More ideas on Web 2.0 and Changing the World

Now that the Stand Up End Poverty Now! event is over, I am taking another look at the potential impact that the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 tools can have on the world. My latest source is the Fast Company article Can Social Networking Change Our Political Consciousness?

Twitter, Facebook and the many other social networks that have emerged are reminding us exactly how small the planet is, and how seemingly mundane or personal issues (where you live, what you feel) have all kinds of ramifications.

The question of the veracity of this statement has its greatest challenge from Evgeny Morozov. I previously blogged about his Foreign Policy article. This time it is the TED Talk that he gave on the same subject.

TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.

This slideshow on How the Net aids dictatorships is also from the TED Talk. First off, everything Morozov says in the talk is in my view could be and often is correct, but I still disagree with his overall argument. In it, Morozov provides his own version of the Maslow hierarchy hierarchy for Internet involvement on slide 21 going from Have Fun, Talk, Share, Learn, and finally at the apex Campaign.

This can also be compared to the Groundswell Web 2.0 usage taxonomy. The difference is that the Morozov hierarchy is basically group-defined and the Groundswell is individual-defined. The top of Morosov's heirarchy is campaign - a group of people working on a common cause. The top of the Groundswell hierarchy is creator - which on the Internet can become collective creation.

Both also have important differences between the Maslow hierarchy in that both, especially Morozov's hierarchy, though he does not make the point, can be re-iterating. Morosov's Campaigners can use the lower levels of Learn, Talk, and Share. Those at the Learner stage have the potential of moving to the Campaigner stage.

Morozov speaks of KGB in the former USSR using torture to find out the means of communication between rebels. Now, Morozov complains that it is made instantaneously apparent on the Web. It is also, however, ubiquitous and there is nobody to torture or everybody to torture. When one person or a few hold to key to an entire organization that organization it is far easier to stop despite romantic ideas of the activist bravely standing up to the secret police. While it is true that dictators will try to find ways to stop dissidents using Web 2.0 tools, this does not mean that they have become ineffective.

A far more effective argument on this issue is made by Clay Shirkey the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky: Social Media vs. the Dictator

Clay Shirky - Clay Shirky is a professor of Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology.

Full Program

Blogging about Hardship to Ease

Blogging about Hardship to Ease is a new path that I recently took in collaboration with hal786 on BloggersUnite. The path is new, but as happens so often a number of connections to other paths became apparent. My original intent was to try to write something that fit the theme of the day.

Every person's life matters. We should share their stories, to bring ease to their lives, or know about how they got from their tough life to ease.

Trouble is that my Myers-Briggs in INTJ and I am not personally that good at the pull-the-heartstrings stories. I am though impacted by them and seem to find others that are so gifted and incorporate them into what I am writing about. I recognize the importance of imbuing stories with feeling to create greater connections.

The path hal786 asks us to travel on is a personal one of individuals sharing stories with other individuals, but the commonality of those stories helps bind us together. These stories are like the cells of a living creature in that they have life on their own, but they are able to bring a greater and more complex entity to life. These stories are what some have called the "small pages" of the Internet.

I got the idea of uniting "Small Pages" discovered on the journey from Aira of the blog It'll be alright.

It seems a small thing, I know. But the net itself is made of small pages, like mine and like the web pages of the over 10 thousand bloggers part of the Bloggers Unite. Ten thousand stories and thoughts for giving voice to 40 million refugees, for making known an association that help people for real. And to put in practice an expression I read on the Refugees United’s page and – with its simplicity – seemed to me such fundamental: spread the world.

Another important aspect of this blog has been serendipity. Now I am using the word in a very broad sense, it seems though to best describe the aspect of not only finding connections, but having those connections flow towards me without calling. It is what helps me find new connections. The most recent example is that yesterday my niece sent my wife the YouTube video Children Full Of Life. The video tells of the importance of storytelling as a means of traveling a path from hardship to ease.

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

As in the video, the ability of one individual to tell their story of moving from hardship to ease allowed another to start their journey.

This is not my first journey along a path discovered through others demonstrating the impact that individual stories can have. SAUDADES SERENDIPITY from an Orkut friend in Brazil was another.

Ju teaches a very important lesson why people take up causes such as the Millennium Development Goals. It is not always to make massive political paradigm shifts, but finding personal ways to connect through countless small interactions for a better world. It is through the means of first defining ourselves as the path to redefining the world.

My interest is in how we move from the individual to groups and to society as a whole in expressing the story of hardship and more importantly the path to ease. I can see a similar aspect of hardship to ease in the efforts of people to overcome hardships in the world as is seen in the efforts of individuals in their own lives. We just have to be open to it.

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

Other Paths Showing the Way From Hardship to Ease

The web journey of this blog has taken many paths and a recent one was agreeing to participate with fellow blogger hal786, an English Muslim girl who writes After Hardship Will Always Come Ease, in her BloggersUnite's event HARDSHIP2EASE DAY which takes place today 23 September 2009.

According to hal786:

The goal is to help bring ease to people who've suffered hardships in life, by sharing their stories and writing stories of how someones life went from bad to good/hardship2ease.

