I just love the power of blogs to take you on a journey of discovery.
To illustrate this story and the growing power of blogs to make new and interesting links - rather like six degrees of separation, I’m going to take you through a recent lunchtime surf of the web that started with a recommendation from my wife to check out Will Wheaton’s blog - and then on through NASA, Futurama, an online t-shirt shop, Guitar Hero II and lastly to a revitalised Netscape.
For those of you with long memories, Will played Gordie, in the 1986 movie Stand By Me, amongst his many other acting roles. Gordie was the movie’s story-teller, a role we’ve talked about before on this blog.
On his own blog, Will tells a mean story and his blog is a veritable lesson in how to stay interesting, write in a witty and involving style about diverse interests, and engage with the audience and take them to them new places - everyday.
Will’s first post took me to NASA’s Visible Earth site - an awe inspiring catalogue of images on planet Earth.
To quote NASA, “On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view of the Sun sinking below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset.”
Beautiful. And a great example of a blogger taking you to a useful and inspiring site folks without an interest in astronomy are not likely to visit unprompted. As one wag on Reddit said, “Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of desktop backgrounds changing.”
After life on Mars, Will’s next few posts quote Futurama’s Zoidberg, point reader’s towards his passion for cool t-shirts and the Guitar Hero II computer game. And if I didn’t before, I now know what burnination means thanks to the folks at Urban Dictionary.
The point of all this is that as London Region ICT Champion, I get to look at how new technology - particularly blogs - can help voluntary sector organisations (or non-profits) communicate with their audience, funders and supporters. Although Will’s blog has nothing to do with the non-profit world, I’ve picked it out because it brilliantly shows how a writer can talk about his passions (news, poker, geekery, animals, t-shirts) and still connect with a diverse audience of loyal readers who keep coming back for more. Surely this is the skill and the point of good blogging?
Done right, blogging is a great example of the social web - making new connections that take the reader to new concepts, people and places. For example, David Wilcox does a great job of video-blogging community events and bringing to life the messages of keynote speakers that might otherwise go unreported. Likewise, images from Camera Rwanda on Flickr and NSPCC awareness campaigns on Youtube do a great job of spreading their message to an audience far beyond their normal range.
There’s also something in here about the blogger as a navigator/facilitor/educator - someone who ploughs through the morass of the web on your behalf and comes up with the content worth reading. Services like Digg, Reddit, Ma.gnolia, etc do a pretty good job of filtering web content - they work on a recommendation system - so that stories rated highly by readers naturally gravitate to the top of the pile. Ofcourse, this is purely subjective and relies on people having similar tastes.
Interestingly, this is the diametric opposite of Google’s search engine which uses a mathmatical algorithm called Page Rank to analyse key words and rank web pages according to your search terms. It usually works pretty well, but doesn’t always give the results you expect and can be easily manipulated by black hatters - mainly because computers and humans look at web pages differently. If you want to read more about how computers and humans search differently for the same information, start with Tim Berners-Lee’s blog, creator of the web, and his work on the semantic web.
Back to the main point: with some notable exceptions - stand up YouthNet, Podnosh, Demos, Greenpeace - blogging is not something commonly done in the UK voluntary sector. The reasons for this and what it would take to get the UK voluntary sector to a tipping point where uses of new technology like google docs and spreadsheets, RSS, blogs, Youtube, etc become common is (i) why the ICT Champion exists, and (ii) another conversation.
I want to bring you the best ICT projects from around the non-profit world and how we can learn from them. Doing that is going to be a challenge. But for today, I put my own hand up. I’m a new blogger and whilst most of the material I quote deserves to be noted, much of it really belongs in the file marked ‘For Reference Only’. In future, rather than clog up the blog with references to worthy reports, I’ll be dropping them into a new Resources section for you to check out as and when the urge strikes.
