CivicActions

A few weeks ago someone pointed me toward this interesting writeup of 50 social sites, it is geared toward sites where businesses should try to build and maintain a presence, but I think that it is applicable for NPO and NGOs too.

The article is split into 5 sections:

• Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites
• Professional-Networking Sites
• Niche Social-Media Sites
• General Social-Media Sites
• Job Sites

Just before the holiday break, I spoke with Alyssa Royce, Editor of JUSTCAUSE about non profits, the internet and the social networking (full disclosure: they are one of our clients, and I worked with them on the site which launched at the end of the summer).  Alyssa was researching an article on nonprofits and social networking for the GuideStar newsletter.

In September we launched JustCauseIt.com (beta) a social networking website that acts as a companion to a forthcoming print magazine. When the folks at JUSTCAUSE came to us with their idea and told me their mission is (as they put it on the website):

From the people who brought you the enormously popular The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The rumor is that Google is planning to fight Facebook on the "social networking" front...

If the story is true, Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data and will be an attempt to connect the currently closed communities of Tribe.net, Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and more...

Guy Kawasaki, the poster child of dot-com boom and crazy Silicon Valley venture capitalism, has entered the next generation of the Web using all the "right" buzzwords.

"By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09" is the title of his latest blog post.

Learn how Guy spent only $4K on lawyers, $400 on a logo, bought 55 domain names, setup a Wordpress site and used Yahoo! as the hosting environment.

Too bad, the site didn't survive the Digg effect. Someone should remind Guy that social media sites need to be _running_ to be useful. (As of writing this post, the site was still down.)

Check-out the top 20 largest social bookmarking sites by unique monthly visitor data and other traffic metrics.

TechPresident features a few posts from Micah Sifry on the recent Obama MySpace snafu. The short of it is this: volunteer makes a Barak Obama MySpace profile in 2004. Over time that profile grows to 160k friends. The volunteer gives freely of his time doing it (by his account 5 to 10 hours a day since the beginning of the year). The Obama campaign decides they want control, ask the volunteer how much he'd like to be compensated.

MySpace and Presidential Politics

Sunday's NYT ran an article about MySpace's new Impact Channel where presidential candidates' profiles will be aggregated and presented for MySpace's 60 million (mostly young) American members.

The article basically says "candidates are going where the voters are" and expects that MySpace and the Impact Channel could have an, err, impact, on youth turn out and the election.

Conflict Resolution Software is one of my biggest interests, and the OneVoice software has been working for years to develop a movement with a practical outcome to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.