Being ignorant of such matters, I did not realize that the words come from the Qur'an. As is my habit, I did some web-searching to learn more. The blog Far From Home provided greater insight. My sense as an outsider is that this is a very important part of the Muslim tradition of which our Western culture has very little idea. It also strikes me as a very personal idea of finding ease within ones self. The underlining of the quote below is mine.

"With every hardship, comes ease. Verily, with hardship comes ease." (Chapter 94; verses 5-6)

This refrain, echoed twice, stress upon the sometimes "hidden" blessings within a given burden or hardship. In the ordinary words of mortals, "In every dark cloud, there is a silver lining." Sometimes, we are too weary, too burnt out, too depressed to see that "ease", that silver lining. After all, when surrounded by darkness, it is not easy to "see." Usually, we understand the "ease" afterwards and therefore make the mistake that the ease comes after hardship. But note the stress in the refrain of the word "with" which indicates that the ease comes hand-in-hand with the hardship. (Once again, the duality that I was discussing in an earlier note kicks in.)

Another source was Islam.Online.Net Thinking Over the Verses of the Qur'an
Many people read the Qur'an, but the important thing is, just as Allah states in His verses, to ponder on each verse of the Qur'an, to draw a lesson from that verse, and to improve one's conducts in compliance with these lessons.

Those who read the verse [For truly with hardship comes ease; truly with hardship comes ease] (Al-Inshirah 94:5-6), for example, reflect upon it. They understand that Allah creates ease with each hardship, and therefore, the only thing they have to do when they meet a hardship is to put their trust in Allah and find the ease that is with it. Allah's promise being so, we see that giving up hope or being stricken with panic in moments of difficulty is a sign of a weakness in our faith. After reading this verse and reflecting upon it, our conduct will go in line with the verse throughout our lives.

I can't help but find it interesting that my last post on this blog dealt with perception and this blog post deals with concepts arguably beyond perception. When BeyondPerception writes of dunya it brings to my mind the Buddhist concept of samsara. Similarly Far From Home above speaks about duality. The concept of "With every hardship, comes ease", also extends to others. This seems to me to be a concept common across all the major religions. It is not merely a matter of how we see the world, but how we take what we see and the shared story we create to make our world.

Verily, With Hardship Comes Ease (Surah al-Sharh,94) posted by BeyondPerception

In the end, love means wanting the best for that other person. But I truly think love shouldn't end with our family and friends, it should spread to everyone, even a stranger. As result, if you have this type of love for everyone, you should genuinely only want the best for them.

The dunya is ephemeral. Change is inevitable and nothing, including this world is permanent. Relationships will always change, feelings will continue to change and it is all because it is God's will. "Allahu Alam" (God knows best). He knows what's best for you even though it may not be in your favor. All we can do is love one another and pray that Allah will bless all of us with goodness in this life and the hereafter.

I thank Allah for making me stronger in times of tribulation, for removing anger from my heart, and turning my negative emotions into peace.

Here is a wonderful youtube video passed along from another xanga member for those going through hardship. JazakAllah Kairun :)

Appealing to the Slacktivists

In the last post of this blog I made a defense of slacktivists in general, though I ended up agreeing with so many points made by Evgeny Morozov that slacktivists will still not be able to hold their own convention. This post will also be in support of slacktivists, but this time as an essential audience for change-agent organizations.

My last post took the perspective of one who fits into the slacktivist demographic, though I believe that the demographic is more diverse than appreciated. This time I am going to consider the issue from organizations that need large numbers to directly support their efforts through activism and funding, or to support larger scale efforts to initiate change through other government and social organizations. The Millennium Development Goals involve both approaches in bringing them to fruition.

There are numerous organizations struggling to meet the challenges of implementing the objectives of each of the Millennium Development Goals. These organizations often involve professionals on-the-ground seeking to increase awareness and derive support from a larger and usually less expert base. There is also an overall effort to get developed countries to meet their promise of fully funding the Millennium Development Goals. The Stand Up and Take Action event is an example.

The first set and the second set of activism are natural allies. For the organizations seeking to implement each of the particular objectives of the Millennium Development Goals, the struggle to push the larger agenda is no doubt important, but I cannot see it as a defining goal. Whether or not a certain number of people stand up on October 16th, those organizations working in Africa to eradicate typhoid or to provide universal education in India will still be at work. However, for those working in the second category for global political change, which is what we are talking about, having the first group of on-the-ground change-agents is not enough to positively influence the fundamental source of change in the leading developed countries, the mainstream voting majority. This majority cannot be defined by political affiliation alone because no one makes up a super majority. It does have one general defining aspect and that is, for the most part, for most of the time, non-activist.

Here again, I agree with Evgeny Morozov.

Of course, the ideal case here is when one's participation in digital activism doesn't subtract from -- and instead enhances -- one's eagerness to participate in real-life campaigns.

Now that gives change-agent organization two tasks. One to make sure the the true-hearted and dedicated activists don't lose heart and become part of the Facebook generation wasting their time on Mafia wars.

