News Site Web Design

Diigo and the rise and fall of Delicious

One of the big bits of tech news yesterday was a leaked slide showing that Yahoo was closing down Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system that helped define. Yahoo must not do Twitter because it took them till today to finally respond. They now say that Del.icio.us doesn't fit their strategy and that they will be selling it.

Do we care? Should we care? When it started in 2003, Del.icio.us was something innovative and quirky. It helped teach us that our online behavior didn't need to be secret and locked away on our hard drives but could be shared. Indicating that you thought a website was worthy of a bookmark could be a recommendation to friends. Even people bookmarking a site was an indication of it's real world value. For us techies, Del.icio.us opened our eyes up to a world where everything could be an RSS feed and in 2006 I jiggered the social aspects to create a human-powered editorial aggregator QuakerQuaker.org.

When Yahoo bought it we were all a bit nervous but it seemed like a good move. Yahoo could bring server resources and a userbase and take Del.icio.us to the next level. When corporate decided to rename it Delicious.com, it stripped the quirkiness but perhaps signaled a willingness to take this more into the masses.

Screenshot of my revived
Diigo account, showing
Delicious imports.

Alas, it didn't turn out that way. Delicious settled in and stopped innovating. Eventually the founder left Yahoo. Things got so bad that it seemed exciting when it essentially got a design make-over a few years ago. Competing services sprang up but none were different enough to make many of change our habits.

So yesterday's news is perhaps a good thing. I've been looking at those other services. Diigo.com looks really fabulous. I tried it when it launched in 2006 but wrote it off at the time as a Delicious clone with high ambitions. But they've been working hard. They're onto version five now and they've been adding the kind of cool features that an independent Delicious might have pursued.

For example, you can add a note to a webpage that you're bookmarking and then send a special URL with the site and note. They make it really easy to Twitter this. Last night I bookmarked and tweeted about an online radio service I've been using:

Listening to a lot of Radio Paradise lately. Good background work music, interesting selections: diigo.com/0e8gw

That Diigo link will take you to Radio Paradise's homepage with the note I added. That's really useful.

Diigo just a few moments ago put out a Transition to Diigo FAQ. Exporting from Delicious is really easy and importing it to Diigo is easy too--though not instant, it was about twelve hours. I'm confident enough about Diigo that I've upgraded to the $40/year Premium account--partly chipping in since I imagine they're being hit with lots of new accounts today.

Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Del.Icio.Us Delicious Diigo Yahoo | Edit

Philadelphia Metropolis

Metropolis - Philadelphia News and Journalism

Metropolis is a "news, analysis and commentary" site from veteran Philadelphia reporter Tom Ferrick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom's spent the last half-dozen years talking to everyone who will listen about the future of print and Philly news. He's done talking and is showing what can be done on a budget budget. From "This is Metropolis," the lead article:

Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are retreating from in-depth coverage of regional news either due to economic or audience considerations.

The retreat has been gradual, but no one expects it to stop. The company that owns the region's largest newspapers - the Inquirer and Daily News - is in bankruptcy. The size of the editorial staffs at the papers continues to shrink. The prognosis for metro dailies here and elsewhere is not good. The journalism practiced by these papers is still robust, but the economic model that has sustained it is eroding. If these traditional sources of news falter or fail what will take their place?

The site was built in Movable Type. The most prominent feature is the slideshow display of featured articles. Tom has seen a similar effect on another journalism site and a search found the "Sliding Horizontal Banner Rotator" at Active Den, a great site to purchase pre-built Flash files. Movable Type entries are outfitted with custom fields to enter images and links. Movable Type then creates a custom XML file for the "Main Stories" feed, which is then picked up and displayed by the Flash banner. In addition, the site uses Google Adsense to provide income.

Visit: Philadelphia Metropolis

Continue reading Philadelphia Metropolis.

Categories: Client Sites , Custom Design , Journalists & Artists , Local , Movable Type
Tags: Active Den, Bloggers, Flash, Google Adsense, Journalism, Metropolis, Movable Type, Newspaper, Philadelphia, Phlmetropolis, Tom Ferrick, Xml | Edit

Nonprofits and Social Media

I'd like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I've had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we've focused on email lists. We all have big email lists--tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.

Facebook Pages

A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don't need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there's a wall, there's an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.

Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as "fans" of your Page see what you're putting out in their individual stream. They'll log into Facebook and see that messages like "Jen just got engaged!" or "Joe is having a bad hair day" and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You're seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It's different from a spammish email because it's coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.

The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they're public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren't but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.

I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we'll be able to reach out to people. I'm very excited about this because there's all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it's happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.

Intimate, immediate, engaging

What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that's authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we've typically been.

What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I'm not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization's focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn't matter where they hosted but you'll have to make sure they're embedded on your Facebook fan page.

