Posts from — June 2008
Txt to save power
One free power saving tip arrives on your cellphone each day. This is one way to keep people engaged and informed.
Free text POWER to 3642 and get FREE power saving tips direct to your mobile.
[Via Powersavers: Get free powersaving tips straight to your mobile!.]
If you txt that number you’re added to a distribution list — which isn’t very clear from the quoted section above. Once you send that txt, a reply lets you know you’ll now receive a maximum of one text message per day, and that you can send ‘Stop’ to be removed from the distribution list.
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June 22, 2008 No Comments
How to set up on Facebook
Wild Apricot Blog not only has an excellent beginner’s guide to Facebook for non-profits:
This powerful networking service is not just for individuals like me to keep in touch with friends. It’s a very effective networking tool for nonprofits to create awareness and connect with their community. In this post, I’ll take you through a beginner’s guide to get your non-profit on Facebook and ways to effectively use this tool. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of features, but it may help get you started.
but also useful information on How to Set Up a Non-Profit Facebook Page:
How do you tell Facebook that you want to make a Page for a nonprofit organization, not for a commercial business?
If you’re even thinking about Facebook — and you should be at least thinking about it — visit for clear, helpful instructions.
June 21, 2008 No Comments
Novels at 140 per
A cellphone can traditionally handle 140 characters in each txt message. What can you do with that? In Japan, a lot:
Novels written and delivered on cell phones have been a huge fad in Japan, with 5 of the 10 bestselling novels of 2007 in the island nation originally composed on cell phones.
[Via Read/WriteWeb: Quillpill: Cell Phone Novels Escape Japan.]
What can you do with that?
June 20, 2008 No Comments
WordPress, Utterz, Flickr, YouTube and the Red Cross
Josh Catone reports:
… while the Central United States recovers from a spate of storms that has ravaged towns with tornadoes and flooding, the American Red Cross is relying on a number of web 2.0 technologies to spread information to the press and people affected by the severe weather. The online newsroom that the organization has set up relies on a number of web 2.0 widgets.
The newsroom site runs off of Wordpress, and it’s being used to push out press releases, media, and information about shelters. The Red Cross is using Utterz to post audio reports from the field, Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos, as well as a Slide-powered slideshow widget that allows anyone to upload photos of disaster areas. The site also features a Google Maps mashup that depicts the surprisingly large number of relief operations currently being run by the American Red Cross
[Via Read/WriteWeb: Social Media Used to Keep Flood Victims Informed.]
June 19, 2008 No Comments
Small change or big? $1 a day casual cellphone data
My cellphone, a Sony Ericsson K800i, has a screen only marginally bigger than a postage stamp. That’s part of the reason why I don’t really actually use it much for anything except phonecalls and txting (and taking photos). That, plus my fear of the cost of doing anything else.
When I was in Hamilton for the Engage your Community conference though I experimented one evening with looking at a few RSS feeds and (trying) to read a couple of news items from Stuff, or maybe it was the NZ Herald. That was all fairly unsuccessful — it was slow and the web pages were truly dreadful and unreadable on the phone.
A month or so later I received the bill for that attempt: $20! I won’t be trying that again in a hurry.
Or maybe I will. On 11 July the iPhone will finally arrive in New Zealand. I’ll be buying one as soon as possible, because I’m just that sort of person.
With the iPhone comes proper web surfing, email, RSS feeds and so on. And with the arrival of the iPhone comes a huge change from Vodafone. I’ll let Rod Drury explain it, in his post $1 a day:
Vodafone launches $1 a day mobile broadband
Vodafone has blown apart the mobile data market with the launch of its new casual rate of $1 a day.
From July 28, customers will be able to surf the net, download music and games and play on their favourite sites without committing to a fixed monthly data contract.
The $1 a day casual rate gives customers up to 10MB of data – more than enough for most casual users on their mobile devices. Customers who go over that limit will be charged at $1 per megabyte and users who regularly need more can take advantage of our suite of data plans.
[Via : Rod Drury > $1 a day.]
Read Rod’s full post for more of the story, and also read the many many comments on his post, including those from Paul Brislen, boss of Vodafone.
So why am I mentioning this? Because it will change the way Kiwis use their cellphones. For community organisations that means they may change the ways they go about their business. It also definitely means that the people they are trying to reach — volunteers, clients, customers, stakeholders — all have more possibilities open to them.
We’ll keep an eye on this. Change is in the air.
June 18, 2008 No Comments