However, it's also quite possible that a significant portion of the activist population would be morally content with the "slacktivist" option alone, preferring not to get too close to more dangerous activities that are likely to get them in trouble with authorities.

I seriously doubt that anybody who was was of the meddle to protest would not because the Internet just made it too easy. The harder task is getting the uninvolved masses on board.

What we are dealing with from the perspective of social or change-agent organizations promoting their cause is social marketing, and as with social-entrepreneurship it takes a degree of business acumen.

It was dealing with issues of marketing, communications and networking the helped to lead me to the Millennium Development Goals. In a previous post on the blog I looked into the book GROUNDSWELL by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff which makes the case that either Your Marketing Is Riding The Wave or Its Under Water.

More importantly for this post it provides taxonomy for Web 2.0 usage on the Internet. This I submit is also the different levels of slacktivists.

1. “creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
2. “critics” who post comments,
3. “joiners” who sign up for online communities,
4. “spectators” who read and watch, and finally
5. the unengaged “inactives”

The general understanding of slacktivisits seems to fit under numbers levels 3 and 4, only a small step above the bottom rung of inactives. I still put online creators and critics as being in the slacktivist pool, realizing fully as I have said that writing a blog does not equate in any way from on-the-ground action of groups like Oxfam UK, ONE, Millennium Promise or other similar organizations. Web 2.0 could hopefully help change-agent organizations recruit the unengaged "inactives" and move each rung of the Web 2.0 ladder up, but it is as likely to be other slacktivists higher up on the rungs.

This may fly in the face of our vision of social activists taking a stand like the revolutionaries in Les Miserables, but the concept of effective political change only coming from sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture as opposed campaigning in the virtual space is to my mind false for liberal democratic countries. I do not believe that such actions alone will accomplish the Millennium Development Goals.

As I said in my last blog post, demonstrations and sit-ins can force the discussion into the open, but at some point the message needs to be taken up the the majority of voters in the democratic countries to put pressure on their governments to put pressure on other governments. It is the responsibility of organizations such as the Millennium End Poverty 2015 Campaign and anybody else supporting these goals to lead such as effort.

It is our responsibility as individuals participating in causes of our choosing to avoid become political commodities by understanding that you are commodified when you lose the ability to change things.

A Defense of Slacktivism (Not Really)

I linked an article critical of slacktivism by Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy to a blog post I did on actions being taken on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. Despite having admitted to being a slacktivist, I wanted to look closer at those parts of the article I agreed with which are critiques of my actions and the actions of the vast majority of us.

Morozov provides the standard definition of "Slacktivism" as, “an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. “

It gives those who participate in "slacktivist" campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Remember that online petition that you signed and forwarded to your entire contacts list? That was probably an act of slacktivism

Admittedly this is true for me. A good number of worthwhile online petitions come by email, on which I quite honestly don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time. I would rather spend that time on causes that I have chosen to put more time - the Millennium Development Goals. So I click and move on.

The main point is “that media attention doesn't always translate into campaign effectiveness” was made by my blog post Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. The web can be a catalyst, but it can not make a difference in the "real" world on its own.

He offers his own argument for slacktivism as a Straw man through the "long tail" argument.

...the dramatic fall in transaction costs of organizing activist campaigns has simply opened up the field to many more participants and issues, there has been no drop in the actual quality and effectiveness of these campaigns.

I also wonder if "nano-activism" for specific campaigns easily thrown up on the web and send to thousands of people, most previously not involved in activist campaigns, benefit from the increased public attention. There has to be more to these campaigns then how the website is designed.

Morozov goes on to write about "activism for a lazy generation”. Again I cannot argue with this on its face. I don't believe that Morozov means the protestors in Iran using both demonstrations for which many meant arrest, beatings or death and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, but for campaigns such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals there will be a point where they need to reach the mainstream masses of the developed countries. The Millennium Development Goals as far as I can determine are not mainstream in the United States.

Morozov challenges the basic slacktivist narrative by asking the question:

are the publicity gains gained through this greater reliance on new media worth the organizational losses that traditional activists entities are likely to suffer, as ordinary people would begin to turn away from conventional (and proven) forms of activism (demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc) and embrace more "slacktivist" forms, which may be more secure but whose effectiveness is still largely unproven?

The answer to whether the utility of the very public work of 1000 "slacktivists" equals that of the very quiet and often unattributed work of one traditional activist is that it simple does not.

However, this seems to me to be a very unpersuasive argument. How often has demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc worked without either a democratic system of change through voting or a sufficiently large militia to bring about the change? Vietnam did not end because the demonstrators convinced the government, but because they finally convinced the voters who changed the government. The demonstrators forced open the discussion, main stream then took it up, perhaps with false turns and setbacks but they made the final decision.

The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the "slacktivist" option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead.

However, I disagree with the idea that ordinary people, of which I am a fairly good example, would be out demonstrating and confronting police if not for the Internet. Today, I worry about family, mortgages and my job while trying to participate when I can through online activism and voting. The young have far less problem doing both online and on-street activism.

If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.