Building our Facebook Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you're sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what's happening: you send out a 140-character "tweet" with an interesting tease about the video you've produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.

The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you're in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you're organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It's a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that's not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).

The New Nonprofit Outreach

I'd love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.

--------------

Martin Kelley is a web developer and social media consultant specializing in nonprofits. This post is a loose transcription of his video, Nonprofits and Social Media. This essay is also available on the MartinKelley.com Facebook fan page.

Categories: Facebook , Niche Marketing , Practical 2.0
Tags: Activity Stream, Email, Facebook, Linkedin, Nonprofit, Outreach, Pages, Profits, Twitter, Youtube | Edit

Extending customer relationships through social media

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.
This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.

Categories: Analytics , Facebook , Niche Marketing , Web Design
Tags: A/B Testing, Analyytics, Corporate, Customer Relationships, Facebook, Marketing, Oreilly, Real Time, Social Media, Websites | Edit

About Martin

Martin Kelley is a web designer in the Philadelphia area. Here's the story of his evolution from activist book editor to social media marketer to a magazine editor!

Continue reading About Martin.

Categories: Martin
Tags: Alternative Press, Book Editor, Economics, Editing, Email, History, Independent Bookstores, Journalism, Music, New Society Publishers, Peace Groups, Philadelphia, Pictures, Quaker, Small Business, Social Media, Typesetting, Web Design | Edit

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

I've always thought such tricks were pathetic and bound to lose over the long term. Search engines want to feature good sites. It's in their best interest to make sure the sites listed are the ones people want to see. A search engine that returns unsatisfactory results quickly becomes a has-been in the search engine competition. So as soon as a site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skewing the rankings they tweak their secret search algorithm to fix the SEO loophole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

Categories: Beyond SEO
Tags: Google Yahoo, Loophole, Search Algorithm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Results, Search Engines, Seo, Yahoo | Edit

Creating an RSS feed from scratch

RSS feeds are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds together the hundreds of services that make up "Web 2.0." The term stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and can be thought of as a machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once you have a website's RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a ridiculously easy way to "roll your own" RSS feed without having to worry about your website's content platform.

Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds. But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite number of content management systems and web development software programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads its functions over multiple domains.

Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us

To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us, the popular "social bookmarking" web service (similar services can be easily adapted to work). Then add a "post to Del.icio.us" button to your browser's toolbar following the instructions here. Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page, click on your "post to Del.icio.us" button and fill out a good title and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and you can make it whatever you want but "mysites" or your business name will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you've started an RSS feed.

How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed. You can see it in all its machine code glory at del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing "username" with your username and "mysites" with whatever tag you chose).

Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves, then your published RSS feed will need to change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won't even be able to tell who's still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed you should "future proof" it by running it through Feedburner.

Cloak that Feed

Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL. Enter your Del.icio.us feed's address and sign up for a Feedburner account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name relating to your company or site, let's say "mycompany" for our example. You'll now have a new RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you're in business: this is the feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.

The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it's Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster's username). To clear that out, go into Feedburner's "Optimize" tab and turn on the "Title/Description Burner," filling it out with a title and description that better matches your feed's purpose. For an example of all this in action, the Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner "cloak" can be found here:

Get that Feed out there

Under Feedburner's "Publicize" tag there are lots of neat features to republish your feed yourself. First off is the "Chicklet chooser" which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed icon to let visitors know you've entered the 21st Century. Their "Buzz Boost" feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that will list the latest additions. "Email subscriptions" lets your audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to your site.

Final Thoughts

RSS feeds are great ways of communicating exciting news to your audiences. If you're lucky, important bloggers in your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.

Categories: Practical 2.0 , RSS Syndication
Tags: Binds, Content, Content Management System, Email, Glue, Infinite Number, Lingua Franca, Native Web, Real World, Really Simple Syndication, Ridiculously, Rss Reader, Web | Edit

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

Interesting article over the Moveabletype blog. Anil Dash interviews George Johnson Jr of Hyperlocal Media, who's using MT as a content system to build hyperlocal community sites that can compete against local newspapers (see their very-cool looking BuffaloRising site).

Here's some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.

Categories: Drupal , Practical 2.0
Tags: Blog, Blogging, Content, Content Management System, Local Newspapers, Local Players, Movable, Moveable Type | Edit

I am the King of Folksonomy

I just relaunched my personal blog a few days ago, moving it from nonviolence.org/martink to quakerranter.org. I plan to write a whole big piece about it in the near future. But my access logs just picked up something amazing.

An important part of the redesign was an automatic keyword generator. Posts were run through a script that automatically pulled out keywords from the text. My 2003 article, Going all the way with Movable Type generated the following tags, which appear as links after the post:

Following the links takes you to similarly-tagged articles. At least that's the conceit. When you follow a tag's link you're simply doing a site search for that keyword. A little htaccess rewrite magic is making the result look like it's a static category page.

