Blogs | Social Signal

From my Civic Minded blog on Corante:

Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:

 * Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities. 

While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.

I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default:

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.

The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from one of the members of the Habitat Jam team about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from Steven Forth of the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.

The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org 

 Event details

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Thurday, May 4th
6pm-8pm
at
The Whip (map)
209 6th Avenue East (at Main), Vancouver

RSVP on Upcoming.org 

Any questions? Email [email protected]

One of the most powerful aspects of the new web (some people say it's the defining aspect) is how so many web sites are actually applications that can share data with each other. One simple example is a blog, which can share its content with other blogs or with news aggregators.

Late last night, I received the e-mail from Google. No message, just a headline: "Google Page Creator: sign up!!" It's still in an invitation-only beta, but here's what I found:

There's a lot of innovation going on in the new web right now, with ground-breaking applications coming from individual developers as well as big, well-funded companies. It seems like every day, there's a new service out there giving you a new way to collaborate, create, tag or remix.

Keeping track of it all – or even knowing where to start looking for a particular kind of service – has been a daunting challenge... until now.

Here's a quick link for political bloggers and their followers: the CBC's blog columnist in the last election, John Bowman, recaps blogging's impact on the campaign in a Policy Options magazine article (PDF).

At last week's 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, I sat on a terrific panel led by Matt Blair, with Marnie Webb and Marshall Kirkpatrick, on the security implications of the new web. It was one of those amazing sessions where the audience was so engaged from the start that we had no need for the usual opening-presentations-plus-Q&A structure; we got right into a very cool 90-minute conversation.

I don't think anyone was recording the session, but I thought I'd share the notes I'd prepared for my presentation.