NonprofitEye

Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Error 404 File Not Found by Pam Ashlund Before my fingers had left the keys...my prayers were answered. If only I could tag a webpage and know it would still be there when I returned! While I've been tagging used Del.icio.us for a few weeks, I came across another service: Ma.gnolia. I finally got around to importing my bookmarks to Mag. today and was just browsing around, reading the FAQ files, and what did I find? This: When you add a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, we rush around in the background to save a copy of that web page for your future viewing. Never again will you be lost if a web page moves or gets deleted. Ma.gnolia's saved copies have got you covered, so that what you find stays found. Would I be pushing my metaphor if I said 'I was lost but now I'm found'? Okay, okay...so how did Ma.gnolia handle the legal/ethical dilemma? How does Ma.gnolia treat controlled content when making saved copies? Ma.gnolia only makes a saved cop...

The Temporality of Digital Knowledge by Pam Ashlund The nonprofit community has a wealth of information online. Advice from Fundraising to Finance. Whitepapers, ToolKits, Articles. A collective knowledge that could never be found in one book (or ten books for that matter). What worries me is that the owners of each piece of this databank have no commitment, responsibility nor mandate to leave this information on line. When a website closes, the data goes with it. When a newspaper archives its free material, it is either gone or pay-to-play from that point forward. At the moment this information is all available at a click, but it is not centralized and its very existence is oh so tenuous. As anyone who has bookmarked or tagged a reference URL has discovered, upon returning to the link, the site is no longer there, the article has been moved, or resides behinds a closed door. These broken links are a fact of the electronic age. The ethical dilemma: make sure this data doesn't dissap...

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? by Pam Ashlund Tuesday I wrote about tagging, but it didn't answer one question: what is all that tagging supposed to achieve? Presumably it’s about categorization (for yourself and for the public), but more significantly it’s about attracting attention (pro’s call that “publicity”). OK, I admit it, I was perturbed by my Technorati ranking of 170,000, but today I read that they rank 57 million blogs, so maybe anything over a 1 million ain’t bad. LOL Amy Gahran in her blog “ Contentious ” has a great article deconstructing Technorati’s ranking methodology. Did I just use deconstructing and methodology in the same sentence? Maybe I need to lay off the coffee! Seriously folks, I’ll be here all weekend. Try the veal! But back to Amy…she asks: is “more” better? Using variables like “posting frequency”, “regional popularity” and “in-bound links” to measure popularity, authority and influence has it’s limitations. In high school, popularity had nothing to ...

Tag You're It - Nonprofit Tag Systems by pam ashlund I have a nonprofit tech item today. Tag's seem to be a reality of the Web 2.0 world; but I find them so difficult to use. Some widget's exist to make this easier, but even widget's might be a challenge to install for someone who just wants to throw some tags in their blog. Want to know more about widget's? follow Beth Kantor's thread on "Widget's" on Beth's Blog . As Marnie Webb from Ext337 says: Sure, tagging and badges already make all this possible, but possible isn’t easy. And it isn’t easy. It’s possible in an early adopter kind of way. While I was enthusiastic about the "sharable" nature of Technorati's tags at first...I now find it cumbersome to add them. It's also odd that they're in the form of a hyperlink, meaning: 1) that I have to make a decision each time about where the link should go; and 2) a link re-directs from my site and my blog platform doesn't...