The argument fails from my perspective. This blog and Milestones for a New Millennium have found too many resources and too many connections beyond Facebook to give any credence to this argument. Still in the end, Evgeny Morozov makes a number of points we need to think about, and each of us needs to re-examine what they are doing to determine for themselves if they can do more to make a difference and still live their own lives.

Privacy versus Authenticity Keeping My Online Personae Straight

I have often alluded to my "real life/day job" when writing for this blog. This blog started out as an experiment and as part of that experiment it was decided that it would be kept separate. One, to see how it fared completely on its own without outside assistance, and two, to keep my "real life/day job" uncomplicated with personal viewpoints. Being in public administration means to a large extent that you put your opinions on the backburner and respect the democratic process that put those making the decisions in power.

Because of personal and policy changes at the "day job" my virtual and more openly idealistic online persona, which was borne of this blog, is now getting short shrift. My day job has its own online persona and is getting benefit from what I have learned during my sojourns into the World of Web 2.0 through this blog. The separation still exists, but now more tenuously. It is also getting harder to maintain because while I still have some desire to maintain the private space there is also a sense of being inauthentic or at least fragmented.

There are points of connection and it is possible to discover one of my online personae through the other, but so far nobody has seemed to have noticed any of them. Do I want to make them more obvious?

Reconnecting to Why To Connect

I have decided to reconnect to why I started this in the first place. It was to learn and share. The learning was whatever interested me with more specific focus on issues being dealt with through the Millennium Development Goals. The sharing was with whomever was interested. It is not going to change the Web 2.0 world, but I was quite happy when Youth for International Human Rights is clicked 61 times, or 36 clicks for the MIT video Technologies Changing Communities, Communities Innovating Technology or 34 clicks for my own post Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort.

Another aspect of blogging that was enjoyable was seeing people across the globe connect with what I was sharing. People find me through Google. One popular search is "millenium development goals obama", and I take satisfaction that Milestones for a New Millennium comes up on the first page. Another from the UK was "web 2.0 on social impact" at which I was at last look at the number one spot. Now this does not mean I am now taking the Web 2.0 world by storm. Much of this is the fact I focus on areas without much competition, which is unfortunate because they are very worthwhile causes, and luck in choosing the right words.

The other measure is how long people will spend interacting with one of my posts. Most visitors don't even register, though hopefully they read some of it. I figure two minutes on web time, equal to about 20 minutes off-web time indicates some engagement. Somebody spent a couple of minutes at my Making Hope Last Longer Than Hunger that I did for BloggersUnite and then clicked to their site. Which is part of the whole idea, getting others to find interesting, informative and inspiring sites. Somebody from NYU.EDU found my blog Milestones for a New Millennium through Google "Business and human rights: Towards operationalizing the 'protect, respect and remedy' framework", though admittedly not on the first page, and through it connected with the Business and Human Resource Centre. That took them 14 seconds. Somebody in Oklahoma City visited my Milestones for a New Millennium blog. and found TED talks Rethinking Poverty on the site. The trouble has been that I have been getting far fewer of these connections lately and could only come up with a couple of examples to share. That is going to change.

Penelope Trunk Takes the Pressure Off

Yesterday, OK day before yesterday, Penelope Trunk had a post on Reality check: You're not going to make money from your blog in Blogging, Journalism. I don't follow anyone with twitter-like devotion, but I find a good deal of useful insight reading Penelope.

Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It's so unlikely that it's a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It's not. Blogging is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself. But here are eight reasons you should stop thinking about money from blogging:

Personally, I am glad she is taking the pressure off. Besides, this blog was never right for making money. I follow pathways that interest me, not the market. I am inconsistent in doing posts and I do more re-editing and reformatting than actual writing since I am basically passing along information I found interesting. Below in bullet points are her reasons and why I agree.

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print.

I do try to make my writing at least passable, even it mean coming back again after a few days to make corrections, but I do not consider myself a professional writer. The fact that I get visitors through the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant (links now repaired at left hand column) helps me to pay more attention than I might otherwise.

2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you're probably not one of them.

If we desire that blogs and networks become part of the democratic infrastructure, does it make sense that only the exceptions participate? There are easily over 5 million sites and blogs out there, but 5 million works nicely because it means the first million are the top 20%. According to Alex.com there are a number of blogs, this one included, between the 1,000,000 mark and the 500,000 mark. They may not have the impact of the top 1% like Google and Techcrunch individually, but in aggregate I believe that they can have an impact with venues such as Bloggers Unite For Hunger And Hope or Blog Action Day.

3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard.
Blogging to support yourself is a complete full-time job.

When my life gets complicated blogging is the first thing to go, well maybe not the first, but it drops way down the list. I started this two days ago. Recently I have had thoughts as to how this could work for local communities, but I am hesitant knowing the commitment needed to make it work.

4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging.
And if you are making good money from your blog, you'll have hundreds of people telling you how you're an idiot. Do you want that? Really?

I find online arguments, unless done by professionals in the field, tedious. I am not interested in proving any point. I would much rather find some new avenue of inquiry to pursue.

5. You can make more money flipping burgers.

I don't flip burgers and I make far more than I could blogging. Even if I made it a component of my work life it would not add to my bottom line. It does have value both for myself and I believe, in aggregate with others in the blogosphere, for the world.

