Some days you can get to see that something big has shifted in the way the world works. Twenty years ago it was the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Berlin Wall and when things happen on that scale seeing the change is easy, but sometimes the change needs to seek you out and slap you awake. Like this. I’ve Got Nothing: Crowdsourced Song Created by YouTubers [Read more →]

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According to Mark Milian of the LA Times, Geocities was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet, its been there longer than I have been connected and, for years, any search of the web produced at least a couple of Geocities sites. It still attracts 10 million site visits a month but now, as Chris Crum writes, it is over. R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

[...] Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

[...] It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users?

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it.

What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished?

Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

OK, I accept that Yahoo! might have a commercial or operational reason for doing this, but shifting a site that may have been up for years, with all its files, is a huge job and not to offer some kind of simple migration to a blog for example is just bad PR.

Then there's the issue of millions of links to Geocities pages that will now vanish, again, an automated tool could set up forwarding to the new address for every page, but once Geocities closes, all that we'll have left is dead links.

This isn't the first such event, nor will it be the last, but as the internet ages, it will happen more often, hollowing out the whole system from the inside even as it grows at the edges. Yes, search engines will soon enough find those files that are transferred, but those that are not will mostly disappear, to be found only in google's cache if you really want it or in the wayback machine.

As the net becomes increasingly the memory of our collective mind, will it also be subject to an equally collective amnesia - or worse, Alzheimers?

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote the many free tools available, from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, PBWorks, Flickr, YouTube, MyCommittee and so on.

Just remember that your rights under a free site are very limited and it can disappear tomorrow, don't keep irreplaceable material only where its free and preferably use tools that enable you to download the entire content to your hard drive in a single operation.

That may mean getting familiar with the old guys like FTP or finding tools with downloads using XML, but the moral will always be - backup!

What's your experience? Did you have a Geocities site? What free online services do you use and how do you rate them? In a pinch, how could you recover all the material you have posted there? Comments are open.

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Video can be a very powerful tool for getting a story across when its used well, but when its used inappropriately, it is worse than useless; it becomes a hindrance to your objectives. Like this.Video: Low-Cost Search Tactics. [Read more →]

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Rebecca at Beaconfire Wire has a good rundown on approaches you can take and even better, has a host of links to examples at How Nonprofits Are Using Video Online: 20 Examples

Online video has become an increasingly popular tool used by non-profits to raise awareness. If you’re using video online and need some inspiration, or just want to see what others are doing, take a look at these non-profits who are educating and getting people involved through the use of video.

Interactive Campaigns

These campaigns encourage visitors to get involved by recording and contributing their own videos or photos:

• 24 Hours for Darfur
• Witness.org – The Hub is an interactive community for human rights
• The Prince’s Rainforests Project
• DoSomething.org holds an annual video contest with $100,000 to the winner’s cause.

Stand-alone, viral campaigns

Rather than belonging to a collection or gallery, these videos stand on their own. They’re often longer in length and housed on a page that provides opportunities for visitors to share and learn more. These types of videos make the biggest impact when they go “viral,” spreading from person to person through word of mouth and social networks.

• Charity:Water raised over $10,000 in one day, using YouTube’s new overlay ad feature.

Video Galleries

Unlike the stand-alone videos above, these pages allow visitors to browse a collection of videos that give an in-depth feel for a cause or provide education on topics anf ror more examples check out DoGooder.tv’s Non Profit Video Awards and YouTube’s Non-Profit channel.

The biggest challenge for an organisation wanting to use video is no longer the technology which is relatively cheap and increasingly easy to use. The biggest issue now is using the video medium to tell your story effectively and THAT is a whol new ballgame.

Have you tried to use video to promote your cause or reinforce your message? How did it go? What were the difficulties and how did you solve them?

Comments welcome as usual.

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Every organisation that hopes to have a future needs to understand the next generation of potential clients, workers and supporters. And the next generation is definitely connected, but in ways that are not always obvious to us old people. Which is why Matthew Robinson has made such a huge splash.

Just over a fortnight ago, Matthew Robson had never worked in banking. This was mainly because he was 15 years and 7 months old and attending a comprehensive school in South London.

Today he is the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City. Fund managers, CEOs and analysts are poring over his report, How Teenagers Consume Media, which he wrote last week while on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers

The world according to Matthew Robson aged 15 and a half

Radio
With online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free and users can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses

Newspapers
No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV

Internet
Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered. On the other hand, teenagers do not use Twitter

Music
They are very reluctant to pay for it (most having never bought a CD) Teenagers from higher income families use iPods and those from lower income families use mobile phones

Directories
Real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services teenagers do not require. They can get the information free on the internet

Viral/Outdoor Marketing
“Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing... Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop-ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless...they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.”

Cinema
Teenagers visit the cinema more often when they are in the lower end of teendom but as they approach 15 they go to the cinema a lot less. This is because of the pricing; at 15 they have to pay the adult price. Also it is possible to buy a pirated DVD of the film at the time of release, and these cost much less than a cinema ticket

Mobile phones
The general view is that Sony Ericsson phones are superior, because of their long list of features, built-in Walkman capacity and value

Our kids are not making decisions about new media based on models from TV, radio, movies or any of the other parallels that us oldies fondly imagine that we both understand and can apply to to new meida.

So who advises your organisation about the role of new media in your business strategy? Got any smart 15 year olds about? That would seem like a good start.

Update. For some ideas on how new media are becoming disintermedia, check this YouTube

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