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I want to take a moment to disagree in part with both Andrew’s and Marissa’s recent posts about the story wherein a professor assigns his students articles on Wikipedia to write in lieu of traditional papers. First, a disclaimer: while both Marissa and Andy have Masters’ degrees, I do not, so I don’t have the experience with peer review that they do.

But as someone who went to college in the internet age, I can attest that there’s a lot of skepticism of research done online. I’ve had a variety of professors who ranged from full blown Luddite ("If it doesn’t have a Dewey Decimal number, it isn’t a fact") to mild traditionalist ("You can use lexis-nexus, but make sure your archaic citation formats are right or I’ll downgrade you to next Tuesday") to early adopter of academia ("Use the latest research you can find - just be prepared to defend your sources if they start with geocities.com").

By and large, there was a common skepticism of the web as a research medium - the thought behind it is is that if it’s easy to post and easy to find, anyone can do it. This is the sort of elitism that I’m predicting won’t survive my lifetime - check below the fold for why.

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Our Beaconfire offices in Arlington have been undergoing something of a transformation lately.  Our main conference room has been updated with fresh paint, new furniture and plush leather benches to accommodate our entire staff during large meetings.  We’ve added additional seating areas to make room for new staff members.  However, the most stunning transformation has been to our two small conference rooms.

Beaconfire staff participated in an in-house design challenge to spruce up our boring, white-walled conference rooms.  The office was divided into two groups, with each group decorating the conference room on the opposite side of the office.  Secret meetings were held, budgets were planned, mysterious packages arrived in the mail, and during a 24-hour period, two dull rooms were transformed into Café Luz and The Lodge.

The Café features soft lighting, staff-donated books to exchange and a bench seating area with fun, fuzzy pillows.  The Lodge features a stunning view of the mountains and lake and…a moose.

View all of the before and after pictures!

The White House is famous for hiding unpopular policy announcements on Fridays when no one is paying attention. In this holiday week, it looks like two major developments are going on at Facebook that could see ramifications going far into the future, but which were probably scheduled to coincide with universities’ Thanksgiving break.

The first is the launch and response to Facebook Beacon (no relation to us, or so they would probably claim). Beacon integrates your site with Facebook and posts messages to your feed to say that you interacted with that site, so hopefully your friends will as well. The catch?

That it pops up a little notifier in the bottom right of the screen, telling you that a story will be posted on your feed unless you opt out within a few seconds. This bug already exists on such sites as Blockbuster and Fandango, and MoveOn has a quick demonstration of how it works right here.

More on the reaction, as well as a more positive new change, below the fold…

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Amy’s recent post on Facebook’s new social ads got me thinking about ways that non-profits could leverage these new ads to microtarget possible donors or members (incidentally, the social ads system confirms my theory of a couple months back that the infuriating fluff stories were a way to bolster interest filling out, which is the basis of how these ads do their targeting).

The system is  perhaps the ultimate affordable segmentation engine. While direct mail houses can segment out people to a very fine degree, it becomes prohibitively more expensive the more variations of a mailing you have to print to reach them all. What’s more, non-profits can’t go in and fine-tune their specifications in real time to see exactly who they’re hitting with each message.

Facebook social ads bring microtargeting to a whole new level. Let’s say that Beaconfire was looking for a Tech Lead (we are, incidentally - check our job listings for more!). I’ll walk through the process of creating the universe, and how you can do the same, below the fold.

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The other day, I was browsing Digg and came upon WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com. This site blocks Firefox users because of the prevalence of the AdBlock plugin, which, as the name implies, blocks ads and deprives sites of revenue, either directly in pay-per-click or pay-per-conversion arrangements or indirectly by lowering hit counts in pay-per-impression situations.

The site raised strong reactions from Digg users, who were almost universally opposed and had angry words (many of them misspelled) for the site’s creator. In a way, they ironically confirmed many of the arguments that the author makes in his article "Firefox - a New Religion."

The site raised the ethical question in my mind of who’s really at fault here: people depriving content creators from ad revenue, webmasters who monotize every pixel of screen space to the detriment of their content, or advertisers who create more and more obnoxious ads in an arms race for eyeballs?

