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After several emails that have come across the various NTEN and nonprofit email lists about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) this year, I thought it would be a good idea for us to have a look at the specific impact to Beaconfire. For those needing some context on what I’m talking about, this year there is a new law that affects when DST is observed (3 weeks earlier than before). The best summary of this issue for nonprofits was penned by Gavin Claybaugh at the Mott Foundation on the NTEN Discussion List.

Most of the issues with the change relate to updates to the operating system software (Windows, linux, etc) that normally manage this change automatically. Other systems affected include email and calendaring tools like Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry servers. Here’s a handy list of vendors and their patches, statements or positions.

Rather than try to cover all the tools or vendors affected, I want to share our experience which may be useful for others.

So far, (knock wood) it doesn’t look like we’ll have to do very much at all to prepare for the change. This isn’t because there aren’t things to do but in this case we are lucky that others will do the legwork. Beaconfire outsources the vast majority of its IT infrastructure and support to mindSHIFT who manages our laptops, desktops and core servers through autmoated and remote management tools. They’ll take care that all the key patches are applied and all we have to do is leave our computers connected to receive the udpates.

As for our clients Web sites and applications, nearly all of them are hosted at third party facilities. In our discussions with those hosting vendors, they have either already patched their servers or have processes in place that will take care of this without any real impact. The main thing it looks like we’ll need to do is update any applications that use a Java Virtual Machine.
There are many reasons why outsourcing your technolgy and hosting infrastructure may not be right for you, but it is times like this that demonstrate why outsourcing can work. Let the experts deal with these once in while issues and stay focused on your business. I’m glad this is a path we’ve taken for ourselves and that made sense for a number of our clients.

I was recently asked why an agency that touches all aspects of the Web Industry would be a better value than a specialty group. This person was looking for a document management system and thought that a group that specializes in document management would be better able to help select one.

The difference is in the knowledge that informs the final recommendation. An agency that touches upon all Web Industry aspects can leverage subject matter experts in each field – broadening the field of possibilities.

Illustration of the birds-eye view approach to making the best business decisions for clients.

It seems like we’re just digesting the differences between how broadband and dialup users behave, but now those dogged scholars over at the Pew Internet and American Life project have found another way to identify the true online elite – those who log on with wireless connections. Here are two highlights from their latest study:

Check email on any given day:

• Wireless laptop: 72%
• Broadband desktop: 63%
• Dialup: 54%

Get news online on any given day:

• Wireless laptop: 46%
• Broadband desktop: 38%
• Dialup: 31%

hese findings do raise questions about the chicken and the egg. Do hard-core Internet junkies get wireless connections to feed their addiction? or does the convenience of a wireless connection prompt users to log on more often?

Read the report to learn in painstaking detail about the differences among wireless laptops, wireless phones, and wireless PDAs.

Getting less traction with press releases these days? Was the turnout at your last press conferences a little disappointing?

It’s not you, it’s them. Media blog Lost Remote is reporting that U.S. media companies laid off 17,809 staff in 2006, a huge increase over 2005. And that means significantly fewer reporters and producers to work on your story.

In related news, Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion is reporting that the exponential growth of the blogosphere has slowed, and the reason is very simple: everyone that wants a blog already has one.

Another great NetSquared Net Tuesday meetup on…Tuesday this time. Side story: Too many people, including me, wondered about Net Tuesday being on a Wednesday. After an informal survey, the organizers decided to move it to Tuesday, saving themselves quite a few questions in the process.

Katya Andersen (VP of Marketing at Network for Good & author of Robin Hood Marketing) presented on www.sixdegrees.org, a social networking site with a celebrity twist. The celebrity involved is Kevin Bacon who is somehow or the other connected to this six degrees of separation concept. My ignorance of most of the American pop culture or sports references put me at a disadvantage there, but I am guessing the above sentence makes sense to all of you.

Kevin Bacon approached Network for Good wanting to do something with the sixdegrees.org URL that he had reserved. They decided to create a site where users can sign up to create web badges or widgets to fundraise for their causes from their social network. sixdegrees.org will also create “celebrity badges” where celebrities can fundraise for their favorite causes.

The original idea was that people will give in droves to their favorite celebrity’s badge. Katya mentioned that the week their site launched, a Cone study came out with a survey result that said that only 15% of those surveyed said they would give because a celebrity asked them to. In contrast, a whopping 76% said that they were influenced by friends and family. This did not bode well for their site, but they are working their way through.

