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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Recently I launched my second facebook application called Feed the Pig and I figured I should take some time to share some of the lessons I learned and guidelines I’ve developed for making facebook applications. This post is the first of a series I plan to write in the coming weeks so stay tuned. A lot of the terminology that is used in this post is explained here.

• Keys to success
• Considerations and Cautions and Lessons Learned
• Structure/Pages (application Map)
• Permissions/Privacy
• Hosting
• Useful Links
• Useful Blog Posts

Keys to Success

Keep in mind why people tend to join facebook in the first place. Most users want to keep her/his friends and family updated on her/his lives. Users also want to keep in touch/keep track (perhaps stalk) one another. Facebook is a *social* network so you should design your application with that in mind. If your application doesn’t encourage users to share and interact with one another than maybe facebook is not to right place for it. Above all you need to make your application spreadable and continuously engaging.

• Make it easy for your current users to share with her/his friends
• Post your user’s actions to her/his feed.
• Design your application so that users can engage her/his friends, post things to either her/his friends profiles or her/his own, send requests to friends that will link her/him to the app.
• Don’t let your facebook application be just a passing fad. Many applications on facebook although exciting at first lose their luster after a user has tapped into all of the applications features.
• By updating your application with new features and content you can keep your users engaged and your application feeds going which is basically free advertising for your app.
• For non-profits, Facebook applications can be a great way to get users involved in a cause, provide her/him with a dashboard of tools to take action, and keep her/him posted about news and upcoming events. Email your users. If a user gives the application permission to change her/his status that is another great way to spread important updates about your cause. And again make sure you provide users with the tools to involve her/his friends.
• Here is very useful marketing post
  10 tips for releasing your Facebook application, and maximizing growth

Continue on to Considerations and Cautions after the jump…

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The AP caused quite a stir over the weekend by demanding that a blogger remove even small quotes from AP articles, according to this Times story^*:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

While it seems to have backed off from the stance that pretty much any use online shouldn’t be covered by fair use, AP has indicated that they want to define specific rules on pulling quotes from AP stories.

I suspect that this is an effort that is ill-thought out and doomed to failure (not to mention backlash) – to learn why, read below the fold…

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RSS feeds are great. Tech-savvy users love them because they can receive site content and other information without wasting time checking for updates. Site owners love them because they mean that more users will consume their content (on that note, consider subscribing to the Beaconfire Wire feed). Unfortunately, this kind of convenience means that you’re missing one critical thing: everything else on your site that you use to upsell people once they arrive for your content.

That’s why non-profits who have a significant RSS readership should consider ways to advertise their other services in their feed to push people to donate, take action, or join the email list. While visitors to your site will already be pushed this way by a strong information architecture, most feeds are pure content.

Several services exist to let you make more of your feed, by placing ads or links back to your site in your feed. Feedburner is perhaps the most popular, because it’s already widely used for other things. On the Beaconfire Wire, we use Feedburner to get stats on our feed and to add a few other neat features. And, as I wrote last year, it’s completely free. One feature independent bloggers will find useful is that it integrates with AdSense, allowing you to monotize your blog in another way. For non-profits who have specific links to include (like “Make a Contribution” and “Sign the Petition”), you can add custom “FeedFlares” at the bottom of each post so you don’t miss a chance to bring in more donors or activists.

So what if you’ve been advertising on the web in traditional ways, and want to diversify? Consider using a service like Pheedo to serve ads in a variety of content networks. Pheedo came to my attention in my NY Times feed, and they claim to have a pretty diverse network. Rates vary depending on the network you want to buy in – for sub-$5,000 purchases, you’re limited to buying in a network rather than choosing a specific feed or feeds, which makes it more difficult to segment your audiance – the site indicates that advertisers can make segmentation choices on a variety of criteria, but this may be restricted to larger buys. Update (5.28.08) – As Bill from Pheedo notes in the comments, advertisers can specify which segments of the network ads will appear in.

While RSS giveth, it also taketh away. New ways to promote your organization allow non-profits to expand their efforts to this space to take advantage of changing user habits. And as RSS becomes more ubiquitous, we’ll hopefully see an expansion of ways for non-profits to take advantage of it.

