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You can now embed a Google map in your blog or webpage. Click on the map above and mouse around. Yeah. That’s cool. Could it be any easier? No, not really.

After you create your map, you just…

And then you just…

There are so many potential applications for this for nonprofit organizations, that I don’t think Beaconfire Wire readers need my help to figure them out.

Once upon a time, getting photos for your site was an ordeal. It involved combing through massive stacks of CDs that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, and required you to buy them all even if you just needed a few. Recent innovations have made it significantly easier to get stock photos for free or cheap (and I don’t mean using Google Image Search and hoping no one notices!)

YotoPhoto is my personal favorite. It’s not a library but an index of other free libraries, none of which are big enough to search on their own but the sum of which make for a pretty good collection. Their mission is

[...]to help people locate, remix and republish open and copyleft images. We aren’t just about ‘free stock photos’ for designers, but also about helping educators, bloggers and digital artists find photos they can use without fear of “the man”.

Yotophoto draws heavily from Flickr photos that are tagged as Creative Commons, as well as Wikipedia’s photo division. An overall great place to find photos.

I just discovered the second service today via Lifehacker: Free Range Stock Photos. Free Range has a library contributed by photographers who receive ad revenue sharing. It requires a registration, which will conveniently sign you up for their newsletter - for those who have an objection to sharing your email address, you can try a login on BugMeNot or just use a Mailinator address. The search still needs work - I typed in “cat” and it gave me a bunch of construction equipment, while “city” gave me a light bulb.

If you’re willing to pay a little money, consider iStockPhoto for your design needs. They’ve got a volumous library of photos (and now video) you can use for $1 to $50 (depending on the resolution, not the subject). The biggest catch here is that they’ve become a popular go-to place for stock photos, so your selection might have already been used by others in your sector!

Of course, the best way to get a free original photo is to take it yourself or to utilize your existing assets. Do you have field offices that do a majority of your actual mission? Make sure they’re set up with a digital camera and a way to get these photos to you. You can set up Flickr and YouTube accounts fairly quickly, allowing remote offices to get you the shots you need without having to wait for the mail, which lets you give notes on them immediately if you need them to try again.

And once you do have internal photos, make sure you figure out a solid way to categorize them and search for them. What you can keep in your head right now could become a major nightmare in ten years when your replacement’s replacement is looking for that one photo you used in a montage… all anyone remembers is that it’s in the folder marked, “Pictures.”

Where do you get your free or cheap photos? How do you manage your house photo library? Share your sources in the comments.

John Brian has has been blogging quite a bit lately about Facebook. I have my own Facebook account that seems to occupy a lot of my “free” time. But for me, it’s not a mission-driven pursuit; I’m just doing it to learn about the technology and what it can and can’t do

How do you get to the bottom of what it will cost your organization to run an effective social networking campaign?

FrogLoop (powered by Care2) has put together an ROI calculator for organizations thinking about getting involved with social networking (Facebook, MySpace).  Formatted like an online mortgage calculator, you type in information about how you plan on staffing these efforts and what kind of membership you hope to gain, and the calculator gives you the resulting revenues and costs.

I’m sure it’s not perfect, but the kinds of questions it asks you are exactly the sort of questions that need to be asked (and often are not) before jumping in with both feet.

Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns

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:

(more…)

With the National Spelling Bee happening right now in DC, I thought it might be a good day to talk about some tools you can use to make copywriting easier and better. Of course, none of the tools mentioned here will do your writing for you, but they will help you see what’s going on with your own writing habits.

The first is a tool that I use on almost every piece of user-facing copy I write: the Web Frequency Indexer by Georgetown Linguistics. Just drop your copy into the text box, choose how to sort, and submit the form and you’ll see how many times you used each word. It’s handy to see when you might need to think of a few more synonyms for “great” and to make sure your organization’s keywords are mentioned frequently enough. The one thing it can’t do is associate similar words, so you’ll have to manually add counts of “donor” and “donors.” But it’s still among my most frequented bookmarks, particularly when I’m writing a multi-email campaign and various drafts and segments are starting to blend together.

Word clouds are also becoming pretty popular as a way to visualize high frequency terms. Snapshirts has a generator that parses a given URL, which can be handy if you’re looking at search engine optimization for your site. Tagcrowd is similar, with a cloud visualizer that lets you set a few options and gives you the code to paste it on your own site - a Pollster.com reader did clouds for the first Democratic and Republican Presidential debates. For more visual people, word and tag clouds can be a helpful way to see what your copy is focusing on.

Lastly, I still make use of Microsoft Word’s own readability statistics, which appears after a grammar check. Every client audience is different in terms of expected writing complexity, but in general, most experts recommend staying close to the 6th-9th grade level. The grammar check also gives you a count of characters per word and words per sentence, which can tell you if your writing is punchy enough to get their attention or if it might be too circuitous for the web.

There are dozens more useful tools out there to help you write better, but I think I’ll close with a paean to that tool that those of us who didn’t complete in the national spelling bee likely couldn’t write without: the spellchecker.

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.

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/

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.

If you are looking for an easy way to find the distance from Point A to Point B on a map, then please meet Gmap-Pedometer Mashup. You can find it at http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

It is pretty simple to use. Zoom in to the point where you want to start from. Click “Start Recording” button and double click to plot points on the familiar Google map. As you double click, the application calculates the distance which is displayed in the text box on the left. Since this is a pedometer mashup, you can plot the points you walk or jog on the map, enter your weight, and the application will tell you how many calories you have burnt in the process.

While the mashup is built for avid walkers and joggers, an interesting side benefit is that it can answer those distance questions you have always had. Is it quicker if I took x road to the grocery store as opposed to y? Is this really a short cut to something or do I just perceive it is?

What? You donâ??t have any distance related question? Then I am afraid you will have to find your own reason to play with the Gmap-Pedometer Mashup.