Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Twitter and Facebook, will they change the way we connect and communicate?

It’s now been around six weeks since I began with Facebook and Twitter to see how it can be used to connect and share with others.

I wasn’t really over aware of the full variety of social media available and how it can support and benefit non profit organisations until I played the Social Media Game earlier this year. We played the game at a a workshop at the UK Circuit Rider Conference back in January. The session was led by David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, and I also met Nick Booth who runs the excellent Podnosh.

Since that event, I’ve used the game myself in several instances with working with groups that want to venture into different ways of connecting and communicating using social media, it’s a great tool to use.

So it was another one of those “practice what you preach” times. It felt high time for me to venture into Facebook and Twitter.
I didn’t really get the purpose of Twitter at first before signing up and starting to get involved more. In the beginning I followed a random set of people, seeing how they used it. It was abit like SMS overload, then bit by bit I began to see how others were using it to connect with their supporters or regular readers. Even one charity sent a daily reminder to remind people of their campaign to prevent breast cancer. Some users use it as a promotional tool, announcing when their organisation had some new news to share.

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Check out Jing!

Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere. Windows or Mac, easy to use and free! Perfect for screenshots and quick screencasts! Find out more at the JingProject.

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VoiceThread - a great new tool for pictures and voices

Beth Kanter has come up trumps again on her blog and discovery of tools that can help non-profits and others tell their story. VoiceThread is an online tool which you can use for a variety of purposes and is free and enables a slideshow with voice and sound too. It's amazingly simple to use, and can involve wide participation which makes it so great.

In my circuit rider role, over the last few weeks, I've had an increasing number of requests from people looking to do the following: make a tutorial for their volunteers; find a creative way to let others know the work of their organisation, but not wanting to keep up with the maintenance of a blog; provide something real and live for potential funders and supporters to show the work they do, and also a group of young people wanting to collate their knowledge and share a project they've been working on together. VoiceThread may be able to help.

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Finally using an RSS reader

Well, practice what you preach. Hmm...taken me a little while on this one. As an information addict who looks at lots of sites and blogs regularly, it was time to pull all my feeds into one place. I'd been using Thunderbird for some, and live bookmarks for others, so it was high time to get my house in order as it were.
So, this morning I spent a while having a play with quite a few options to choose from. Bloglines, which I've used a bit in the past, Google reader and others too.

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Article on Google Analytics

A recent shout out by Beth Kanter for experiences for those using Google Analytics in non-profit organisations, led me to write an article as she was looking for case studies for a forthcoming podcast.

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Do you Ubuntu???

This really made me smile. I was sent a link to this on the UK Circuit Riders e-list. Well, I know when I’m fixing machines….why doesn’t an MS install this smoothly.
Fabulous to see it and coming from a library. Yep, its a library with a neat little video showing just how easy it is to install Ubuntu. Love the music on the video clip and the article too. Need I say

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