Well, there are only 24 hours in a day afterall — and some YouTube.com enthusiasts are making time for the video sharing site by cutting back on the amount of conventional TV they watch. That’s according to a recent poll by Harris Interactive.

For now, the phenomenon is most pronounced among the usual suspects — younger males. This a group that won’t hit the civic and philanthropic “sweet spot” for a few more years. Which is another way of saying that a positive mention on 60 Minutes will impress your active supporters more than a cameo in the latest episode of LonelyGirl15 for at least a little while longer.

But the writing is on the wall that nonprofit organizations need to prepare for a not-so-distant future where the marketplace of ideas demands that they crank out new video productions pretty frequently. If you’ve produced a VHS, DVD, or TV show in the past decade, you can forget most of what you learned during those onerous, high stakes efforts. The online video world is fast evolving into something quite different.

Here are a differences to look for:

Small audiences. YouTube’s traffic is huge, but it is split among a mind-boggling number of choices.

Varrying degrees of effort and polish. Non profits shoot off emails regularly, and produce professional publications sometimes. Expect the same wide variety of investment in your web video efforts.

Distributed production. Basic video editing is about as complex as putting together a Power Point presentation. How many people in your office can put together a basic Power Point presentation?

Asset management challenges. Are you happy with how you store and retrieve your photos currently? Brace yourself for more of the same with your ever-growing collection of video clips.

There has been much discussion lately about Microsoft’s decision to abandon IE as the rendering engine for HTML emails in Outlook 2007. It’s hard to conduct a level-headed exchange on this topic because of strong feelings about HTML vs. TXT emails, and personal, professional, philosophical, or theological issues with Microsoft. Putting aside the endlessly repetitive and unproductive argument about whether Microsoft has any idea what they are doing, and whether or not it is a good idea to send HTML-formatted email messages, let’s look at the facts.

Molly Holzschlag’s (molly.com) post on the subject says that the impetus for this change was the unacceptable differences that MS Outlook users were seeing between what they saw in their inbox (rendered by IE engine) and what their friends saw when they forwarded those messages on to them (Composed by Word engine). Or when they composed messages from scratch (Word in Outlook) and their friends tried to read them (IE engine again). So it makes sense that you’d want the same engine to create a message that you use to view it. But Word? Really?

The problems enter in when you consider Word’s HTML engine: It’s inarguably sub-par. Already, those of us who create the HTML for use in client’s campaigns are forced to utilize a mish-mash of HTML coding techniques, some of which we’ve long left behind in building web pages. This isn’t just Microsoft’s fault; ALL of the email clients we test in have slightly different quirks and shortcomings. As a result, we are still using tables, spacer gifs, and (in many cases) font tags to layout our templates. So this is a situation of something broken being broken in a different (and perhaps worse) way when it really could have been a step toward fixing it.

So what do we do? Test about a bazillion times. This has always been the case. We have always had to test the rendering of our HTML messages in (at least) Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage and — if we can, and depending on the client — Eudora, Pegasus, Lotus Notes, or Groupwise. The testing required for Outlook 2007 adds a new wrinkle to the Shar-Pei, but regardless of Microsoft’s decisions regarding rendering engines, did anyone really think that 2007 would render the same as previous versions? Not likely. However, most of us thought that we might see an improvement due to IE7s increased support for CSS.

Anyone using email newsletters as a mode of communication urgently need to have their templates reviewed in order to ensure that future messaging remains successful. Many existing templates will not be Outlook 2007 compatible, and can almost be counted on to break when viewed. After all, nobody in their right mind has been designing email or web pages to be viewed in MS Word! It just wasn’t ever something we dreamed we’d have to test.

Were not entirely in the dark, however. Microsoft is supplying us with some information on Outlook 2007 HTML and CSS support, as well as a validation tool. Read up, test twice as much and we’ll all pull through. If we just stick together.

Microsoft Tools:

• 2007 Office System Tool: Outlook HTML and CSS Validator
• Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 1 of 2)
• Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 2 of 2)

Other articles and discussions:

• Excellent article by Dave Greiner of Campaign Monitor
• SitePoint post by Kevin Yank
• Arstechnica post by Jeremy Reimer

I fielded a call yesterday about Goodsearch — whether this program by Yahoo! would be worthwhile for an organization to spend time marketing to their constituents.

I fall on the side of extreme caution on these kinds of programs. I’d lump this in with Amazon’s merchant reseller program among hosts of other “make money while your constituents use our store/technology.” With very few exceptions, I have yet to see organizations make net income from these programs that is commensurate with the value of their brand they use to market these programs. When you factor in staff time, the opportunity cost of using an email/newsletter story/print pieces to promote the opportunity, and the brand value you give away for free to promote these … among other investments … organization’s don’t reap what they sow.

Is Goodsearch different? Could it break the model? Maybe because it is a daily experience and utility people truly need, find useful and it’s a quality experience for the constituent. But, to pay off, organizations are going to have to invest a lot in promoting it to convince people to switch from Google.

Is that really the business our organization’s marketing and fundraising departments should be in … convincing constituents to switch from Google to Yahoo!?

GoogleLabs always comes up with really neat ways to interact with their humongous piles of data (sorry for the techno-babble).

I’ve just been playing with their Gapminder, with which they have designed a dynamic, interactive interface to demonstrate disparities between nations, over time.

Use both the chart and the map view to see how countries compare with regard to “Internet users per 1000 capita,” “Carbon dioxide emissions – tons per capita,” or “Women % of workforce”. Use the play button to see how things have changed over time. Select a single country, or several, to track individually.

Compelling data delivered through a whiz-bang interface. Neat-o.

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Our heads are still reeling from last night’s announcement about the Blackbaud/Target acquisition, when news comes from Sheeraz Haji, CEO of GetActive, that they have been acquired by Convio. Is there something in the water?

These two strong competitors in the nonprofit eCRM space have the potential to be an even stronger solution for their customers. GetActive’s roots are in the advocacy space and Convio’s in online fundraising. Taking the best of both products and merging into one solution, done right, will be very compelling.

Some of the same questions I raised in my earlier post about Blackbaud & Target are relevant here too (impact to competition etc). I also wonder how both companies will fare at merging their cultures – never an easy task…

Got an interesting call last night from Chuck Longfield, CEO of Target Software, letting me know that Blackbaud has acquired Target. There’s a rather thin press release on the Target site at http://www.targetsite.com/news/index.php
This is a huge event for the nonprofit software world and a smart move on Blackbaud’s part. Target’s clients are the larger nonprofits, where Blackbaud’s tend toward the small to mid-sized. Target’s done a great job of web-enabling their tools, even more so with their V10 release (so far anyway — it’s still in development). So Blackbaud gains a quite a lot. The question is what they’ll do with it and how will that impact the market. Target will continue operating as a separate company, according to Chuck and the press release. But can they do that forever? Blackbaud’s got a lot of experience in acquiring companies (one of which was a small software company I worked for in the mid-90’s) so they’ve probably got the process down pat. But will it work with a large company like Target?

The big question in my mind is what does this mean for the nonprofit users? With reduced competition, there’s less incentive to innovate and improve. We have to hope that there’s still enough competition among the other players in the market and that the nonprofit clients themselves can exert enough pressure to keep the innovations coming.

This will be a very interesting situation to watch…

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox has stated what I’ve been saying for a long time. Usability methods don’t have to be expensive to be effective.

For everyday design projects, discount usability methods are the best.

While it’s true that an anual usability check-up will be a little more expensive, the usability methods used when designing a site can be fast and inexpensive. This allows you to implement changes while you’re in design mode.

Fast usability methods should be used once you start wireframing. If you’re using Axure you can easily generate a prototype. Have a few people, Nielsen says 5, test it. Make modifications and repeat.

As I code pages for Web sites, I’m always working on ways to improve accessibility. The online tools for evaluating a site really just don’t cut it alone. It’s fairly easy to code a site that passes tests like the one found at The HiSoftware Company CynthiaSays portal (a very popular and accurate accessibility test) but that is still utterly unusable by someone using a screenreader, unable to use a mouse, suffering color blindness or any other disability that means they are using your site in any number of different ways. That’s not to say that online tests are not incredibly valuable, just that running your pages through a single test and thinking the job is done may not cut it.

Accessify.com has provided some incredibly useful tools and wizards to help build and test accessible Web sites. There are wizards for creating accessible HTML code (forms and tables), browser plugins for testing pages, even a set of Dreamweaver objects that increases the accessibility of your code by adding additional options to dialogs for creating tables, images, acronyms, etc.

For testing usability for people with different vision needs, I love GrayBit which renders your page in grayscale so that you can visually evaluate the color contrast of your site. Another really cool color tool is Color Schemes which not only helps you develop a color palette, but also lets you preview your palette approximating eight different types of color blindness.

When you get right down to it, though, there really is no substitute for having differently abled users test your site. They’ll let you know better than any test out there what needs to be improved. Just testing with average users who are unfamiliar with the site will go a long way toward exposing usability shortcomings, which often translate to accessibility issues.

Remember: an accessible site is also a more search engine friendly site! As if you needed a selfish reason to strive for accessibility.

You may have heard about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) recent approval of the AT&T-BellSouth merger. One of the conditions that the FCC placed on the meger was guaranteed net neutrality on its broadband service for the next two years. Net Neutrality refers to the battle against charging Web site owners extra for high-speed delivery and preserving the ability (the right) for equal access to even the smallest Web site. It’s the big telecom companies (AT&T, TimeWarner, Comcast, etc.) who are pushing for a tiered pricing system that will enable those who can pay to make their sites as fast as possible. You can learn more about Net Neutrality at www.savetheinternet.com and about the AT&T-BellSouth story at
www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1028_3-6146678.html.