabled interface, only to find that it failed at the first step – choosing a cinema.
So we waited in line, and by the time we got to the desk the session we were after had sold out.
A couple of things struck me in considering this short, but sad, tale:
Such an approach fulfils a couple of the key principles I outlined in my recent CPA presentation:
So how about it Greater Union?
I’ve just been chatting with a client about email marketing – exploring which tools they should/could use to support their email strategy. I thought I’d do a quick review of some of the options we looked at.
Click through to read the full post.
This post is the third in a series: Part 1: What is del.icio.us?, Part 2: What makes del.icio.us a "social" bookmarking tool?.
The most basic way that del.icio.us can assist you in managing your bookmarks across multiple computers, or simply make it easier to find a bookmark through tags or search. But there are other ways you can use del.icio.us to support collaboration.
If you have multiple people in your business that use del.icio.us, you can check out what your coworkers are linking to by checking their bookmarks page (you’ll need to know their del.icio.us username – then append it to the del.icio.us URL. For example, you can view my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/grantyoung), or you could use the "for:" syntax to share links through del.icio.us, rather than sending emails.
You may instead want to simply all agree on a specific tag that you use when you want to share your links – then everyone can simply watch that tag – rather than having to use multiple "for:" tags to send to individuals.
For example, on the Uncensor project, the tech team have been using the uncensor tag to share links. You could use more obscure tag names – for example I might use “<organisation or project name>:team” (e.g. “zumio:team”) to share amongst people working in your team, or “<project name>:design” to share design related links.
You can monitor tags related to your area business to get insight into what’s happening online, and even watch tags related to your business or product name. For example, to see what people are saying about Yahoo!, you can check the "yahoo" tag. Using an RSS news reader makes this even easier to check as each tag page has its own RSS feed. You can use this as a form of market research – seeing who’s linking to you, and what people are saying about your business or product(s). (You can do similar sorts of research with blog trackers like Technorati or Google Blog Search, but that’s a topic for another post…)
If you are running an event (like a conference), you can suggest that people tag their links with a specific tag related to the event. For example, the organisers of the Web Directions conference suggested that participants use the "wd07″ tag. (You can do the same for other popular services like flickr and YouTube.)
The same approach applies to more general projects as well. Come up with a tag that you all use for your project and start sharing.
You can also share your links via your website or company blog – there are a number of widgets and tools for various blog tools (like WordPress) that allow you to add your del.icio.us links to your site’s sidebar.
You could use such a widget to link to reviews of your product(s), to sites related to your area of business – to any site that you think might be of interest to your target audience.
There are other tools like Postalicious that will take a daily snapshot of your del.icio.us links and post them to your blog (that’s the plugin I use here on zum.io). Some tools also allow you to specify a specific tag to link to so you can target specific links to specific blogs/sites.
I’m sure there are plenty of other ways del.icio.us can be used – leave a comment if you have a suggestion…
This post is the second in a series: Part 1: What is del.icio.us?, Part 3: How can I use it for my business?.
When you go to the del.icio.us home page you’ll see a list of "What’s Hot". This list is generated because del.icio.us can tell when a specific link has been linked by a number of people. Sort of like how Google uses the number of links to a page to help determine if it is useful and relevant, del.icio.us uses the number of links to a site to identify sites of interest in the current moment.
Although this is pretty cool, it’s not the only (nor necessarily the most useful/exciting) way that the social nature of del.icio.us can be used.
Each tag also has its own page. If you were looking for what people are linking to about, say, laptops, you can look at the del.icio.us listing for the "laptop" tag to find out what other people are linking too (or use the model name/number to be more specific – "MacBook" for example). If you use an RSS news reader (like Google Reader), you can also subscribe to a specific tag or del.icio.us user so you can keep track of what’s being added without having to visit the del.icio.us site all the time.
When you add a link to del.icio.us you may also see that it’s linked to by other people. If you click on the "saved by X other people" link next to your bookmark, you can browse what those other people have linked to.
Additionally, if you tag something using the "for:<username>" syntax, that will appear in the "links for you" section of that particular user’s del.icio.us profile (you can see this as a link at the top of your del.icio.us profile page after you have signed in). For example, my del.icio.us username is "grantyoung" – so tagging something as "for:grantyoung" will appear in my "links for you" section. This is a great way to share bookmarks with colleagues or friends. Sending a link this way means that only the "grantyoung" user (me) will have access to the link.
As you can see, there are many ways that the collective value of using del.icio.us’ bookmarks emerges – all from individuals saving their own pages for future reference.
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