Much has changed since humanity acknowledged the word knowledge and started to classify the various subject matters into categories and taxonomies of learned disciplines.
The definition of knowledge is outside the scope of this article because of simple reasons. I am not as qualified as the university professors, or librarians who pour their blood, toil, trouble, and tears into the understanding of knowledge and wisdom.

What I do know about is what knowledge is online. Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Yes. He was knighted.) created the World Wide Web to link documents together on the then nascent Internet, knowledge became more than monolithic documents or books that were linked loosely via citations and references. Instead of specifying in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian style where the source of a particular knowledge was, one could directly link it using something called “HyperText”, or what some know as “Hyper Text Markup Language”. Today, all websites that you see online are built with a combination of HTML, some JavaScript, and possibly some Flash or Java.
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A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

The question one finds asking themselves before taking any task of considerable effort is  whether they really want to do it. This past weekend, I exerted some effort to get myself from Washington D.C. to Cambridge, MA to attend a conference. The topic of discussion was Elgg. What is Elgg and why did I go to Cambridge? Read on and discover why.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that Elgg–an open source Social Networking Platform–was holding a conference on Social Media for Education, and a more specific conference on Elgg. I know and understand the needs of Education that the promise of Social Media can bring. I was very glad someone decided to bring people together to talk about it. Since it was on Friday and I was at work that day, I couldn’t make it. Thankfully, I did make the second conference on Saturday.

At ElggCamp Boston 2009, I was able to see the need for the "Social Networking Platform".Speakers made it very clear that Elgg was not for the person that needed to put up a generic social network to link people together. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter do that just fine.

The iPhone is arguably the most advanced piece of technology commonly found in people’s hands these days. It has a GPS to tell you where you are. It has a phone to let you communicate with people. It has a multi-touch LCD screen that lets the user use the device with no more and no less than one button. The iPhone is a computer … with the Internet. Ten years ago, try to imagine describing to someone what an iPhone does and they’d think that you were talking Sci-Fi. Well, folks, as much as people like to deny it, Science Fiction becomes reality every day in our world.

Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend of mine about “robots that tweet for you” when I mentioned that our company Beaconfire Consulting had successfully mastered the art of Tweeting without actually Tweeting. Please note that I didn’t say “robots that sweep for you”, but then again, someone is probably working on that in Japan or the MIT Media Lab.

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

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Rather than trying to summarize everything that happened at the ASAE Annual Meeting in San Diego in one post, it struck me that it might be better to handle it as a blog roundup of the Best of the Association Blogosphere.

We should start with ASAE’s official blog Acronym.  ASAE did something clever this year:  rather than placing responsibility for officially blogging the meeting on the already-overburdened shoulders of ASAE staff, they recruited a series of guest bloggers to post items to Acronym.  And post they did – more than 60 separate entries over the course of the month surrounding the meeting.  If it happened at the Annual Meeting, somebody probably covered it for Acronym.

One of the best sessions I personally attended was Maddie Grant and Jeff De Cagna’s Pecha Kucha session on Tuesday afternoon, August 19.  Maddie’s comments can be found here.  Jeff’s can be found here.  My own take on the session is also online at this point.  You can also get the slides themselves through Slideshare.

BloggerCon and BloggerUnCon were pretty major events, which featured the launch of the A List Bloggers network and of the executive summary of the results of the Association Social Technologies Survey.  Ben Martin talks about the two sessions pretty extensively in his recap of ASAE post, and I wrote a pretty thorough recap of the two sessions as well.

Andy Steggles accidentally started a firestorm with his not-part-of-the-official-program Secret Session.  I figured it was a live test of social media at work in a real association community – and it really worked, as a Google search returns over 10,000 entries – but it also led to an interesting debate, referred by Andy, between Jeff De Cagna and Terrance Barkan on the future of social media in associations.  The whole thing was recorded and has been posted to YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube, ASAE also recorded post-session interviews with a number of this year’s annual meeting speakers talking about issues including diversity, global competition, innovation, and various types of social media.  I was honored to be included in the interviews amongst such luminaries as Patti Digh and Rohit Talwar.

Of course, no post about the 2008 ASAE Annual Meeting would be complete without a mention of the YAP 80s/90s Dance Party extravaganza.  The pictures are all over Acroynm, Flickr, and Facebook, but I think Bob Wolfe summed up the importance of this group best in his post:  Social Media is My Dance Floor.

In conclusion, all I can say is:  Fogdirog!  (And thank you, Captain Fogdirog, aka Jamie Notter.)