6. Please shut up about your book deal.

OK, would you believe movie deal, how about cable?

7. Blog for better reasons than money.
In the book, Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, Stephane Grenier asked forty bloggers what their definition of blogging success is.

Penelope also tells us about gaining the other benefits of blogging for your career. I am becoming to believe more in the idea of small voice blogs of which I am one.

8. Banner advertising is the mafia.

I actually pretty well suck at this monetize stuff , maybe from lack of really trying, but I have other objectives when I do this.

Blogging to Save the World from My Laptop

One topic I keep repeatedly going over is why I blog. The basic reason was as a learning tool, which I learned was readily shared with others, which I found I enjoyed doing. My other blog was created in part to apply what I had or was learning to a worthwhile cause.I picked the Millennium Development Goals because I was impressed with the cause and the people who are associated with it. It also provides the maximum potential leverage for my efforts - blogging to Save the World.

Now that brings up the potential of being labeled a slacktivist because my BrianDRPM persona does all of its activism online. The trouble, if you can call it that, is that the more you explore, the more you get drawn in by the good work that is being done by so many others. I do find my conflicted about so many doing good works on-the-ground while I merely provide some minimal support through this blog.

My real life/day job persona does have the potential of doing some good for the community for which I work, but I do think about leaving city government after retirement (which is not that far away) to perhaps work for a nonprofit. Yet I can't help but thinking that Web 2.0 will play a larger role in non-profit activism in the future. Even from that perspective there is still a great deal to learn but fortunately many to learn from.

Those internal conflicts aside, it does seem that Web 2.0 is not only taking a greater role in defining activism, especially global activism, but the this online global activism is redefining or reformulating how we use Web 2.0. So the question seems to be, how do we make Web 2.0 an optimal tool for the causes we wish to support and how do we use it do define our own roles in those efforts?

The efforts of one of my Orkut friends and the person who was essential in putting together the Stand Up and Take Action Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals campaign in India is summarized below.

He is also competing in the India Yahoo UnCannies and has been nominated under the online advertising category.

Stand UP Take ACTION - social media for social change

View more presentations from Rupesh Mandal

I also checked out some of the competition on Alexa.com.

• Adultdost.com has a traffic rank of: 203,381
• Pixtelevision.com has a traffic rank of: 187,730
• Endpoverty2015.org has a traffic rank of: 268,934

Related Posts (from my other blog)

• Web 2.0 and Social Impact from the Ground Up and from the Server Out

• Updating Resources dgCommunities

Still 50 ways to better social media

This blog started off exploring pathways into the world of Web 2.0 and found a myriad of pathways available through social media which involves learning, experimenting and then using either here or at my other blog Milestones for a New Millennium.

One source of information, insight and inspiration that I discovered during these web-explorations is ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership and their blog Acronym which has been a source of posts for this blog. This particular post by Kristin Clarke was done last year, but the 50 Ways to Use Social Media for Better Marketing still works (I will bypass any discussion of procrastination). Kristin reblogged something that Chris Brogan did, so this is a re-re-blogged post. I could have just connected to the Chris Brogan post, but I wanted to let people know about ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership. I think, as someone who is still learning, that it is worthwhile to remind ourselves of these points when trying to create a media program that takes advantage of the web's connectivity.

I am a longtime fan of the interesting e-newsletter by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and one reason is because of its practical how-to and trends coverage. Check out this succinct piece titled "50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing" by Chris Brogan from the July 14, 2008, WOMMA newsletter. This would make a great education session sometime, now that I think about it. Feel free to post other tips.

50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the next level is another useful post on social media from Chris Brogan.

Making Change Making More Change Bit by Bit

One pathway of exploration that this blog has taken me is global health delivery. It was initially an interest in how business management systems could improve the efficiencies of social beneficial delivery systems such as global health. It has been a fairly frequent topic of contemplation both here and at Milestones for a New Millennium. Over time I have become interested in participating, first by blogging about the Millennium Development Goals, participating in collective actions such as BlogAction Day Against Poverty and BloggersUnite for Refugees and World AIDs Day, and now by participating with Change.org and creating a fundraising page for FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria. There is still the internal conflict of having so much to do with the "Real World/Day Job" and not relegating one's self to mere slacktivist mode. Below is the more or less official pitch.

Hello,

I am raising money for FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria.

Please take a moment to visit my online fundraising page and make a donation. It's really easy - you can donate by credit card and receive an immediate tax receipt for your donation.

Thanks and best wishes,
Brian

Here's my page:

http://www.change.org/myfundraising/FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria

SAUDADES SERENDIPITY

I wrote before about being part of the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA and about accepting the small pages status of my blogs. Part of the reason is that there are greater opportunities for sojourns into serendipity. A friend Ju from Orkut by way of Brazil recently led me on such a sojourn and into some small insights into his culture.

Um dia a maioria de nós irá se separar. Sentiremos saudades de todas as conversas jogadas fora, as descobertas que fizemos, dos sonhos que tivemos, dos tantos risos e momentos que compartilhamos...

