New links for January 28th
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Filed under News
Headlines: Inauguration Day on Twitter * Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More * Is Email Dead? * Beyond WiMAX: Gigabit Wireless * Building Blocks of Social Media (summary and commentary after the break)
Inauguration Day on Twitter – Good news about Twitter: it saw its heaviest usage ever on Inauguration and was able to keep up with the traffic, a major improvement over its earlier frequent outages, giving greater reason to hope that the underlying code is robust enough to support it as an emergent new platform.
Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More – A wonderfully insightful, reflective piece by the founders of the Genocide Intervention Network on their participation-centric strategy for organizing: “Many groups use social networks for mobilizing — getting members out to an evnt, getting people to sign a petition, getting people to donate for a cause. GI-Net focuses on organizing — creating an educated constituency of people who can motivate others.”
Is Email Dead? – An interesting tactical note: while there are some reasons to believe that email contact is in decline as an effective way for nonprofits to reach members, genuinely urgent appeals (e.g. “the deadline is tomorrow, act now”) are actually getting better results than before.
Beyond WiMAX: Gigabit Wireless – The technologies for mobile access to the Internet are moving fast, bringing us ever closer to a fully-wired, always-connected population: not only is WiMAX arriving in the very near future, but engineers are already working on the following generation of cellular that could provide fiber-optic data speeds through the air.
Building Blocks of Social Media – A good quick-and-dirty overview of the most commonly-used social media tools, with practical advice for how to put them to use in a nonprofit context.
