Tools like YouTube are also giving the voluntary / NGO sector a new way to connect with their constituents. A nice example is video competitions (e.g. Amnesty’s Close Guantánamo now! & UN Fight Hunger campaign’sViral Video Contest.

Of course, in the spirit of web 2.0, people aren’t going to wait for the voluntary / NGO sector to catch up with this stuff - they’re just going to go ahead and do it themselves. The fist ever prosecutions of police for brutality and torture are taking place in Egypt largely because of the exposure of videos posted on YouTube .

best
dan

p.s. for a powerful example of people using video-blogging to report on their local communities, see Alive in Baghdad

I think it’s vital to keep this sort of video communication personal and closely connected to real people. Their is a place for using video as a matter of record (council meetings etc) but the real impact comes from removing the managment and polishing the story.

Thanks for the kind words.

I’ve been reading lots of stuff about the barriers to bringing social media into the mainstream of non-profit technology and together with your article and the Roanoke Times interactive job ad it made me think about doing something similar on social media tools for the blog…..perhaps it could be something like these are the tools we call social media or web 2.0 and if you use them they could help you to achieve XYZ. Haven’t really thought it through yet, don’t know how easy or expensive it was for full-time media professionals like the Roanoke Times to pull that ad together!

I’ve been using GetClicky to track my blog’s analytics: http://getclicky.com/

Anybody else using this?

This is fantastic! Thanks for rounding these up!

I just attended a meetup with some Boston video makers and created a video about what I learned in terms of production values.
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/03/my_learnings_fr.html