Saudades até dos momentos de lágrima, da angústia, das vésperas de finais de semana, de finais de ano, enfim... do companheirismo vivido... Sempre pensei que as amizades continuassem para sempre...

Hoje não tenho mais tanta certeza disso. Em breve cada um vai pra seu lado, seja pelo destino, ou por algum desentendimento, segue a sua vida, talvez continuemos a nos encontrar, quem sabe... nos e-mails trocados...

Podemos nos telefonar... conversar algumas bobagens. Aí os dias vão passar... meses... anos... até este contato tornar-se cada vez mais raro. Vamos nos perder no tempo...

Um dia nossos filhos verão aquelas fotografias e perguntarão: Quem são aquelas pessoas? Diremos que eram nossos amigos. E... isso vai doer tanto!!! Foram meus amigos, foi com eles que vivi os melhores anos de minha vida!

A saudade vai apertar bem dentro do peito. Vai dar uma vontade de ligar, ouvir aquelas vozes novamente... Quando o nosso grupo estiver incompleto... nos reuniremos para um último adeus de um amigo. E entre lágrima nos abraçaremos...

Faremos promessas de nos encontrar mais vezes daquele dia em diante. Por fim, cada um vai para o seu lado para continuar a viver a sua vidinha isolada do passado... E nos perderemos no tempo...

Por isso, fica aqui um pedido deste humilde amigo: não deixes que a vida passe em branco, e que pequenas adversidades sejam a causa de grandes tempestades...

Eu poderia suportar, embora não sem dor, que tivessem morrido todos os meus amores... mas enlouqueceria se morressem todos os meus amigos!!!

Vinícius de Moraes

I used Google Translator to go from Portuguese to English and have now made it a permanent widget on this blog, translating the words is only part of it though.

I started by learning more about who was credited with having written the quote (English translation) he sent me. I learned for the first time about Vinicius de Moraes, but I also learned about Fernando Pessoa and found a number of good sites about him, Poetry International Web - Fernando Pessoa and Pessoa's Trunk. Seems that, at least on the web, both men are credited with penning the words.

I am not worried about who actually said it, but it demonstrated to me that those words are a deep part of the Brazilian/Portuguese culture, demonstrating the importance of Friends.

I continued my serendipitous search and found other connections to my Canadian birth and Irish ancestry through some very interesting sites from Germany Biographeme | vita nuova, time4time.blog, onClicknyc · New Media Design and Corporate Design... and most interesting of all Eccentric, which brought me to the Canadian pianist Glen Gould and Irish singer ROISIN MURPHY Fansite. Overpowered, Ruby Blue :: AbsentMinded.

Ju teaches a very important lesson why people take up causes such as the Millennium Development Goals. It is not always to make massive political paradigm shifts but finding personal ways to connect through countless small interactions for a better world. It is through the means of first defining ourselves as the path to redefining the world.

Inform, Engage, and Empower During Your Freetime

One new set of connections created through my Milestones for a New Millennium blog was through becoming one of the moderators for the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA.

I find that Orkut offers more of a conversation regarding relevant topics than does Facebook. It is an international conversation spanning the globe. Lately the direction of the discussions has been on the best means of directing the discussions. The basic format for the discussions is the web itself and more particularly Orkut, but we are open to numerous avenues of communication. The question is which avenues are best for both open dialogue and advancing the cause of the Millennium Development Goals?

A recently learned term is Slacktivists, basically well-meaning but all too often ineffectual (at least until a tipping point is reached) social activists hanging on and together through social media. At the other end of the continuum are professionals (as in "gets paid for it.") in the social media/Web 2.0 arena. Most of us hope to be somewhere in the middle trying to help when and where we can on a part-time and unpaid basis.

Slacktivists may be those who take no more effort than clicking a button to join a petition, but they are still a step above those that don't know and/or don't care. I try to put a good deal of information on my blog to make it easier for others to connect in the hope they will pursue their own pathways. The basic web connection is information through shared self-education. Then comes engagement which does sometimes mean signing online petitions. There is also the potential, as the Obama campaign has demonstrated, for empowerment.

It is not just the IT-intelligentsia's road, it is a journey for all of us. Ethan Zuckerman discusses Technologies and Emerging Democracies: Building a Better Gatekeeper in an MIT video. I agree with both Zuckerman and others in my Orkut conversations that Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Zuckermans's favorite Reddit among dozens of others offer their own unique impressions regarding their areas of interest, but it also means that the Web is balkanized. Are we "Gatekeepers" or are we attempting to break through the gates?

Is there a way to better leverage the collective wisdom of these international connections being created through these groups? Just trying to keep up with all the information and maintain my two blogs is an effort. Then there is that pesky real world day job. I try to rise above being a slacktivist or at least attempt at being a fairly prolific slactivist. Without the educational background and professional expertise in the Web 2.0 world, how does one best use these online resources to endeavor to connect and make a difference in the world?

I have a good deal of respect for experts in this field, but their professionalism is often related to the medium not the message. The question is how best to connect? One earlier post exploring this idea which I revisited and reedited was Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human.