"Fine and well" you're thinking, "big deal." Well, here's what's cool. There are 225 entries on the QuakerRanter blog. Google's just gone through and indexed the site and is now claiming it contains 1300 pages. Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I mention any interesting term, it becomes a page that Google indexes and delivers to its searchers.

Which brings us to today's cool piece from the access logs. In December of 2004 a rather innocent post on Quaker Ranter became the center of a mini-whirlwind on the political blogs when it mentioned that I had gotten a call from a CBS News publicist interested in Nonviolence.org. All political blogs get publicity calls from news and opinion think tanks trying to suggest (or plant) stories but no one's supposed to talk about it. I only mentioned it because it was so unusual. One of the blogs denouncing the liberal conspiracy my post revealed was the somewhat slimy Little Green Footballs. After a few weeks the denunciations died down.

But this morning, someone looked up littlegreenfootballs in Google and came to my site. Because of my automatic keyword generator, tags, and static-loooking links, I'm now the number two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relocated to a days old quakerranter.org. Cool.

This mixing and matching of content and rich manipulation of data is sometimes lumped together in the cool bu zzphrase folksonomy. Note that none of what I've done is a tricking of Google. Every tag is really going to a page with that content. These are "natural" and "organic" search results in the lingo of SEO. I'm just presenting my information in multiple formats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it's worth, I don't think I deserve #2 status for "littlegreenfootballs" and I don't think Google will keep it there for long. It's a bit odd that they have elevated that particular term so high and no others tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of February 2007, Google indexes 3,540 pages on QuakerRanter.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In December 2006 30% of my Google visits were to one of the "tags" page. Reconfiguring the blog in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than doubled search engines visits, again in a very natural and organic way. Adding tags has simply made what I've written more accessible to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Shortly after installing this new system, my servers started periodically crashing (about once/week). The problem would be multiple MT-Search processes overloading the memory.

My guess is that a search engine spider came along and started indexing all of the tags. Each link initiated a search query in Movable Type. The built-in search for Movable Type is just not able to handle this volume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the problem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I needed to install these plugin fixes. Then it was fine-tuning the htaccess files. It was been more work than I initially expected and the tag results now forward to a funny URL that Google doesn't love as much.

Categories: Niche Marketing
Tags: Blogs, Htaccess, Keyword Generator, Magic, Movable Type, Movabletype, Nonviolence, Personal Blog, Quotes, Rewrite, Run Through | Edit

The Wonders of RSS feeds

RSS Syndication feeds are small web files that summarize the latest posts to a particular blog or news site. They're a central repository of basic information: title, author, post date, a summary of the post and sometimes the whole post itself. You can open these files directly (here's the raw file for this blog) but you'll see there's a hierarchy of coding that makes it visually uninteresting.

Syndication feeds are the lingua franca powering all the cool new websites. It doesn't matter what blogging platform you use or what operating system you're on: if your software provides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in content to my site.

Examples 1: Photographs: I email all of my adorable kid pictures to the photo sharing site Flickr, which then provides a syndication feed ("here"). I use a little fancy patch of coding on my website to pull in the information about the latest photos (location, caption, etc) so that I can display them on my homepage. Whenever you go to my Theo age you'll see the latest Flickr photos of him.

Example 2: Bookmarks. I also use the "social bookmarking" system with the odd name of del.icio.us. When I find a page I want to bookmark, I click a Delicious button in my browser, which opens a pop-up window. I write a description, pick a category or two and hit save. Deliciouis then provides an RSS syndication feed which I can use to pull together a list of my latest bookmarks and display it on my website. Wave a few magic wands of complication (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!) and you have the main trick behind Quakerquaker.org.

I've simplified both examples a bit but you probably get the point. Syndication feeds are the secret behind blog readers like Bloglines and email subscription services like the one's I provide for quakerquaker.org.

New to me is the concepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Donahue "The layman's premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will have drill-down feeds - a top level feed, item specific feeds, and so on." What this means is that you don't just have one single RSS feed on a site (your latest ten posts) but RSS feeds on everything. Every category get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about web design) and every post gets its own unique feed tracking its comments (e.g., this feed of comments from my "Introducing MartinKelley.com" post). It certainly seems a bit like overkill but computers are doing all the work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to pull all sorts of neat things together.

Categories: Practical 2.0 , RSS Syndication
Tags: Adorable Kid, Blog, Blogging, Caption, Email, Flickr, Hierarchy, Lingua Franca, Mix And Match, News Site, Operating System, Photo Sharing, Raw File, Rss Syndication, Web | Edit

The Early Blogging Days

When Nonviolence.org morphed into a blog

An early edition of "Nonviolence Web Upfront," which debuted December 29, 1997.