They went live in January 2007. In 4 week about 3,000 people created badges. Of these, only 12% have at least one donation and this smaller sub group had raised a total of $150,000 in that time frame. They are currently having a contest of sorts where Kevin Bacon is going to donate $10,000 dollars each to the cause of five of the largest social networkers (I know, MS Word already told me that there is no such word. But it sounds so appropriate!). This being defined as the badge creators who get the most number of donations before March 31. (The donor with the most number of donations is Ali E with 200 donors giving a total of $6,105. Kevin Bacon’s badge has 10 donors who gave $50,260.)

Lessons Learned:

• A promotion they did with AOL that involved users creating their own AIM pages (similar to MySpace pages) was not very successful. They sent out an email message to 16 million users with almost no noticeable response from them. (Raise your hand if you knew about AIM pages.)
• Their technical execution was not as good as it could have been because of time constraints. The entire site is Flash-based and the widget was hard to create for some users. The badge did not work across all external social networking sites. It still does not work on WordPress or MySpace.
• And finally, this application does not tell the user who gave to their badge. They made this decision because they were concerned about the privacy of the donors. (Aside - I thought this was a really bad decision. I ask my friends to give to my badge and have no way of checking or acknowledging those who responded? Hello??)

They are working on fixing this and a few other technical issues in their next release. Like every other Web 2.0 application world, this is still a “learn as you go” experiment in its early stages. However, Katya seems to understand the new donor-powered world better than anyone. So, expect to hear more about www.sixdegrees.org.

Wikipedia defines anthology thus:

An anthology, literally “a garland” or “collection of flowers”, is a collection of literary works, originally of poems, but its usage has broadened to be applied to collections of short stories and comic strips.

With due apologies to literature, here is an anthology of sorts - a collection of articles on the topic of server power consumption and some (selective) pieces of information pulled out from each.

Data Centers’ Growing Power Demands: A new report quantifies the electricity consumption of servers, revealing a startling trend. (By Kate Greene, Feb 15, 2007 - MIT Technology Review)

• In 2005, servers and their auxiliary equipment accounted for an estimated 1.2 percent of all power consumption in the United States and 0.8 percent worldwide…
• … overall electricity used by servers–computers that make up the networks of organizations, from small businesses to giant financial institutions–doubled between 2000 and 2005.
• … server power consumption in the United States was the equivalent of that of the entire state of Mississippi in 2005; that year, 20 other states used less power.

Power could cost more than servers, Google warns: Computer equipment power consumption could “spiral out of control,” affecting affordability of computing, Google engineer says. (By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com, December 9, 2005)

• Fears about energy consumption and heat dissipation first became a common topic among chipmakers around 1999… coming up with solutions, while providing customers with higher performance, has proved difficult…
• Over the last three generations of Google’s computing infrastructure, performance has nearly doubled … But because performance per watt remained nearly unchanged, that means electricity consumption has also almost doubled.

Server Power Draw Overstated, But Still Considerable (By Andy Patrizio, internetnews.com, February 16, 2007)

• Almost all of this growth is attributable to growth in the number of servers, particularly volume servers, with only a small percentage associated with increases in the power use per unit.
• Most servers run at around five to 10 percent load, which is driving the trend toward virtualization … if you can take 500 servers running at five percent capacity and consolidate to 100 servers running at 25 percent, then you can get some savings there.

Note that virtualization and consolidation are just two possible solutions for improving performance and reducing power consumption. There are few others out there.

Implementing these makes business sense for organizations that are running their own data centers since it can be translated into real cost savings over time.

Added bonus: Saving electricity and helping the world.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both helped legitimize online social networking for serious purposes by baking collaborative opportunities into the core of their campaign — inviting supporters to friend-raise, fundraise, and even express themselves in their own words under the candidate’s banner.

There’s a sharp partisan divide over the wisdom of all this, it seems. Pete Cashmore is reporting over on Mashable that Illinois State Senator Matt Murphy (R-27, Palatine) is seeking to flat out ban social networking sites in libraries, schools, etc… This move comes on the heels of Ted “Tubes” Stevens related efforts in DC. I doubt either of these gentlemen will be mimicking Obama and Clinton’s campaign strategies for the 08 elections.

So Republicans, I’m not sure what you have against online social networking, but here’s a proposition for you. You keep Fox News and Druge Report, and leave YouTube and all those other undisciplined social networking sites to the Democrats. Each party competes for the hearts and minds of the voters in their respective channels — and the winner get Congress and the White House.

Sound good? Now check out the traffic trends (Hat tip: Alexa) below. Still sound good?

Facebook, the students-only turned come-one-come-all social networking community, has introduced a new gift shop feature. For $1, you can buy a cutesy icon and send it on to someone else on the Facebook network. The recipient can start accumulating these “tiny tokens of appreciation” on their profile page. You can make the gift public, which makes it show up on the “Wall” or keep it private thus hiding it from the world.