Uniting "Small Pages" Discovered on the Journey

My new blog Milestones for a New Millennium continues to grow and find new connections. Depending on how you measure it has now surpassed this blog. Alexa.com has Millennium Milestones at a traffic ranking of 766,539, while this one is at 860,699. Those numbers still put me what has been aptly called "small pages" rank.

I got the idea of "small pages" from Aira of the blog It'll be alright. I had participated in Bloggers Unite For Refugees. Aira helped to organize the majority of the posts under one thread and tied the whole affair together rather nicely in her own post.

It seems a small thing, I know. But the net itself is made of small pages, like mine and like the web pages of the over 10 thousand bloggers part of the Bloggers Unite. Ten thousand stories and thoughts for giving voice to 40 million refugees, for making known an association that help people for real. And to put in practice an expression I read on the Refugees United’s page and – with its simplicity – seemed to me such fundamental: spread the world.

I am not trying for the big numbers any more. It takes me away from what I find enjoyable and educational about this experience. The journey is far more interesting traveling away from the masses, but there are still many who can share in the travel. At the same time, I still want to find ways of getting the ideas that I learn on those web-journeys to a larger audience.

Getting Your Say Getting Heard

In my last post, I admitted that a limited number of readers and visitors were coming to either one of my blogs. I am though quite happy with the quality of visitors. While no longer chasing numbers, I still visit Feedburner and Sitemeter to see who has dropped by. According to Sitemeter, Milestones for a New Millennium was recently visited by the University of Bristol, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, University of Sussex and the United Nations. These were, to be fully truthful, a result of searches, but I still like the idea that something I write could be picked up by a highly regarded institution even for a glance.

Other searches picked up by FeedBurner were, Search for “OBAMA MDGs”, Search for “millennium learning goal” and Search for “2008 millenium development goal obama”

If you blog, you get a chance to have your say, and you have a good chance that somebody is at least going to "hear" you. I don't believe one can expect more.

Getting Ideas Stick To Make Them Grow

I consider the "economics" of my blogging on the Millennium Development Goals sound. Economics is in quotes because I am not talking about making money. Using the Lionel Robbins quote from the the Wikipedia article on "Economics" "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.", it is based on putting in minimal investment, relatively speaking in influencing somebody else's behavior, for a maximum return, making the world a better place. Even if I only effect one or two people, there is the potential that with an aggregate number of people like me that at some point in time it could reach a tipping point.

Truth is that I am only going to reach a limited number of people. It is also true that I don't understand what makes the World Wide Web tick. I may know a few tricks of the trade, but why at one point people are clicking, then they are not and then they are again is beyond my understanding.

Still some insight might come from comparing this blog, ...New Paradigms, and my other blog Milestones For A New Millennium. This blog has been in existence for almost a year, ...New Millennium has been in existence since August 23rd of this year. Right now this blog has more subscribers than New Millennium, 10 compared to 8. Over the last month New Paradigms had 8 subscribers while New Millennium had 7 subscribers, so that fluctuates. For the life of the blog, New Paradigms had an average of 9 reaching a high of around 20. New Millennium has too short a life to worry about. So far New Paradigms is arguably has good of a blog as New Millennium.

It is harder to measure click rate since both blogs are on Blogger, and New Paradigms gets credited with most of the click on items counted by Feedburner. New Paradigms got 547 clicks in a month on 54 items with 0 views. New Millennium only got 6 clicks on 2 items with 64 views on 42 items in the same time period. The "business" of delivering global health services was the last New Millennium post to be click (4 times). The best for New Paradigms is still “WHO | What are the key health dangers for children at 129 times.

In regards to site visitors, New Paradigms has had 7 on average in the last month from all over the world Most stayed for a very short time, not really sure how that works. New Millennium only had 3 visitors on average.

According to Lijit, New Pathways had 385 pages views within a month, many coming from Indio, CA. 118 of those views were a result of re-searches with the most common term being "Creative-Destrucion". The average number of page views per day 12.85. New Millennium had 412 page views within a month with only 12 being for researches, a good number of them coming again from Indio, Ca. The average number of page views per day 13.3. I thought that maybe Lijit was located in Indio, but it's in Boulder, Colorado.

Be The Best For Your Self

Skellie at skelliewag.org recently wrote about how to Be the Best, Be Discovered.

The significance of this experience for me–and hopefully it seems significant to you as well–is that my motivation for working on the site was completely internal.

My goal was only to please myself by creating the best site I could and my rewards came in being proud of what I’d done. Visitor feedback was nice, but it only served to tell me that ’some’ people were enjoying the site. I didn’t really care so much about the volume, only that at least a few other people thought the site was as cool as I did. But if I had only ever received a handful of emails each week to say I was doing a good job, I probably would have been happy, and I probably would have maintained the site for a long time.

But I didn’t. Once stats came into the picture, my motivation was externalized. I wanted more visitors, and I started to only enjoy adding to the site when I felt it would see my stat counter climb. Whenever my visitor count dropped I felt deflated.