Since coming back for South by Southwest, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about sponsored posts by bloggers. There were several events there that made me think about the topic, from Jeff Jarvis and others lampooning clumsy astroturfing to meeting the folks at Izea who run a pay per post service with a strict ethics code to attending a session on SEO for social media that mentioned that paid blogs can quickly bump up your Google rank for a new campaign. And I think that we’re finally reaching the point where the idea of blogging for money may be finding the right equilibrium to work.

The key requirement that bloggers and the rest of the social web seems to be asking for is disclosure. They don’t mind if you’re paid to shill for a product, just that you point out that you’re doing so. This is little different from the long-standing practice on political blogs of requesting that users disclose if they’re paid by a campaign when posting and commenting – it helps users understand the context and take the remarks with the appropriate amount of salt.

I look at some of the ways to provide this disclose, as well as why non-profits should consider paid posting, after the jump…

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In case there was any doubt, here’s further evidence that blogs have truly arrived as a widespread mode of communication: even the government is getting on board. A number of federal agencies now use blogs to share news, both within the agency and with the general public. The most notable blogs: the Environmental Protection Agency and, surprisingly, the Transportation Security Administration. (more…)

Happy Spamiversary! Fifteen years ago today, the term "spam" was coined by Joel Furr, referring to an accidental auto-posting of 200 messages to a Usenet group. Today, the term has become so common, it ranks as the second disambiguation on Wikipedia and is estimated to cost Americans more than $13 billion per year (That’s enough to fund the state of Utah).

While spam used to be confined to the world of email, spammers have recently branched out to new frontiers: blogs, social networks, and search engines. It seems that no online garden can stay a spam-free Eden forever (perhaps an inapt metaphor: the apple represented knowledge, not pharmaceuticals).

What all these techniques have in common is that they put practically the entire cost onto the recipient. While direct mail, junk faxes, and robocalls at least have a cost to the sender, all the methods of spam that I discuss here are pretty much free, once you have the system set up for delivery.

More on these new theatres of spam warfare below the fold:

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One of the most interesting things about the Internet is its impact on the evolution of language, turning verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs (ala “Facebook” me). A more recent emerging trend of web 2.0 technologies doing just that is Twitter, a simple service that allows you to communicate quick and concise messages to your “followers” – friends, family and co-workers – about what you are doing. You can now Twis or Twoogle with Tweeple all day and night (not my words. You can get your own at Twitter glossary)

More interesting than “what” is “why” Twitter? As the site says, “Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues – especially when they’re timely. Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know…”

Though I don’t think it will take me 10 years to latch on to this trend (i.e. how long it took me to take up blogging), “microblogging” is going to have to evolve past its hyper-connected, information overload, time sucking, egocentricity before I add another tool to my box. To be fair though, here are some “tweets” about Twitter in true Twitter form, which limits all messages to 140 characters. What do you think? Over hyped or exactly what you’re looking for?

1. Launched in Oct ‘06, many point to last year’s SXSW conference for its take off. More info & useful links from Mark Glaser & DoshDosh
2. In Jan ‘08 Twitter reported just over 750,000 registered users with 3,399 new users daily (for sake of comparison, Facebook has 250,000).
3. “…its status & image has been upgraded from toy to tool – can [it] ‘leap from’ a small, enthusiastic group of tech-savvy people to the mainstream.” ‘ Mark Evans
4. “A hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging,” it’s built on the attraction to community, need to be social and desire to matter.
5. Pres. candidates are twittering “the new reality of Campaign 2.0, where web-savvy campaigns are trying to attach themselves to as many social networking sites as possible.” (ABC)
6. Even if you don’t use it to chat, there are a number of practical uses of short, concise messages like RemembertheMilk.com
7. “…as with most Internet phenomena, users hacked [it] into something completely different – place I turn to if I need a quick question answered…”‘ Patrick Ruffini at TechPresident
8. “Twitter hate is the new black – [though haters] do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not…”  Robert Scoble, a top Twitterer with almost 7,000 followers
9. “…intriguing, useful & addictive for those who live on the move. One observer called it “the Seinfeld of the internet…a website about nothing.”  The Guardian
10. “More than a status app, it is being used as a 1st alert mechanism for the dissemination of news & for immediate discussion surrounding [it].” Josh Catone, ReadWriteWeb
11. Is it worth it? “the average Twitter user lists six to 12 “friends” on the site and choose to receive cell phone updates from three friends.” (ABC)
12. ‘[it's] different from other e-tools. “When u get an email, you have to respond to it, but with Twitter, there’s no expectation of a response.” ‘ Twitter founder Biz Stone
13. “…has turned distraction into an art form. It’s like hanging out at a bar with a bunch of interesting people…& forgetting that you have to go home.” Scott Karp
14. “…inability to immediately embrace Twitter means you’re old…Admitting you don’t ‘get’ [it] is like admitting you can’t hear those specialized ring tones only audible to the young.” – Helen A.S. Popkin, MSNBC

