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Category — Thinking points

Osocio - a fountain of inspiration and ideas

by Miraz

After spotting the video mentioned in Make it shareable: The Girl Effect - a YouTube video and a social cause I read the comments on the blog where I found it. One of them mentioned Osocio, so I went to have a look and found a real treasure house.

If you’d like some ideas for your community group you’ll find plenty of inspiration at Osocio. Hustle over there now and have a look:

Osocio is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. It’s the place where marketing and activism collide. Formerly known as the Houtlust Blog, Osocio is the central online hub for advertisers, ad agencies, grassroots, activists, social entrepreneurs, and good Samaritans from around the globe.

Despite there being hundreds of other ad blogs on the web, Houtlust stood out by focusing exclusively on social advertising. Unlike commercial advertising, which only attempts to influence purchase decisions, non-profit ads seeks to connect us with other human beings. Social advertising has an uncanny power to make us stop, think and then take action to help a person, or a group of people, who we don’t even know, who might be from a foreign culture, living thousands of miles away. And for that reason we celebrate these ads, study them and discuss them at length. We hope you will too. …

Osocio is more then a blog. It’s a complete resource for all things in the world of non-profit and social messaging. It’s a platform for global and local social issues, both large and small. It’s a community of social thinkers and marketing do-gooders.

[Via : About - Osocio, Social Advertising and Non-profit Campaigns.]

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August 12, 2008   No Comments

The next 5,000 days of the web

by Miraz

While the Internet has been around for decades, the web is only around 15 years old.

A decade ago anyone suggesting that we’d all have instant access to vast stores of information, or satellite images of the planet, or near real-time photos from an event half a world away, for free, from a device we hold easily in one hand would have been thought a wild dreamer. Today it’s just reality.

We use laptop computers, large and tiny, cellphones, games machines, home computers, to connect to the Internet, sharing text, sounds and images instantly with billions of others.

All that in 15 years. But what’s next? What will we be doing in another 15 years? People often talk about what may happen next year, or even, at a stretch, the year after that, but Kevin Kelly stretches his mind , and ours, with a longer view:

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

Download his 20 minute talk from Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web | Video on TED.com to find out what he sees in our future. The talk is around 70Mb, so you need broadband.

He offers interesting, and challenging, ideas. What do you think of what he suggests?

July 31, 2008   No Comments

Make Your Public Event Calendar Usable To All

by Mike Riversdale

If you run a sports club, this post is for you.
If you are on a community committee, this post is also for you
If you host events, this is for you.
If you put on shows, this is for you.

In fact, if you do anything that has a date/time component that you’d like to share with people, this is for you. Yep, probably for all of us.

Sharing calendars can be both:

  • an effective way of letting everyone know
  • a complete and utter technical pain in the bottomly region

If you’ve posted up an events page onto your website you know how difficult it is to keep up to date, how the readers have to keep coming back to get the latest changes and don’t even think about integrating with somebody else’s “events page”.

Ok, so we all know the problem.
What’s the solution? iCalendar (normally shortened to iCal) … yep, it’s a geek word that you will come to know and love just as much as RSS. In fact, think of it as RSS for calendars. But that’s enough geekery, if you want to know more pop over to Wikipedia: iCalendar

All we need to know is that iCal is the Web way of sharing calendars.
And with everyone being on the Web why not make your sporting club calendar available on the Web? “Because it sounds hard Mike, that’s why!”

Allow Google Calendar to be your friend.
Google Calendar is not just a calendaring system for you, the singular, even though it does that very well. It also allows you to:

  • Set-up group calendars
  • Share and collaborate on calendars
  • Publish them on the Web

And it’s the last bit I want to draw your attention to today.
Publishing your calendar on the Web means that anyone can “subscribe” to your calendar and all updates you make are instantly reflected in their calendar client. And it’s not just about dates and times but also locations, maps, details and even links to web pages.

Take a look at this example from the publicly available Wellingtonista Event Calendar (iCal)

Everything you need to know without ever having to do a thing.