I did not start off on this venture with the intention of creating a blog to speak to the world. It was created as a means of discovering and organizing new sources of knowledge and experimenting with some of the tools of Web 2.0, all of which were new a year ago. The blog itself became the focus of the experiments and I discovered that somebody was reading what I wrote or saved. The surprising thing for me was that it doesn't really matter whether its 10 or 10,000, it still has an impact. I also tried chasing statistics, though I was only trying to get to double digits. Then everything deflated for a while.

So I decided to stop worrying about it and focus on what I liked best about doing this. I like having people click on items that I placed at del.icio.us and other places. It makes me believe that they possibly found something useful. While I do not have a large number of contacts, the contacts I do have are more like collaborators working for common . I appreciate the quality more than I yearn for the quantity. I am more impressed with the fact that somebody in Africa might read one of my posts than I am getting a thousand posts in Akron, Ohio (OK, I am lying, I would love to get a 1,000 posts in Akron, but if I don't still OK).

Now I have two active blogs and for whatever reason, because it still seems like tea leaves to me, this blog is doing better. Not next Facebook better, but better enough to make it enjoyable again. I enjoy doing this. Now, with this blog, I am no longer worrying as much about where I stand in blogosphere, but simply participating in World Wide discussions. I am still watching the stats at my other blog, but since it reflects my own views and opinions there won't be any chasing numbers there either.

Learning To Be A Good Netizen - Not A Well known One Perhaps, But A Good One

My new blog Milestones For A New Millennium is turning me into a netizen.

The word netizen seems to have two similar meanings. A citizen who uses the Internet as a way of participating in political society (for example, exchanging views, providing information, and voting). An Internet user who is trying to contribute to the Internets use and growth....

Source: www.synergy-uk.com/glossary.php

A Netizen (a portmanteau of Internet and citizen) or cybercitizen is a person actively involved in online communities. ...

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netizen

Starting this weblog gave me an online personality, now I am becoming engaged in World Wide Web citizenship. The new blog engages both the World Wide portion of that concept in the work with the Millennium Development Goals and the Web portion because I am making a concerted effort to get the word out to a greater degree than with this blog.

I am trying a number of new things, more on that later. I am also attempting to avoid some of the faux pas of the Internet. The first was deleting two posts that I have on Newsvine that linked back to my posts. That turns out to be frowned upon, and I want to establish some trust with this endeavor. I honestly thought that since my post had additional links to other information that it was the best which to link plus it was easier since the Newsvine button is below every post. I am going to leave that to others since reputation is more important than forcing numbers.

I still have limited impact as a netizen with my online persona. In some ways though, I have greater impact on the World Wide Web Stage as a netizen than as a voter in the "real" world. In the real world, my particulars can be fairly well known, fairly easily. It is my vote that is secret and only combines with others in aggregate. On the World Wide Web, my particulars are for the most part of no consequence and it is my publicly accessible vote through my blog posts that define me. My vote may not at this time reach more than 10 people, but it has a chance to cascade and there are millions of others making the same cascading votes on these issues (I get to do it on my own blog). This means that there is a force beyond the aggregate of people passively voting for whatever program is put in front of them to a level of actively engaging in the issues on an ever expanding platform.

Change in Pathways But Not A Change in the Path

The site is going back to its original intention of being a learning portal. The efforts toward blogging will be focused on the new blog Milestones For A New Millennium. I will still be making posts here but with less regularity. The difference being that this policy will now be followed on purpose rather than by happenstance as has been occurring.

This site can provide two important avenues. It can be used to explore issues which relate to but don't deal directly with the subject matter of Milestones For A New Millennium and it can be used to work through some of the subjects prior to posting on Milestones For A New Millennium.

Lessons Learned Lessons Applied

The new blog is still undergoing construction. Actually construction is not right because it is still in the design phase and undergoing is not right because I haven't done anything with it for last few weeks. This post is partially to get back on track.

While this current weblog has provided a number of lessons that can be applied to the new one, there is still the matter of deciding what the new weblog is supposed to accomplish and how to achieve that. One primary lesson being applied is that Milestones for the New Millennium is far more focused than this endeavor which tends to follow its own path of exploration.

The new blog is focused on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the efforts of others to see those goals accomplished. The eight goals though still provide a wide range of topics to write about. Within each of those goals, is it to 1. End Hunger 2. provide Universal Education 3. ensure Gender Equity 4. ensure Child Health 5. ensure Maternal Health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases 7. ensure Environmental Sustainability or 8. create Global Partnerships; there are both milestones to celebrate and millstones to rail against. The efforts of those supporting End Poverty 2015 will be prominently featured.

The concept, though, of overcoming all the world's problems for the thousand years before us is daunting. The notion that we will be successful in pushing the world's governments into meeting their promises by having people stand up is almost naive. It is still, nonetheless, worth supporting.

The Millennium Milestones blog is based on the premise that there has to be other avenues connecting the global perspective of the Millennium Development Goals with the individual activities of organizations and people working at the local level. There is also the "how" as well as the "what". This blog has explored social-entrepreneurship and the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place. There is the expectation that increased awareness will not command compliance from world governments but that their lack of commitment will inspire others to take matters in their own hands. It will be the day-to-day efforts of hundreds working through organizations utilizing new technologies that will lead us to fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals.