Social Good and Web 2.0

A new ride sharing service to and from New York City airports is attracting some attention for its online platform, hitchsters. I remember a couple of similar efforts have been floated the last couple of year for commuting and national ride-sharing; commuterlink and ridester. These types of Internet services, though plausible, seem to never quite get off the ground. While the community and social good from these services are clear, overall these websites never attain any critical mass and are generally pretty localized.

This seems so odd.

Web users are willing to date online, manage their banking, order groceries and books and intimate apparel, even rent movies and pay bills. Yet, somehow, we can’t quite turn the corner for sharing a ride with another person when the arrangement is facilitated online. If we are unable to build an online connection to share a vehicle, it seems fair to question whether we can build anything else more structured, impacting or longer lasting. This challenge strikes at the very root of those that see Web 2.0 as a method of fostering new communities and modes of discourse.

Amongst the positive examples cited above, the common thread seems to be connecting with a base physical experience or need. Think about how this impacts cultural institutions. In order to build powerful collaboration and community tools, it is first necessary to identify the interactions and activities that already exist and would best port to an online medium. Image tagging or social networking, while amazingly powerful activities online, do not carry a natural compliment in most peoples’ visit experience to cultural institutions.

I applaud reinvigorated effort to bring offline collaboration and social good to the web, but it remains to be seen if these can truly be successful. The execution is the key here. For the user, the benefit must be clear and the payoff immediate. As the O’Reilly Radar recently pointed out, “one of the secrets of success in Web 2.0 is to harness self-interest, not volunteerism, in a natural "architecture of participation." This will hold doubly true for commercial and cultural sites that seek to build community not only online, but offline as well.

Museum Director Blog - Opportunity and Liability

The Director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is blogging. As far as I am aware, Mr. Vikan’s blog is the first and only effort being written by a museum director.

Checking out the couple of entries there, I was amazed at how engaged I felt by his writings and the experience he lent to various topics. Though it is only being contributed to once a week (which is still an amazing feet), the depth on each of the blog’s topics is remarkable. Unlike journalist or critics that tackle museum issues like curatorial structure, antiquities or accessioning from the outside (where most readers already are), a director’s thoughts on these topics were enlightening, relevant and crisp. It just underlined the power of blogs as a medium.

When done well, a blog can enable specialists to create dialogue in a volume and scope previously unimagined. Yet, while engaging, I cannot help but think that a directorial blog represents a huge liability as it offers museum detractors even greater ammunition and text from which to build criticism. Especially since the museum director has come to personally embody many institutions...

This is part of the downside to blogs in the Museum realm. The information posted can just as easily serve against the institution. For example, another item that I ran across recently is this art blog from Cincinnati.com. This entry struck me as exemplary of how blogs also represent a communications challenge to cultural institutions. In her blog, Ms. Pearce attempts to extend controversy over an Associate Curator’s firing via the employment section of the Museum’s website. While her initial post and controversy were interesting and helped further dialogue about the institution, this additional writing represented nothing but noise. Note that even the most banal information on the CAM website can be discussed and taken out of context. In this situation, the blogger believed that the Museum’s employment section was meaningful, but as one commenter pointed out, “The job ad means nothing.”

Another example, recently, I had applauded the use of kiosks at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Having mistaken their blog entry for a press release, I received a comment from a member of the NA staff. Ironically, the marketing department produces the blog. The lesson here is that if blogging just looks like marketing and PR, the audience will know it. Authenticity in subject matter, content and tone are crucial.

These two cases, the Nelson-Atkins and the Cincinnati, make clear the liabilities of Museum blogs. This new medium, like any other public-facing communication device, can be used to delight or annoy potential visitors. The increase in public content is not inherently good or bad. This is perhaps the greatest cause for anxiety if a director decides to start a blog. To be successful, blogs must be approached strategically and not as just another website.

It is essential to see where a Museum blog can increase the message, dialogue and transparency of an institution with its public. The Walters is a good case study in how this can be accomplished. In the future, I hope that it does not also come to embody the downside of this medium.

Location, Technology and Cultural Patrimony

Out of Virginia came this very interesting story about a website that enables users to contribute submissions to and track small, local suburban cemeteries. The website of the African-American Cemeteries in Albermarle and Amherst Counties is a superb example of what happens when cultural heritage meets the Internet age.