Set-up a public Google Calendar

  1. Get yourself a Google Account
  2. Go to your Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com)
  3. Click the ‘Manage calendars’ link - bottom left of the current calendar list (which might only be one, yours)
  4. At the bottom of the “My calendars” list click the the ‘Create new calendar’ button
  5. Fill in the new calendar details including:
    • A clear name (I include a location that the calendar covers such as “Wellington, New Zealand”)
    • Verbose and clear description
    • Who, if anyone, you’d like to be able to update the calendar

  6. Ensure the “Make this calendar public” is ticked

    Note: you can change this later or for specific events
  7. Push the “Create Calendar” button
  8. Start adding your events

Share your newly created public calendar
Google will index your calendar within 24 hours allowing it to be searched by everyone.

However there are many other ways to share your calendar and, because it uses the Web standard iCal, they don’t have to use Google Calendar (but why wouldn’t you!) as long as their calendaring system understands iCal you’re sorted.

And for the uber geeks and/or IT Departments you can build calendars on your own website using Google Calendar Data API

One final goodie, notifications.
You can have events pop-up, email you or even send a txt to your mobile … you never have to miss an event ever again!

Add a public calendar to your Google Calendar

  1. Go to your Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com)
  2. Click the ‘Manage calendars’ link - bottom left of the current calendar list (which might only be one, yours)
  3. Click the ‘Add calendar’ button - bottom of the list of current “Other calendars”
  4. Make sure you’re in the “Search Public Calendars” tab
  5. Search for your calendar (eg, wellingtonista) and push the ‘Search’ button
  6. There it is - click the ‘Add Calendar’ button

A sample of public calendars
Finally, the goodies we’ve all been waiting for, a sample list of publicly available calendars you can subscribe to right now by either doing a search inside your Google Calendar or by browsing the Google Calendar Directory. If you publish a public calendar for your events let me know and I’ll tell the world for you.

New Zealand
978 calendars matched my search, here’s a sample:

Australia
A total of 457 matched my calendar search with the following a mere taste:

UK
Too many to contemplate, you’re gonna have to really be specific to the events you want :-)

The rest of the world
I went looking for the strangest calendars I could find and the three I present to you are:

More resources
There’s LOTS about Google Calendar on the Web, here’s some pre-loaded searches for you:

(this is a cross posting from MiramarMike.co.nz)

July 28, 2008   1 Comment

The medium and the message

by Miraz

There are people who live online and on their phones, and there are folks who stick to the newspaper.  You need to look not only at the age of your audiences, but also where and how they live so you know the best way to reach them.  Fancy marketers call this ethnographic research.

[Via Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog: Must read: the changing US consumer.]

July 24, 2008   No Comments

Identities in the offline world

by Miraz

Karaitiana Taiuru makes a point about how we contact people in a world where populations are in a constant state of change: we change jobs, houses, cities and even countries with great frequency. Is it still appropriate to ask people for their phone number? Perhaps an Internet address would make more sense?

I wonder if it is time we stopped using our phone numbers on personal ID and forms, or that we are at least given the option to use a phone number and a web address such as a personal domain or social networking site address.

Read the whole post at Karaitiana Taiuru - Blog: Identities in the offline world.

Add in schemes such as OpenID and i-names, which allow people to establish a definitive identity:

…your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

While OpenID is more about logging in to password protected areas, i-names are more about claiming a single identity to represent you on the Internet.

Just as a url is an address for a website, an i-name is an Internet address for YOU! It is a simple, secure way to authenticate your identity and to share personal data, with the assurance that it will remain private and up-to-date. Further, your identity cannot be “harvested” by spammers or other marketers without your express permission.

There are two types of i-names: individual i-names and organization i-names:

  • An individual i-name begins with an “=” sign (i.e., =victor.grey)
  • An organization i-name begins with an “@” sign (i.e., @2idi)

This post was written by Miraz Jordan, i-name=Miraz.

July 23, 2008   No Comments

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