When I was in college, one of my most difficult classes was scenic painting. Not only did it mean trudging into class at 8:00 am (the only class with that distinction in my five years of school), the professor would amble around behind us as we were painting and, if were looked like we were stopping to ponder our work thus far, shout "Paint faster!"

While it had the effect of giving the class a sort of sweatshop feel, the practical reason for his argument was that the faster you painted, the more work you could do, and the more money you could make in a year.

Today, who among us doesn’t wish we had more time? My available time at the office for blogging is limited, so any tool I can find that lets me blog more efficiently is one that I’ll latch on to. Here are five ways I’m able to get posts done faster, so I can blog with less time or churn out more posts in a week:

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There was an AP piece out recently, discussing the problems and challenges of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – yeah, it’s a stretch, but most of the good acronyms were taken), and proposing, as a possible solution, a webcam that continually takes pictures of a variety of subjects and asks users to identify them. It’s rooted in the problem that unless you have a truly gigantic database, spammers will eventually just add your pics to their library and be able to break through. By using a webcam of, as the article suggested, a kitten bouncing around a room, there would be a continual stream of new photos for users to identify – presumably, you could have multiple kittens and ask how many were in a shot or what color the one currently on screen is or something that would change but be easily identifiable by people.

While this is an innovative, not to mention fun, approach to CAPTCHA, it brings up a chance to discuss the merits of using it at all. Let’s take a look at three areas where CAPTCHA is causing debate online: blogs, webforms and email.
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Weeks after their recent purchase of Feedburner, Google annouced last week that they were going to make Feedburner’s two paid functions free for all users. Feedburner is already a fantastic free feed optimizer and stats tracker, and opening up their advanced stats tracking and custom branding just makes it better.

What’s more, rumors abound that Feedburner will be integrated into Google Analytics, making your RSS an integrated part of your web stats package. So what are you waiting for? If you’re not using Feedburner yet, go burn your feed now – and if you are, upgrade to Stats PRO and custom brand your feed. And if you aren’t subscribed to the Beaconfire Wire feed – pick it up here as well.

Update: Via Lifehacker, if you’re using Blogger you can integrate Feedburner directly into your account. Here’s how.

Read below the jump for more details on the formerly paid features that were just freed up:

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Blogs have long been great advocacy tools, but thanks to widgets they are the hot new fundraisers. So far we (at Beaconfire) have worked on two widget campaigns and have been keeping track of a few others; here are a few things we�??ve learned:

Bloggers read blogs so if your organization does not have a blog, it may be worth it to set one up. There is no quick and easy way to reach bloggers and gain their trust. We found that the earlier you initiate a �??Blogger Relations�?� outreach, the better. There may also be bloggers laying dormant on your listserve, don�??t be afraid to ask if they are there!

If you are not sure where to find bloggers that care about your issues, your site stats can yield some leads. Review the list of search engines and sites that refer visitors to your site; chances are they are coming from blogs or news source that bloggers use. If your site stats are too cumbersome, Technorati is also good place to start.

As flattering as it is to have BlogRaisers as far away as England, to keep them happy you will need to be able to process donations in multiple currencies. If you can�??t, state that clearly on the campaign�??s landing page.

Keep in mind that MySpace and some other sites restrict the use of some widgets, so try to create an alternative to your widget. Looking for widgets? Six Degrees, ChipIn, Kintera, Convio, GetActive and SpringWidgets are good starts. Happy BlogRaising!