Though it is not completed, the mashup that maps where these small cemeteries are helps to tell the story of this regional community, the cemeteries themselves and the families linked to both. What an amazing amount of forethought on the part of the site’s creator to connect this finite data to the ground (and locations) in which the objects are rooted – literally.

I wonder if similar technologies could be used to enhance other situations involving cultural heritage and patrimony such as tracking archeological sites, museum objects or repatriation candidates. The challenge, it seems, is enabling the data itself to balloon and feed these types of services and mashups. The flexibility and extensibility of object records and data sources are the technical constraint on how far the geo-representations can mature.

(To get a sense of how far mashups and visualzation can go, check out Infosthetics. They have a number of great threads and conversations regarding the visualization of various information sources.)

Currently, within the cultural sector, the biggest push in the preservation realm seems to be digitizing and cataloging objects. This is essentially a first-order concern; how do we preserve and index digital copies of objects to make them accessible. And while this itself is noble, the question of what will happen next with the data must be asked. You've got the data, great. Now what? In answering this question, a foundation must be laid now of the possible future uses of the information. In digitization projects, the groundwork that is laid at the data level today, will define how the objects engage and interact on the web in the future.

The impact this can have is fantastic. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History is an award winning website that maps the trajectory of art and culture across all continents and 5,000 years of history. This suggests possible directions localized object data can lead.

Another example from outside the cultural sector, Transportation Alternatives manages a site that presents the 10 most dangerous intersections for pedestrians and cyclists in New York City. Link The impact of this service is the convergence of both search and indexing services along with the visual representation. And while this mashup does not include, say a picture of the intersection, it still makes an experiential impact that the data by itself would lose. For a much weightier example, check out the Map of Sex Offenders.

The point of these two advocacy sector examples is that location and local context can be extremely powerful allies in educating and raising awareness. When developing data sources and services that digitize an object, additional consideration should be given to how this data can be recapitulated. I can imagine any number of organizations that would benefit from such an approach, World Monuments Fund, National Trust for Historic Preservation or even the Smithsonian Repatriation Office.

It’s the Experience Stupid

A couple of readers replied last week with some great questions in response to my post on the graying of the web. These could be summarized as follows: if it isn’t innovation or new media that makes a good museum website, what is it? I tried to reply to this question with the examples I used in my followed-up. But, to no avail. I will spell it out…

Museum websites succeed when they offer visitors an online experience that marries the wonder of museum visitation (engaging the objects) with the opportunity for further exploration and surprising insights. Successful websites are those that create a space for experience that is not feasible in a physical museum environment.

In other words, it is the experience created that defines the success of Museum websites, not the technologies embedded or leveraged therein.

This might seem antithetical to my usual rants on Web 2.0, innovation, API’s and open access in the context of museum and cultural institutions. However, this is not the case. Web 2.0 is innovative not because its new fangled technologies, but rather because it has fundamentally shifted the paradigm of the web from eyeballs to hands. Web 2.0 and its extensions (Mash-ups, API’s, social production, tagging) have traded passive site visitorship and information broadcasting for tools that enable content creation, sharing and manipulation. This is the core innovation and it is rooted in the site visitor's experience.

Ironically, it is the experience that Museums tend to gloss over when they are wrestling with their websites. With the hype over technologies, the essential lesson is missed along with institutional mission. For example, while people certainly enjoy having access to Podcasts and tours in MP3 format, the technology itself is value-neutral. It is not the MP3 format itself that is driving people to download. The true power of the technology is in its redefining of where and how visitors interact and experience a Museum’s work.

A great analysis of the power of experience can be found in Max Lenderman’s Experiencing the Message. The author discusses the emergence of experiential marketing and what it offers brand managers in terms of both greater control and return for their efforts. And though Lenderman is primarily focused on the corporate retail and tourism sectors of the economy, the lessons are valuable for the cultural sector as well. “…reaching them might not be enough. They need to be inspired by the brand, product or service… An experiential approach – one that emphasizes a personal or sensory interaction - is proving to be the best way to reach the elusive influentials and connecors…” And while there is a real bias away from technologically-based approaches to experience in this work, his point on creating experience and not passive receptivity is important and points to the other essential benefit of experience-rich websites; the marketing and revenue return.

When experiential programming is embraced, there is a breakdown of the traditional silos of marketing/fundraising versus education/curatorial. Engaging and experience-driven websites create opportunities for loyalty, buzz and revenue where none previously existed.

The inclusion goSmithsonian on my current list of favorite Museum websites underscores this point. While it offers some surprising technologies – it is also extremely rooted in experience of the visitor. The ability to build your own itinerary (and subsequently share it with others) is a great utilization of technology to allow users to interact, build and share the experience of the Smithsonian. Its personally created and socially distributed structure reflects the web 2.0 paradigm completely. This platform, in turn, enables scheduling, reservation and other services essential to cultural tourism. (Now if only similar services like this would be developed for collections and exhibitions)

Another example, I really enjoy the public television station Channel Thirteen’s inclusion of their director’s blog on their homepage, weekly newletter and fundraising emails. One could validly ask how this is experiential. The point here is that the blog underscores the overall mission of the organization while complimenting other outreach that this institution performs - it does this by highlighting the activity, conversation and dialogue with the director.

The connective tissue here is the experience. Cultural institutions that are successful online are not just broadcasting their schedules or exhibitions to the web. These institutions are creating online spaces for exploration, conservation, sharing and connection that are rooted first in a user-centric understanding of mission.

Gross Clinic: Success and Distress

Make no mistake, I am excited that the Eakins painting is remaining in the care of the the Philadelphia Museum. By any measure, the Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins is an amazing acquisition, one of which any Museum or city would be proud.

However, there are other issues than Jefferson, Philadelphia and Thomas Eakins. There are ramifications for the field of philanthropy as a whole in this case. In the media, the prospect of losing the Eakins was framed as the equivalent to a natural disaster for the art and history communities in Philadelphia. What is troubling in the whole affair is that the museum had to tap a crisis-psychology across its cross-channel fundraising campaign (View Pages). As successful, creative and unique as this approach to marketing and fundraising is, there exists a real possibility that the public response may also be unique.

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If Museums are able to garner such philanthropy around the maintenance of a single piece of art in crisis, it is disheartening to ponder how cultural institutions (in general) have such difficulty with ongoing fundraising. Last October, Bloomberg noted the recent trend of declining funding for the arts (-10.6% between 2005 and 2006). Further, in today's Wall Street Journal there is an article by Robert Hughes entitled "Firms Funding Arts Seek a Return". Echoing the Bloomberg report, Hughes also notes that donations to performing arts organizations have declined by 25% since 2000. From Hughes' perspective, this decline is meaningful because it forces Museums to offer greater visibility, benefits and premiums in exchange for support from top institutional donors. He labels this philanthropy "transactional".

The bottom line is that the cultural sector is having to find ever more market-driven angles for supporting their institutions. This raises serious questions of how institutions consider fundraising initiatives that the public might value. Because, let's face it, Museums need lights, guards and heat. These, however, are not great or flashy marketing causes.

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In the final analysis, it is disingenuous that the arts are funded generously in support of "keeping works" but not to keep these same works cleaned, guarded and open to the public. I certainly hope that the Philadelphia Museum is able to build on the Eakins success (both symbolic and economic) by increasing its visitorship and Membership roles. That is, that the interest and support that the Gross Clinic has attracted will be stewarded to create deep and meaningful relationships with the public. This is a great opportunity to do it. The first challenge was keeping the important work, the next is remaining important.

Museums: To Flickr or Not To Flickr

The Brooklyn Museum has done a fantastic job of late leveraging some of their internal images while also enabling users' to upload and tag images of the Museum. They have leveraged the Flickr platform to give an inside look both into the creation and experience of their exhibitions - most recently the critically acclaimed Ron Mueck show. Though this feature has now been taken off the Museum's home page (it still lives on here, along with their other blogs) - the exploration into image serving and tagging provides a great insight into how Museums might serve cultural content on Web 2.0 platforms.

This is a topic worth discussing. Below is a short review of two image tagging sites. One commercial, (Flickr) the other, a joint museum research project called Steve.

Flickr

Flickr is a fully integrated platform whose primary purpose is not a folksonomy or image catalog, but the more basic storage and sharing of images amongst a diverse community of users. Social tagging is a by-product in all this. Tagging, from a functional perspective, is one of many ways in which friends and guests can comment on an image – tagging here is analogous to “comments-light” – a deprecated form of user feedback and dialogue.

