Category: Uncategorized

Technobabble : A short list of "Home Words"

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.

Green iPod

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.
[youtube]2Uo_4kyrkDc[/youtube]

The Smartest Online Organisations

Just a quick pointer to the 59 smartest online organisations. Great for inspiration for charities looking to make better use of a range of internet tools.

Celeste over at studio 501c tells us to encourage just this sort of list making in our own organisations.

If you’re interested in using the web more effectively, ask different staffers or volunteers to each review a few sites and to report back to the group on their findings. Make sure to examine the sites of those with missions that are close to yours as well as a few that aren’t. If you have a narrow goal, e.g., improving your online donation capacity, concentrate on what the different nonprofits are doing in that area.

Toast falls butter side up

nameontoast

Yournameontoast is a great reminder of some guiding principles for attracting attention online: It’s a simple idea and a good one; the people who had it (Belfast’s Atto) also had the confidence to see it through and make people smile – or at least the hundreds of millions who harbour an abiding affection for toast. On top of that Atto are giving the profits to charity – which is a key wallet opener for many. It’s not social networking per se, it’s marketing and it works.
Thanks to beth and nancy.