I’ll explore each below the fold…

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My Must Haves:

• Web Developer
• Firebug
• Tab Mix Plus
• View Source Chart
• IE Tab

For Convenience/Fun:

• Context Highlighting
• Cooliris Previews
• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Download Statusbar
• FireShot
• Split Browser

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Yesterday, we kicked off our newest relationship with IUE-CWA, the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers-Communications Workers of America. As the Industrial Division of CWA, IUE-CWA represents a force of 150,000 active and retired men and women united collectively to seek dignity on the job and a secure future for ourselves, our children and all future generations.

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with IUE-CWA on developing their new Web site and online communications program. This is an important initiative for the organization’s ability to improve how it serves its members. IUE-CWA has tapped Beaconfire to launch the new site and as an ongoing partner to create new content, roll out new site features like online training, and manage their online presence. We’re looking forward to helping the IUE-CWA team and it’s members get more from their online program!

If you work for/with a nonprofit and your success is dependent on technology, the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference should be on your calendar. And don’t think this is just for techies! The agenda is still being formed, but you can count on sessions for nonprofit leaders and folks from communications, marketing and fundraising, as well as the technology staff. We’ll come together to talk about tools and strategies that are reshaping how we go about our mission focussed work. The 2008 conference is in New Orleans March 19-21st and you can learn more at www.nten.org/ntc. See you in New Orleans!

Full disclosure: I’m the Board Chair of NTEN and think the world of the good work they do…

There is a lot of talk these days about "Serious Games". What are they anyway and how are they different from typical video games?  Serious Games is a term used to describe a movement in gaming where games are created and used for education, training, health, and public policy.

Darfur is Dying (http://www.darfurisdying.com/) is probably the most well known game created to raise awareness about a specific topic, in this case the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. A contest entry by MTVU and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, the game puts the player in Darfur as a villager who must perform real-life tasks like foraging for water without being captured by the Janjaweed. The game ties in actual statistics about the life of people in Darfur and how you can make a difference.

Planet Green Game (http://www.planetgreengame.com), produced by Starbucks in collaboration with GlobalGreen USA, allows a player to pick a mode of transportation and travel through a city, finding ways to decrease the CO2 emissions. In addition to learning more about global warming, the game provides the ability for users to take action and pass along the game to a friend.

Do you know what edict means? At Free Rice (http://www.freerice.com), they’re turning your vocabulary knowledge into rice to end world hunger. The World Food Program’s internet game, Free Rice (http://www.freerice.com/), is simple in its execution and has two primary goals; providing English vocabulary to everyone and helping end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people. For each correct click to a vocabulary question, the website donates money to buy 10 grains of rice. Since its launch in October 2007 it has already raised over 1.7 billion grains of rice to feed the hungry - not bad for a little over a month.

Even main-stream games like SimCity are jumping on the Serious Gaming train by highlighting the impact of electricity generation on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change within the interface of the next release of SimCity Societies.

Serious games take learning to a new level. They target a generation raised on the net who eagerly spread engaging games virally through sites like MySpace and Facebook. The games attempt to teach people about the world in which we live in an interesting and engaging way. Would you rather learn about Global Warming as your cruise a virtual city on your skateboard? Or read page after page of text on a traditional website (with celebrity quotes, of course)? The answer seems almost too easy.

Do you think there is a place for a serious game to raise awareness around your nonprofit’s mission? Have you launched a serious game you are having success with?

Small towns hardly make big news in the world of online marketing technology; small islands even less so. While most of us have gotten over Google putting small town America on the map—in the most literal of ways, the Caribbean is just getting around to celebrating their inclusion. Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and Trinidad are just a few Caribbean islands that can be Googled down to 110 ft scaled maps in both satellite and hybrid.

Although, Google’s Street View has not made it there yet—that’s still only available for select neighborhoods in a few big U.S. cities such as NYC, Miami and Denver; the Caribbean maps provide the same detailed view of towns and infrastructure (and yes, beaches too) that it does for cities across the U.S. The only difference is that directions are not offered.

Still, if you’ve got a project in the Caribbean you can finally use Google Maps for a more dynamic presentation of your work. So far real estate agents and sporting fans (cricket, fishing, sailing etc.) seem to be the only folks that have been using the maps in mashups to reach their audience. Hopefully organizations such as Heifer International, Madre, Amnesty International and the many others doing great work in the region will jump on this opportunity to connect donors and volunteers to their work.