What I find most intriguing about Flickr is that it points to a velvet revolution for the semantic web. The emergence of a descriptive, meta-data driven web will emerge not through killer app’s but ‘smart platforms’ that allow people to choose, create, share, comment and interact with content. Clearly, with 5.5 Million registered users and 20 Million monthly visitors - the sheer size of the network insures the platform's relevancy - but its power lies in replicating users' "natural" interactions on the web.

This is exactly the model that Museums need. Though the platform may be proprietary, the social content model leaves plenty of room for the cultural sector to define its own space and requirements.


Steve

Steve is a joint research project of technology practicioners of SFMoMA, the Met, Indianapolis Museum of Art, LACMA and Guggenheim. It is an interactive tool designed for Museum researchers, curators, technology practitioners and librarians. Steve is based on the concept of folksonomy. According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy– antithetical to taxonomy – is a labeling system created and maintained by the end-users, not a class of outside experts. In theory, a folksonomy creates more natural and user-centric search and aggregation systems.

I recently had a great discussion with a technology developer at a major art Museum regarding the life of information in peoples' actual lives. He pointed out that tagging, bookmarking and information storage is personal. With sites like Del.icio.us , part of the user's value is the
ability to choose and create networks of personally relevant resources and references - remarkably similar to the personal value of Museums. Yet, the experience of Steve is far from personal. I greatly admire the goal but the execution leaves something to be desired.

2/7/2007 UPDATE: I recently caught up with a contributor to Steve and he mentioned that the project has received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences and would soon be unveiling a site update. This is a great development and demonstrates the sheer possibility of this project. It is certainly worth following. I'll check back on Steve after that redesign has gone live with some further thoughts, perhaps even an interview (fingers-crossed).

Museum Software Merger

It was with the great surprise that I stumbled upon the announcement of the merger of Convio and GetActive companies this week. Though mergers may be commonplace in the general technology sector – especially after the Internet bubble – in the cultural sector, corporate mergers and acquisitions amongst companies that serve Museums (and non-profits generally) is a note-worth occurrence that has an immediate impact.

The topic of interactive marketing software may seem trite, but the companies that produce software and systems that serve the Museum-world are important and merit critical consideration. There are no Museums in the United States that have the luxury of full application-development and support departments. Museums are fully reliant on third-party administrative and collection software in order to perform their public mission. Further, for public-facing systems, these email and web marketing platforms (with their own delivery models and technical limitations) define how the public is introduced to exhibitions and culture. In effect, the available platforms define how institutions announce exhibitions, garner support, steward to Members, reach out to the community and market themselves globally.

Though this acquisition cannot be considered anti-competitive (PatronMail remains the top software firm in this market vertical and Blackbaud is the unchallenged heavy-weight in the non-profit sector as a whole), the consolidation in the software market bodes ill for the Museum sector.

Convio and GetActive are two of the top service providers for integrated content management, email marketing and hosted CRM systems in the nonprofit sector. For institutions looking to integrate systems, reduce overhead/administration and remove the communication barriers between programming staff and constituents, both these platforms were well positioned. In the long-term, the loss of either of these forward-looking companies (at least in relation to the sector as a whole) can only be considered a loss of choice, innovation and competition for Museums and cultural institutions.

Further, there are always the practicalities arising from any loss of competition in a service industry; the leverage these companies will gain in terms of controlling pricing, system customization and upgrade flexibility. These too are important issues for Museum technology managers as they impact total resources, budgeting, staffing and strategic planning.

So, given that context and the newly shifting technology landscape, I thought it might be useful to outline a list of email and web marketing companies that serve the Museum sector (with some of their respective clients). This list is by no means exhausitve, so if anyone has additions and/or experiences to add, I'd love to hear from you.

• PatronMail
  Clients: LACMA, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jewish Museum, Denver Art Museum
  


• Convio / GetActive
  Clients: Smithsonian Institute, Carnegie Museums of Art, Natural History Museum
  


• Constant Contact
  Clients: High Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Aperture Foundation, Museum of Science
  


• Exact Target
  Clients: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum of Art
  


• Institutions Using Other/Commercial Products
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art: CheetahMail (Commercial Software)
  MoMA: SilverPop Solutions (Commercial Software)
  Corcoran Gallery of Art: Blackbaud Net Community (Non-Profit Software)
  

Smithsonian Deal (II) - Long Tail Ideals

Reviewing the Smithsonian deal with Corbis - initially, my thinking centered mostly on the nature of Museums as stewards of public trust and culture.

