Aloha - Movin' On

Yes it's true. After 10 years, I have left CompuMentor. (And I'm only now catching up to updating this blog....)

I will be consulting - in and around a lot of the topics covered in this blog, as well as my new "independent me" blog.

I'm also the part-time Director of Technology at a small K-8 school in San Franicisco. I haven't cleared it with them yet that I'll be talking about my work and lessons learned there - but I will name the skill soon. ;-)

In the meantime, there's always a ton of unfinished business - blog posts I have yet to compose; several dozen unanswered emails from leftover projects I've been working on; and several more dozen unanswered emails from people wishing me well.

Thanks. And I'm not really going anywhere. Just moving over here.

OBDouglasAdams: So long and thanks for all the fish.

Spin Project - Presentation and thoughts

I just got back from the Spin Academy, and boy am I dizzy. (Ba-dum tsss).

I have uploaded the full presentation I gave at Spin on the Consultant Commons website. Yes, it's very similar to the CTN presentation, but the difference in the room was significant. Most of the folks at Spin Academy are inherently interested in expanding their online voice, and a lot of them were younger than myself, so there was a lot more energy and interest in what some of these tools can do - and less apprehension about "the new stuff I have to learn." (And I can't blame it on the fact that my CTN presentation was the dreaded late afternoon slot - my Spin presentation was after dinner! And we went 30 minutes over!).

Some quick thoughts:

• I need to get a lot more familiar with podcasting. Honestly, I tend to know what I know because I've messed around with the tools - even if I haven't used them. But I've listened to a total of one podcast so far - and I'll be honest - it showed when I tried to answer questions.
• One attendee came up to me afterwards and said that their organization uses a blog to post news-related commentary - and gets listed on GoogleNews! That's a great way to work the system.
• We talked briefly at the end of the presentation about social network tools. I expressed my specific feelings about social networking "destinations" (that I've expressed on this forum before) - although not very much coverage was given to the potential successful uses of places like MySpace. I could point to some, but maybe a better riposte to my argument are some of the thoughts about the use of MySpace, from NetSquared (the link takes you to the search results page for "MySpace").

I'm blogging from CTN

Holy cramoly - wasn't that cool!

Blogged with Flock

Update: Yeah, so I gave a pesentation yesterday at the CTN conference - and at the end of it, I blogged directly to Ext311 from Flock. HEnce the random photo from upstate New York, and the text.

My full ppt presentation is here, and all the links to the apps referred in the presentation are here.

And I'm doing something again - similar, yet different - at the Spin Academy next week, up in Sonoma.

RSS to Email?

I'm testing an RSS to email feature, and since my previous tests have failed, I've decided to go live on this blog in an effort to force the service I'm trying out - Squeet - to send me an email update of my blog.

No, I'm not doing this because I would prefer to get blog updates via email. But I might want to get wiki updates via email, and as far as I can tell, WikiSpaces doesn't support email updates, only RSS/ Atom feeds.

See, I've helped someone set up a WikiSpace because - well, it's easy to use, particulary for non-techies. And then to ask people to set up a feed-reader? Not in my world, dood. KISS - email and the Web - baby steps, baby steps. I'm not throwing Wiki-style CamelCase and RSS to a tech newbie in the same week....


(And if this fails, I may have to add another filler blog post.... Pray that it works...)

Fixed Flock?

So a while back, I tried a couple of different things to see if I could incorporate my blogging more easily, as opposed to having to log in every time I wanted to blog something (no, I prefer not to sit on logged-in sites, but I'm slowly changing).

I tried the plug-in Performancing, but had some challenges with it.  A friend convinced me to re-try Flock, which is what I'm using create this post.  We'll see if it works.

(And a mean RSI pain just flared up, so I guess I'm quitting for the day.  Perhaps too much Drum-Fu this weekend at the SF Theatre Fest?....)

Blogged with Flock

Bonding, not branding

Following up on a little on a previosu presentation I gave on "how to blog, and why to blog, and then - why to read other people's blogs (and how)" (otherwise known as my blog-tags-rss presentation). Here's a succint case made by Nancy Schwartz on why you should read and search blogs - make sure to click to read the full article. It may make my post about how to set up feeds on Bloglines using Technorati make a little more sense.....

IssueLab - nonprofit research portal

IssueLab, created by the Chicago-based New Media for Nonprofits, collects and shares (or links to) the plethora of nonprofit research out on the Web. As far as I can tell, it's all free, unlike research clipping services. Part of the strategy is that nonprofits register (for no fee) to add their own reports - or add links to their research. There's a wide range of information on the site, from The Almanac of Hunger and Poverty in America 2006 to Health Care and Opportunity - but since it relies on organizations uploading info, there are a few holes (the tech reports section is fairly light, and there's nothing under "Arts and Culture").

Nonprofit Operations Tips blog!

It's exciting to see things come full circle. I first met Heather when I was giving a presentation on Healthy and Secure Computing, and she was struggling to manage the technology where she worked. Since then, she's plowed through a ton of resources on nonprofit technology, continued to develop her expertise in nonprofit management operations - and now she works for Aspriation Tech, and is posting blog tips on nonprofit operations - that I end up reading!

Carnival of Nonprofit Blogs: Technology!

Last week over here I mentioned the call that went out to bloggers for the "best-of" technology for nonprofit blogging. Well, here are the results - edition #5 of the Carnival of Nonprofit Blogs: Technology.

("The Carnival of what?....")

New Technology in the Arts site and blog!

A while back, I too was invited to be on the Honorary Committee of the new Technology in the Arts conference (my nomination was care of the Beth Kanter, linked).

Now that they have the website up, what's the first thing they do? Set up a blog! Brilliant!

Technorati hates me - I wanna Rent an Expert

So the idea with Technorati is that you can use it to not only find out what other people are saying, you can find out what other people are saying about you.... And, if you use tags in your posts, you can then share "conversations" on a topic (as defined by the tag) with others. To wit, I can search for "social networking" as a keyword, and I get a different list of blogs than if I use it as a tag search - because some people are specifically identifying their post as being relevant to "social networking." (Note: you'll get different mileage on tag searches if you keep or omit the space between words).

How is this supposed to work? Well, you add some html into your blog post, as directed here - using your tag word of choice. Recently, I've tagged blog posts with OCC2006 (posts I think are relevant for Online Community Camp), WineCamp (posts relevant to WineCamp and WineCampers), and MMC2006 (the Making Media Connections conference). However, if you look at the links, while my OCC2006 and WineCamp posts show up on Technorati (amongst other bloggers who have also blogged about these events), my MMC2006 posts don't.

And that's frustrating, because there are several worthy posts (oh, and one more)!

I would consider going and Renting An Expert (courtesy of the folks who bring you BrainJams) - except that I'm in rehearsal for a small performance. Oh well - maybe next time someone can come and rent me!