Today, as I was following the Healthcare Summit on Twitter, I was fascinated to see the way transparency has set in and opened up data for all the world to see who is who and where some individuals may be coming from, while defending or opposing an issue.
The Sunlight Foundation offered a live feed of the health care debate, with data right by the side of the video feed showing Top Industry Donors 2010 for each person speaking.
I just submitted four videos from the Diabetes Hands Foundation for the 4th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards.
Here they are so you can enjoy them!
Have you subscribed to the Diabetes Hands Foundation channel on YouTube?
If you have heard the buzz, so have millions of others lately: Google recently launched a service in direct competition to Twitter and Facebook called Goggle Buzz… or is it a complement to them? Or none of the above?
Don’t worry: you are not alone in having questions about this new service in the social media landscape! To help you figure out what to do about Google Buzz, make sure to read this great post about the role of Google Buzz for nonprofits by John Haydon.
P.S. While I decide how to go about the use of Google Buzz, I decided to activate the Google Buzz Button WordPress plugin, which you can now see at the bottom of all posts on the blog.
April will be a great month for nonprofit groups. The 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference will be taking place in Atlanta. I will be having the chance to speak in two different sessions there this year, which I am very excited about!
As we gear up for three great days of technology conversation among nonprofiteers, I recently received from Holly Ross (the hear of NTEN, the group responsible for organizing NTC every year) an invitation to highlight our sessions, so I thought I’d blog about it instead, responding the questions she sent our way here…
1. What’s the most important trend in nonprofit technology for 2010?
At the 2009 NTC, I did an Ignite session about Ning For Nonprofits. Back then, there were not that many nonprofit groups taking advantage of this platform to build niche communities.
Today, more and more groups are developing their own social networks on Ning (many others are also using other tools such as Joomla or Drupal) to improve their outreach and fundraising efforts. No wonder Mashable featured a great article by Geoff Livingston with 5 Tips for Creating Non-Profit Online Communities.
I see this is an important trend in nonprofit technology this year.
2. Why do you think your session topic is important for nonprofits to address
I am fortunate to be able to participate in two different (though related) topics this year:
Both topics revolve around the concept of communities and social networks. So they are very relevant to this growing trend mentioned in question #1.
3. What’s the one thing you want attendees to remember from your session
It is possible to still retain your sanity while running an online community… see my reply to the next question for evidence of this?
4. Which Muppet do you most identify with and why?
That’s a tough one, but I am going to have to go with the Swedish Chef!! He still cracks me up to this day. I guess what I love about him is his goofy nature.
You expected me to answer Animal, huh? 
5. Where can people follow you online (twitter, blog, etc.)?
It’s kind of hard to miss me since I am online so much, but if you must get the links, here there are:
After nearly 8 years of living in its Blogger home, my blog has now moved to its new home on WordPress HERE!! The content is all here, but under the hood, I am happy to have a better engine powering it.
Thanks to my friend Danilo Campos (who is also now a Bay area neighbor) who gave me a hand setting it up!
Know those semi-cryptic wavy characters that you need to type back in when trying to link to a web site on Facebook or sign up for some web services? They are known as captchas and, in case you are wondering, they are there to try to keep spammers at bay (though spammers are never shy of exploiting good people around the world and pay them to sit at terminals typing these in for pennies an hour…)
This morning (probably the result of not enough sleep or coffee… or both), I was wondering what my favorite kind of captcha was. There are, of course, the ones so cryptic that it takes a true calligrapher to tell what the heck they say! I am sure those keep spammers at bay, but they probably also keep REAL people at bay, because they are so hard to read! 
So, I guess my favorite kind of captcha is the one I encounter in Facebook:
I can not only read the words, but it also provides a certain level of entertainment, because they are real words (“wagons” and “unfair” in this case) that leave me wondering sometimes what the connection may be between them… Are wagons unfair? Is it unfair to ride a wagon? What’s a wagon? What’s fair…?
See? Next time, I will get more sleep or get more coffee into my system before I blog! 
Last week I learned about NutShellMail. They dub themselves as the “DVR for your social networks” and the more I think of it, the more I agree with the name… and the more I am liking the service. So much, that we rolled out NutShellMail on TuDiabetes this week.
What do I like about it? I am constantly on top of 3-4 sites that I monitor for content and conversations, among them TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes (of course) but also, Twitter and Facebook, where I spend most of my social media time these days.
NutShellMail precisely hits the sweet spot, by allowing me to configure the combination of updates (from the combination of sites -my network on Ning + Facebook or not + Twitter if I want to), and sends me an update via email up to 3 times per day.
“Email?!!” you may say. Yes. I find it convenient, b/c it combines updates in a single place that happens to be another space I spend quite a bit of time on (my inbox). So, while it may not be for everyone, I find it to suit my needs and I highly recommend it!
Update (Feb. 1, 2010): I have stopped using this service. However, we continue to offer it as an option for our members on TuDiabetes. My reason for stopping its use was related to an already high volume of emails I receive.
This weekend, I was reading the interview of Techcrunch with Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning) in Davos. In it, Gina argues that that she doesn’t see Nign as a competitor of Facebook or Twitter.
I agree with Gina’s statement to a certain extent. Quote:
“Facebook… is actually going more in the direction of connecting you with the people you have strong relationships with your real identity, with status messages, and with photo sharing… Twitter’s about news and real time events.”
Ning instead is about building (strong) relationships with people you may not know in real life. So they overlap nicely to a certain degree, in terms of what they allow you as an individual or as a business to do.
But I still feel they are in direct competition, not only against each other but with all other things that pull us in different directions in our lives. We each may belong to dozens of social networks (online), be a part of multiple networks (offline -think your children’s PTA, homehowner’s associations, trade groups, etc.) and each of these expect a chunk of our time. No matter how effective we are, days are still 24 hours long and we have a few hours we need to sleep every day. So in the end Ning, Facebook, Twitter and all manifestations of social media in our lives are in direct competition for our most valuable asset: time.
How do you manage your time in social media?