But clearly, there are even broader social ramifications to this deal.

Recently there's been a good deal of buzz surrounding Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail. The immediate ramifications of which relate to the creation, distribution and consumption of digital products and content. His examples are numerous but consider Amazon's impact on books, iTunes' on music, NetFlix's on movie distribution... These platforms have unleashed consumers from the tyranny of the Top 10 and allowed for the aggregation and distribution of a larger swath of cultural content (both high and low). The long tail makes previously obscure content accessible to a wider audience than ever possible. Anderson makes clear that the economics of scarcity no longer apply when the cost of storing and distributing products approaches zero.

Yet, in this Smithsonian situation, the promise of the long tail web paradigm is being ignored. And while no one suffers because of Corbis, no one truly gains either (at least not in any broader social sense). Can you imagine how irrelevant iTunes would be if it served only as a platform for insiders in the music industry? Or, if Amazon were only a tool for editors and publishers? Yet, this is essentially the closed content distribution model the institute is leveraging.

As Anderson points out, for long tail systems to succeed, they also require trust.

How appropriate.

Smithsonian Deal Raises Questions of Platform Neutrality, Public Trust

An Associated Press article has just announced that the Smithsonian Institute has entered a media deal with the Corbis Corporation for the licensing of the institute's images. Corbis will make the institute's image available in a "one-stop-shop" for advertisers and the commercial sector.

On top of the Corbis online image portal, the Smithsonian is also licensing access out in broadcast media as well. As the article points out:

"The [Corbis] deal follows the Smithsonian's semi-exclusive TV deal with Showtime Networks Inc. for use of museum resources for filming projects. The joint venture will launch a new TV unit called Smithsonian Networks this spring that will be available as an on-demand channel from cable and satellite television providers. "

There has been some backlash surrounding the Showtime decision - yet, the Corbis deal is proceeding without review or challenge by the public. Perhaps this reflects that private image wholesaling is not an entirely new trend; similar agreements have been reached with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Still, the incorporation of the Smithsonian raises the profile and stakes within the cultural sector. Amongst the pertinent issues for public (if not Congressional) review:

• How does the concept of cultural patrimony seem relevant to the "public good" if that patrimony is leveraged in the service of private interests?
• Is the Smithsonian also granting free/open access for researchers, developers and the creative commons to leverage those very same images and resources?
• Will the institute leverage the revenue from this deal to fund greater open access and innovation initiatives or just fill budget gaps?

In my opinion, the primary issue in this case is not the institute searching for new revenue streams or receiving licensing fees for its property, but rather the choice to explore closed, revenue-driven platforms for dispersing the content of the nonprofit sector. The most contentious quote from the article is the statement "Smithsonian officials said they hope the agreement with Corbis will make museum resources more easily accessible and offer some images in a digital format for the first time." Accessible to whom? This type of deal sets a dangerous trend of narrow-casting Museum services in all the worst ways - cutural capital in the service of private interests on proprietary platforms.

Weekly Tour - 1/20/07 - 1/26/07

Livening up a Friday morning:

• Art and the Mobile Phone - The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore is presenting an exhibition on the usage of cellular phones in contemporary artwork. Given the plethora of phone news in the last couple of weeks, this is fortunately timed.
  
  
• Couple sued for SMS phone spamming - Again, in light of all the general buzz about the future of phone technology (including my own echo chamber), the other perspective - new ways to invade privacy and clog innovation. One wonders whether all of the resources spent on clogging/disrupting were poured into building and innovating how much further social and cultural capital could be stretched. Ahh... the common good.
  
  
• Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum: Tech on Your Terms Blogfest - The Museum announced an upcoming event focusing on Blogs. Again, in regards to blogs, the Smithsonian seems to be well ahead of the general museum adoption-curve.
  
  
• Modern Art Notes - Discussion of social image tagging research and its applications in Museums. This project includes staff from the Met, Guggenheim and SFMoMA. The Steve website also contains a good deal of information for people interested in social image tagging and folksonomy.
  

A Tale of Two Phones

With the introduction of the iPhone, the media has been engrossed all week with the possibilities of phones as a new platform.

