Micah Sifry points to an ACNielsen study (funded by eBAY) that ranks online community just below religious, community and social groups. Ok, that IS pretty broad, but participation in online communities OUTRANKS professional groups, activity groups, school volunteer groups and some other stuff.
Get thee a community-oriented site.
There are certainly plenty of posts about election protection issues, and I am too lazy to post links to them here. Anyway, Network-Centric Adovcacy points out a quote from ABC news indicating that a large volume of emails is pushing them to take a look at voting issues.
It sort of hits two important themes, that you already know about.
1) The media is being forced to listen to its viewers/readers
2) The online pressure can yield real-world results.
I don’t really have anything interesting to say about this. It is more of a pat on the back really… especially considering the dKos 12 went 0-12, the Dean Dozen didn’t do much better, and that whole Dean in Iowa debacle. Take heart, fellow geeks.
Yay us.
Speaking of issue-spheres, David Weinberger of JOHO points to a post by Rebecca MacKinnon calling for a non-profit Blog Aggregator.
A damn fine idea.
Holy crap, nearly every word in that post is hyperlinked. jeez.
Jim Moore who has been doing everything in his power to raise online awareness about Sudan posts this ecology of Darfur sites.
He makes a very good point, which is that you need to examine the whole ecology of online issue sites/initiatives to understand what is happening around an issue. More importantly, perhaps, it reminds people that it is not a bad idea to forge those horizontal links - either by creating multiple online properties that cater to individual constituencies, or networking well with other groups to create and magnify your message.
So, Forrester Research has published a report on blogging. The executive summary of this report from Charlene Li is:
Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they’ve garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals.
I am interested to see the corporate take on blogging best practices, but save the $349, and check out
Zafar Shah’s primer from The Nonprofit Quarterly (hat tip to Network-Centric Advocacy).