There is a non profit twist to this feature. All proceeds from gift shop sales in the month of February go to Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. The company has this to say about its selection:

When choosing a charity to work with, Facebook turned to its users. We discovered that not only was breast cancer awareness the largest cause-related group on Facebook, it was the second largest Facebook group, with more than 800,000 members.

Many non profit groups have started creating profiles on these social networking sites with the intent of reaching the users within them. Here is an example of how that development can bear fruit, both in terms of membership and financial rewards. The company is promising at least $0.50 for every dollar raised.

The gift shop adds an interesting new tweak to the social networking websites where interactions were so far curtailed to making friends, posting stuff, reading your friends’ stuff, and leaving comments for each other. All free, available for the time and effort of registering with these networks. As far as I know, this may be the first attempt at monetizing these interactions. Making it a $1 effort that people are more likely to spend without much thought seems to be a good way to go.

Social networks and micro payments can make for a beneficial combination for the future. If this one picks up steam, it can be creatively modified to become a fundraising avenue for non profit organizations. Give a polar bear icon for $1 and the funds will be donated to World Wildlife Federation. Or even better, give a $1 directly to the Save Darfur campaign and the campaign will give you a ribbon that you can display on your profile.

So many possibilities!

Web 2.0 sites and marketing techniques influence everyone’ news experience, even those who don’t surf the net, that’s the topline finding of a Wall Street Journal investigative piece called the “Wizards of Buzz.”

The WSJ carefully profiled Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and other “social bookmarking” sites where users sift through billions of web links and highlight the dozen most interesting for each other. Prominent placement can also yield a sharp and immediate payoff – one startup website’s traffic went from virtually nil to over 50,000 hits per day after appearing on the front page of Digg. Indirectly, by influencing journalists and bloggers, these sites shape the buzz around almost everything for everybody.

So how do nonprofits crack the Digg homepage, secure tens of thousands of visitors immediately and influence discussion about their cause far and wide? There are two laborious methods that work, and one quick and easy way that doesn’t.

The first way that works is to get a top Digger to push it there for you. That involves identifying Diggers who are interested in the topic and either pitching them (or even paying them) to do it.

The second way that works is to have someone on staff or a serious volunteer to cultivate the community credibility to put it there themselves. This approach would yield repeat payoffs, but it’s a serious investment of time: Top Diggers tell WSJ they are spending two or three hours daily on the site.

What doesn’t work is having a bunch of staff sign up at Digg right before they need something to get big. I once found out the hard way how easy it is to run afoul of Digg’s efforts to prevent this kind of manipulation of their community.

Last November, I gave a workshop to a group of environmental activists on various Web 2.0 organizing techniques. The workshop was a in a computer lab, so I helped everybody create an account with Digg and vote for one of the attendees’ websites, just for practice. Two days later, Digg suspended my account. They only grudgingly restored it after some serious groveling and begging on my part.

As with all other online communities, active members get deferential treatment and “Johnny Come Latelys” who hope to get something out of the community before they contribute anything to it can expect only limited success.

Named after (and following a bit of the function) of Unix “pipes,” Yahoo has introduced a graphic interface (http://pipes.yahoo.com) through which anyone can create new RSS feeds in a nearly limitless number of permutations. Creating your own pipe from scratch, while fairly straightforward, is not neccessarly for everyone: there is a certain amount of programming logic (if, then, for) knowledge of which will come in handy when developing a good, new pipe.

Fortunately, there is a pretty good list of pipes already created for you to copy or edit and save. You can also return the favor by publishing any interesting pipes you design back to the community.

The basic idea is that you can create a sort of “mashup” of different RSS feeds, optionally do something with that mashup, and end up creating your own, new RSS feed from the results. For example, one user created a pipe that grabs a feed from the NY Times and sends keywords off to a flickr search, returning pictures matching those keywords. Those pictures are then saved as a feed you can add to whatever feed reader you use (I currently highly recommend NetVibes). Another runs a keyword search across six popular news sites and blogs and returns a mashed up feed sorted by date from all of them. Drop that feed into your feed reader and you’re good to go: a constantly updating RSS feed from any source you want, on whatever keyword you picked when running the pipe you created.

The Yahoo pipes platform seems to be making quite a buzz in the geeky blogosphere. It’ll be interesting to see if it works it’s way out to less-geeky, yet still RSS-savvy population. After explaining the way it works to several co-workers, it became apparent that this is one of those things that is incredibly powerful, very neat-o, and a bit tricky to wrap your head around.