How often have you received an appeal from an environmental organization that’s loaded with jargon like “fossil fuels dependence” and “biodiversity”? Be honest. Do you really know what the heck they’re talking about?

Our own Eric Eckl is an evangelist for (on?) using words that us average joes and janes understand in marketing, fundraising, and advocacy appeals — words like “clean air” and “extinction”.

An editorial in the Annapolis City Times today says:

“Mr. Eckl is an environmentalist and also a marketing consultant who understands how to persuade people.”

When not applying his knack for persuading our client’s constituents to sign up, clean, up, open their wallets, or just do it, he’s also sharing his wisdom on his personal blog: waterwordsthatwork. His passion may be clean and available water, but his advice is valuable for all of us who have to communicate on scientific and technical issues. Check it out.

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.

The blogosphere is abuzz this week with rumors that Microsoft will debut the its Internet Explorer 7 in the coming days or weeks. What’s significant is that some insiders now believe that Microsoft will "push" IE7 as an update to the current browser, effectively foisting it on current IE users rather than waiting for consumers to replace their computers or upgrade to the long awaited Vista operating system.

So what would it mean for nonprofit organizations if large numbers of their supporters suddently migrate to IE7? Quite a bit. The new Internet Explorer includes a native feed reader, and its debut will expose to this communications channel for the first time.

The move comes at a time it is becoming an increasingly uphill battle to successfully deliver emails to supporters and get them to open them. Once the general Internet using public becomes accustomed to subscribing to feeds, it is likely that they will demand that nonprofit organizations offer enewsletters and other communication activities on this more secure channel.

This will be a mixed blessing for nonprofit organizations that have worked hard to build large email lists of donors and activists. Nonprofits will enjoy the ease of delivering audio and video to their supporters via feeds, and feeds enhance other online collaboration tools like wikis, blogs, and social networking sites. On the other hand, consumers will be attracted to the higher degree of privacy and security that feeds offer and it may become even harder for nonprofits to determine who is supporting them and track their activities.

We’ll be watching these developments very closely!

A forthcoming study from the PR firm Porter Novelli finds that most corporations report growth in their web traffic and media attention after they dip their toe in the blogosphere.

These results are not surprising. It is pretty well established that journalists have a greater appetite for blogs than the average Internet user. Successful blogs attract loyal audiences — individuals that can be steered into the rest of the website with periodic announcements or invitations.

Ironically, most of those same firms acknowledge they didn’t start the blog to achieve these goals, but rather to experiment with a hot phenomenon. In fact, about six in ten of the respondents report having no particular goals (63%) or guidelines (57%) for their corporate blogs.

Is there any reason why nonprofit organizations would have a different experience? I can’t think of one offhand.

Here are the slides from a presentation I gave to my colleagues at Beaconfire a few weeks ago on Why Nonprofits Should Care About Blogs. (PDF, 327 KB)

The New Politics Institute recently released The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere, a report written by liberal bloggers Chris Bowers of MyDD and Matt Stoller of The Blogging of the President.  Their bottom line?

While progressives may have a marked advantage in overall
blogosphere discourse, it could also be argued that conservatives are
taking a decisive lead in the sort of targeted blogging that will
provide them with real, tangible benefits in the 2005-2006 elections
and beyond.
…
To a certain extent, this is likely the result of
several large progressive blogs offering quick and easy ways to take
part in large communities, a phenomenon that is not found nearly as
often in the conservative online world. Whatever the cause, though,
this is a serious problem that progressives must confront. If
they do not invest time, energy and resources building a local blog
infrastructure superior to that currently possessed by conservatives,
the comparative advantage of progressives�?? overall traffic lead will be
significantly reduced. [Emphasis theirs]

Obviously, the authors have a very clear and straightforward political perspective.  But whether or not you share that perspective, the report’s a stimulating read on the state of political blogs and highly recommended for anyone interested in how blogs are affecting the political sphere.  (And in a very user-friendly touch, the report’s available in HTML and PDF versions.)

Hat tip to Beth Kanter for pointing me to Patrick O’Heffernan’s discussion of the report on SocialEdge.