I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I realized I could highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain. The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on November 13, 1997 when I re-named the homepage "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia's that the term "weblog" wasn't coined until December of that year. I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others. Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for "Nonviolence Web Upfront." The reliable Archive.org has index of Upfront's second week, whose feature was a guest piece by John Steitz, Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.

Here's the email announcement that coincided with Upfront's debut:

NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997

CONTENTS
Introducing "Nonviolence Web Upfront"
New Procedures
New Website #1: SERPAJ
New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby
Two Awards
Numbers Available Upon Request
Weekly Visitor Counts

With my travelling and holiday schedule, it's been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it's been a great month and there's a lot. I'm especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I'm now calling "Nonviolence Web Upfront," seen by 1800-2200 people a month!

----------
INTRODUCING "NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT"
The new magazine format of the NVWeb's homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the "Nonviolence Web" and I wanted it to imply that it was the site's homepage (sometimes referred to as a "frontpage") and that it contained material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.

So the name is "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.

There's also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It's quite a good collection already!

Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, "War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures" FOR's Vincent Romano's piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don't worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!

Categories: MartinKelley.com
Tags: Cassini, Interesting Articles, Martin Kelley, Member Groups, Nonviolence Web, Org Web, Pax Christi Usa, Peace Movement, Quaker, Web, Wikipedia | Edit

The Revolution will be Online

This essay was originally written in 1995.

IT'S HARD TO IGNORE the sorry shape of the social change community. The signs of a collapsed movement are everywhere. Organizations are closing, cutting back, laying off staff, and dropping the frequency of their magazines.

On top of this, the basic resources we've depended on are getting scarcer. Paper prices and postage prices are going up. Direct mail solicitations are for many economically-unfeasible now. With every abandoned mailing list, with every discontinued peace fair, we're losing the infrastructure that used to nourish the whole movement.

Here in Philadelphia, the last few years have seen food coops close, peace organizations lay off staff, and the bookstores discontinue their political titles. I've been meeting people only a half-generation younger than I who aren't aware of the basic organizing principles that the movement has built up over the years and who don't know the meanings of Greenham Common or the Clamshell Alliance

Like many of you, I'm not giving up. We can't just abandon our work because it's becoming more difficult. We need to struggle to find creative ways of getting our message out there and communicating with others. What we need is a new media.

The Promise of the Web

The Web's revolution is it's incredibly minimal costs. Fifteen dollars a month gets you a homepage. As an editor at New Society Publishers (1991-1996), I've always had to worry whether we'd lose money on a particular editorial project, and it sometimes seemed a rule of thumb that what excited me wouldn't sell. With the Web, we don't have to worry if an idea isn't popular because we're not putting the same level of resources into each publication.

Never before has publishing been so cheap. Just about anyone can do it. You don't need a particularly fast or fancy computer to put Web pages online. And you don't have to worry about distribution: if someone sets their Web browser to your address, they'll get you "product" instantly.

All the forces pushing movement publishing over the edge of financial insolvency disappear when we go online. Switching to the Web is a matter of keeping our words in print. The Web is the latest invention to open up the distribution of words by birthing new medias. The printing press begat modern book publishing just as the photocopier begat zine culture. The Web can likewise spawn a media where words can flourish with less capital than ever before.

Advertising Each Other

The problem with the Web is not accessibility, but rather being heard above the noise. People generally find your website in two ways. The first is that they see your web address in your newsletter, get on their computers and look you up; this of course only gets you your own people. The second way is through links.

Links take you from one website to another. Webpage designers try to get linked from sites of similar interest to theirs, hoping the readers of the other site will follow the link to their webpage. This bouncing from site to site is called surfing, and it's the main way around the web.

Linking is a very primitive art nowadays. The Nonviolence Web has internal links that actively invite readers to explore the whole NV-Web. Everytime someone comes into the NV-Web through a member group, they will be inticed to stay and discover the other groups. By putting social change groups together in one place, we can have a much-more dynamic cross-referencing. Think of it as the equivalent of trading mailing lists in that we can all share those web surfers who find any one of us.

In the web world as in the real one, cooperation helps us all. If you're an activist group doing work on nonviolent social change then contact us and we'll put your words online. For free. If you have your own website already, then let's talk about how we can crosslink you with other groups working on nonviolent social change.

Come explore the Nonviolence Web and let us get you connected. Come join our revolution.

In peace,

Martin Kelley

Categories: MartinKelley.com , Niche Marketing , Web Design
Tags: Bookstores, Direct Mail, Greenham Common, Infrastructure, Mail Solicitations, Peace Organizations, Political Titles, Postage Prices | Edit

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