Written on January 31st, 2007 by Nick Booth
Jenni Rowley and Selina Okunnu of the Northfield Young People’s Forum talk to us about how power is shifting towards the young in Birmingham. From April 2007 the forum, run by 11 to 19 year olds, will have up to £80,000 to offer as grants to the young people of this south Birmingham constituency. There is also an update on a story from July 2006 about Get Hooked on Fishing, based in Bournville.
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Written on January 29th, 2007 by Nick Booth
More proof that citizens journalism is finding it’s feet here in the West Midlands comes with the campaign to protect Black Patch Park in Sandwell. Simon Baddeley has written about the park for the independent website The Stirrer, keeps this wiki page up to date and now adds this to youtube:
Written on January 27th, 2007 by Nick Booth
I was working yesterday with the Northfield Young People’s Forum (no website yet) here in Birmingham, looking at ways they can use online social networking to widen the conversation and attract more interest for what they do.
We explored youtube – citing the number of comments attracted by this Birmingham councillor for his film on graffiti tagging. The group I was working with all saw the possibilities, and highlighted the need to combine being entertaining with making a point.
Johnnie Moore spotted the video below, which shows how one person who is autistic communicates with the world. It is entrancing and intriguing and it part of a series of youtube films made to suport the work of www.autistics.org – a site which is also using second life to make their case.
The key lesson hear is that to be engaging you don’t need to set out to entertain. You do need to be authentic.
Couple this with news that Google is close to releasing a means of earning advertising income from you youtube videos and (ethics of taking advertising as a proviso) being engaging may also help your group raise money online.
Written on January 27th, 2007 by Nick Booth
Beth Kanter of the Sharing Foundation explains how they used the internet to raise $100,000 for children in Cambodia. I’ve known Beth through blogging for a few months now, but finally met her in Birmingham earlier this month.
She is an expert on the internet and non-profit organisations and in this podcast she talks about how you combine online tools such as widgets with the power of your networks, whether real or virtual, to encourage people to give money to support to your cause. She also writes about how they raised the money here on her blog and an earlier experiment with ChipIn here. To listen Read the rest of this entry »
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Written on January 23rd, 2007 by Nick Booth
They have barely got their first life started and already children are being offered a second. The BBC has announced plans to create a Second Life style environment where children can play and create and communicate. The beeb says CBBC world will have an emphasis on safety and responsibility with
no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world
Sounds more like a second life half life? Expect more social web announcments from the BBC now the license fee has finally been settled.
technorati tags: cambodia4kids second life bbc cbbc
Written on January 23rd, 2007 by Nick Booth
The BBC The Guardian and others (here, here, here) have written about research at Duke Medical Centre which suggests researchers have found the part of the brain responsible for altruism. I just want to digest this with two things in mind: other ways to understand the research and why these things might mean charities and non profit groups are brilliantly equipped to make best use of the social web….
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Written on January 23rd, 2007 by Nick Booth
As you probably know a theme of this week’s meeting will be web 2.0 and how it contributes to shifting power relationships. Keep tabs in a number of places including:
BBC: Richard Sambrook and others.
WE Forum Homepage
Davos Conversation
Commondreams usually as an alternative take
Speakers will include Bill Gates, Tony Blair, King Abdullah of Jordan, Angela Merkel, Joe Biden, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, Hua Jianmin, John McCain, Mohammed El Baradei, Sergy Brin, Gordon Brown. Apparently Bono will also be there!
The Huffington Post is helping produce Davos conversations and is inviting us all to post our video questions to youtube using the tag davos07.
In the meantime anyone want to step up and have a stab at running their country?
Written on January 22nd, 2007 by Nick Booth
Pete Ashton (a fine brummie blogger) pointed me to a wonderful post from George Dvorsky on Must Know Terms for the 21st Century Intellectual.
The list has some gems, from the increasingly familiar Moore’s Law and Open Source through to Noosphere, the freakily possible Participatory Panopticon and the onrush of the Technological Singularity.
I consider most of this language to be downright rude. They are what I call “home words”: the ones you can get away with only in ‘private’. It’s the sort of language which convinces others that a normal human has become a techno-evangelist (oops), at best a geek, at worst a raving lunatic and certainly to be avoided. So in the world of charities and the internet which are out ‘home words’? What will alienate rather than stimulate?
Here are my five starters…
nptech (tags don’t belong in the real world)
vlogcast (unh?)
blogosphere (we want them to join it, not run screaming)
user generated content (worse ugc)
trackback
Please add yours. Trackback if you like, perhaps even tag them homewords.
Written on January 21st, 2007 by Nick Booth
Number 2 on the netsquared, squidoo, getactive list of the 59 smartest online organisations was Greenpeace. It has gradually been chipping away at Apple with classic guerilla tactics – using their opponents weight to their own advantage. Greenpeace is encouraging supporters to use the creative power of their macs to imagine, produce and share new images and ideas which may compel the company to change it’s policies.
So Greenpeace started a campaign for environmentally friendly macs with a friendly spoof site GreenMyApple and have just added this to youtube.
Written on January 20th, 2007 by Nick Booth
I was in Barcelona recently and found myself puzzling over something. Almost all of the graffiti was on the shutters of shops – not the stone or brickwork. It appears as though the ‘taggers” (also see this on Birmingham tagging and youtube) have decided not to spray the buildings themselves. If this is a correct observation (and please tell me if it’s way off the mark) what’s going on here? …
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