However, there remain very real questions in the United States surrounding the market and adoption rates for phones with increased computing and service capabilities. Case in point, on the heels of one of the most important technology announcements in the last year, a NY Times article ironically explored the robust computing capabilities of decidedly low-tech cell phones.

There are roughly two polarities here:

• Phone as integrated, all-in-one personal technology (i.e. iPhone, smartPhones, full-featured PDA's)


• Phone as, well, phone with on-demand value-added software (See NY Times Article above)

For the cultural sector this opposition raises even greater questions as to how to respond to the presumed rising tide of cell phone technology reliance. A recent Musematic article analyzed the impact of iPhones on Museums. Blogger Nik Honeysett sees the device as a strong step forward for all technically-inclined individuals. The utilization of the technology not-withstanding, it is my contention that it is the platform itself that is the challenge. I posted the following caution to his article:

"The question will be whether practicioners in the Museum world have any interest or stake in platform dependency. This type of device looks great for the integrated apps. (iTunes, the SMS service and Video) but I have a tough time believing that Safari will be full-featured and able to handle Ajax, Mash-ups or data-driven flash programming... Plus, think of the stretched IT resources available for any given development project. Can you imagine adding another layer of usability for touch screens and 3:5 aspect ratio? Resources are too tight to work with this platform..."

Clearly, the open question is what other options exist. Are Museums better situated to create integrated app.'s or websites that are WAP and cell-phone browser usable? For a sector of society that is a perpetually late adopter of technologies the coming years will be essential. The Brooklyn Museum has already reached out to explore cell phones as a medium for audio guides but that is a far cry from the applications offered for ordinary cell phones, PDA's or the newly corinated iPhone.

Resolutions and Solutions

2007 - OK, so everyone has their pile of resolutions for the new year. Mine, it seems, did not include being on time. Twenty-two days into 2007, it is time to get back on the ball - or the blog. My news years resolution, slightly tardy, is to ramp up my efforts of blogging on technologies in the cultural sector.

In 2006, I focused primarlily on technology assisting the administrative functions of Museums and libraries; marketing, PR and fundraising. There is certainly more space to explore those topcs here - and I will continue to do so in 2007. But, I've been ignoring the elephant in the room; of greater interest is the growth of web 2.0 technologies in the diffusement of content and community. Can web 2.0 be a solution to improve the dispersement and dialogue surrounding cultural capital in the public sector?

Let's explore, we're already running late...

Tech Trends For 2007

1. Skype - Can you imagine reference services on demand? Distance-learning and lecturing to underserved populations? A curator on-call for students in Hong Kong, Johannesburg, New Orleans... I'm just waiting for a development department to request funding for this type of service. Bricks and mortar are great for capital campaigns but at some point, the right donor is going to ask why funding projects for dynamic web services aren't being explored.



2. Flickr - Community image-tagging and posting (the Brooklyn Museum is already getting their feet wet - Link).



3. YouTube - What? Treadmills and trampolines? How could this help the ballett or modern dance? Its the platform stupid. Eyes to see great coreography. Gallery tours made easy. Google can't keep this platform streaming forever. Sooner or later it will be available to download individual videos - watch out!



4. Digg - Community-driven news. Museums and performing arts groups draw millions of visitors a year with blockbuster exhibitions but community dialogue and review have not kept pace. Look for institutions relying on word of mouth to harness new avenues for getting noticed.



5. MySpace - The music and social networking site has gotten a bad press of late with its lack of community policing and soft privacy and security protections. What still stands out though is the rising of "alternates to email". Email is dead. We are witnessing the rise of RSS and hosted messaging services where only the invited can play. MySpace for all its faults, is a widely used platform for invitation-only messages and data-mined advertisements.



6. Blogs - Old news you say. True. But I can count on two hands the number of major institutions in the United States that have implemented blogs as part of their PR/outreach and education programming. Link Budgets might be tight, but I think this is still the unexplored frontier.



7. CoRegistration - Pay Attention. New ways to connect to mavens and links. Any annual fundraisers that tells you Direct Mail is going to be where it is now in a decade is not paying attention. The Chronicle of Philanthropy (subscription required) and the eBenchmarks survey both boast of the rapid growth and reliance of online donations and community building in the non-profit sector. It isn't 2.0 but it is an emerging trend to monitor for non-profits of all shapes and sizes.