See What’s Out There

We recently did a project for a great nonprofit called One Economy, based in DC. One Economy helps low income people around the world get access to the broadband web, get online and get information that can help them do everything from find a job to get the earned income tax credit.

With a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, One Economy has created a section of their award-winning Beehive website about diabetes. The purpose of the site is to give low income people access to information about the disease in a way that’s compelling. They also know that there is a literacy problem among the population they are trying to reach and so they came to See3 with the idea of using video and multimedia to get people to pay attention.

What’s nice about this project for us is that we got to do some Flash work — explaining a nutrition label and portion sizes, as well as video. The Flash pieces aren’t the usual edgy advocacy-style pieces we are used to, it’s straight educational content in a kind of school slide show style. Also, one thing you will notice is that the video isn’t in a video section, it’s fully integrated into the site.

I have a more personal connection to this project than I do to many other projects we do. My father has diabetes and he participated in the video shoot. He’s the first person speaking in the video about Complications.

Here’s the site’s main page.

In my previous post about being this Michael Hoffman and not those other Michael Hoffmans, I forgot to mention two things.

First, that other Michael Hoffman, the anti-Semite Holocaust denier, is popular on Google partly because he has his own entry in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become the single biggest source of top ranking links. Some commentators have questioned whether Wikipedia’s popularity in this regard is always a good thing, because the Wikipedia entry is often higher ranked in search engines than the original source (or more credible source) of the information. One thing Wikipedia doesn’t do now is help you with external links. If, for example, there is a link in that Michael Hoffman’s entry for his book, it won’t help his book’s search engine rankings because Wikipedia has instituted something called “do not follow” for external links. The purpose of this is to stop people from seeding Wikipedia entries with links for the purpose of raising their search engine popularity.

The second thing I forgot to mention was a story that illustrates how many Michael Hoffmans there really are. Last year I was standing in the security line at BWI airport and in front of me stood a man of about my age looking like he just came from a trade show. He had a badge on, and upon closer inspection, I noticed that the badge said “Michael Hoffman.”

He was on the phone and I waited until he was done and as he was just about to dial another number I handed him my business card. He looked confused until he looked at my name. “No Way!” he said. Way.

What are the chances of having two Michael Hoffmans in the same airport at the same time? What are the chances of being in the security line at the same time? What are the chances of being right next to each other in the security line? Wow. Turns out that Michael Hoffman is in the organic food business up in New England somewhere. So while I don’t expect that to happen again, I do bump into Michael Hoffmans all the time, only virtually.

My name is Michael Hoffman and this blog post is part of my effort to get Google and the other search engines to put this Michael Hoffman above those other Michael Hoffmans. You see, Michael Hoffman is actually a pretty common name. And one of these Michael Hoffman’s is a director — so he is in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and that helps his Google rankings. In fact, there are several Michael Hoffman’s in IMDb, including a sound and costume designer.

The thing that kills me, and got me writing here, is that the top ranking Michael Hoffman is an anti-Semite which is terribly ironic, and of course I will not link to him or even mention his name — may it be blotted out forever, amen — but he has all kinds of friends and foes linking to him and that raises his stock on Google.

If you don’t know this, one of Google’s main ingredients is links — links are like votes and the more folks that link to you, and the more significant they are, the higher your rankings. (It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but if you get this much you are OK.) And so this post is another link connecting the search term Michael Hoffman to this website.

This Michael Hoffman was born in Baltimore, Maryland and is the son of Barbara and Donald Hoffman, brother of Alan and Carolyn Hoffman, and husband of Jessica Kaz and father to a bunch of kids. This Michael Hoffman is the CEO of See3 Communications, the founder of DoGooderTV and a member of the Board of Directors of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps. This Michael Hoffman lives in Chicagoland, and does not write fake history books or act in movies, unless you count this one. I am not an auctioneer, nor am I a professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Oy.

I am not a corporal in the Marine Corp. I am not a Partner at Skadden working on securities and financial matters, though I would trade salaries with him any day. I am not on the anthropology faculty of the University of Arkansas. I have never even been to Arkansas. I don’t sell real estate in Ocean City New Jersey, though I used to spend my summers in Ocean City, Maryland. I have never written an article in The Japan Times, though I have written articles on politics, fundraising and web marketing.

I recently learned about a documentary film called The Grace Lee Project. Grace Lee did a film about all the people named Grace Lee. From what I heard, it turned out to be a nice film about diversity, identity and stereotypes. I suppose many of us could make such a film. My kids won’t. Dorianna, Meital, Asher and Gili. They will totally dominate their Google search eventually. I hope they appreciate the gift.

I was with my wife Jessica in a baby store a few years ago and they had a list of the most popular baby names. Michael was the one on top for boys at the time and Jessica was the one on top for the girls. So I figure I have a lifetime of trying to be the #1 Michael Hoffman around. If you want to help me all you have to do is link here.

One of the themes in all of my conversations with nonprofits is the idea of encouraging your supporters to educate and recruit others to your cause. This has always happened, but the web has made it happen so much the more better. People will tell their friends about you if they are excited about what you do. But your job in the nonprofit is to make it easy, to give them the tools to tell the story in the way you want it told, to have compelling photos and media materials that they can use, to easily provide links for others to donate.

I was thinking about this this morning when I received an email from my friend Brian Blum in Israel. Brian is a blogger, among other things, and he just wrote about a hike-a-thon he participated in to benefit an organization called Tsad Kadima, that works with kids with CP.

Not everyone is going to take the time Brian did to write about this, email it to his friends, put it on his blog, etc. He didn’t need any encouragement to do it. But a lot more will do so if you encourage them to, provide them with photos, interviews and quotes, and recognize them as supporters for this kind of work as much as you do for the money they give. Have a look at Brian’s post here.

From Alice Peacock’s newsletter today comes an update about Alice’s nonprofit and See3 client Rock for Reading:

On the Rock For Reading front…Our fundraising efforts this past year definitely exceeded our expectations. With monetary and book donations of over $1 million, we were able to fund seven of our current grantees as well as provide grants to twelve new organizations and multiple book sets to over 85 schools!

Rock For Reading recently launched its first program, “Creating a Nation of Readers” through the collaboration of Weigl Publishers Inc. of New York and Rock for Reading and Book Worm Angels of Chicago. The program will recruit substantial book donations from publishers and, in turn, distribute these books to reading and literacy programs throughout the U.S. Publishers who have books to donate should contact Linda Weigl at linda@weigl.com. Organizations needing books may submit an online application at the Rock for Reading website, www.rockforreading.com. So far, we have received commitments for over 50,000 new books so the program is rocking!

Check out Alice Peacock’s awesome music here

See one of our Rock for Reading Videos Here

Continuing to jump on the political bandwagon, MySpace recently announced a series of in-person events that it will host on college campuses with presidential aspirants. This report from CNET also says MySpace is working with Mark Burnett (Survivor) on something called Independent “a new program that uses television and the web to discover budding political minds.”

We are proud to say that the evaluations from our session at NTEN’s nonprofit national technology conference were amazing - even though the session was so packed we had 20 people sitting on the floor. Two-thirds of our panelists were in the top 10 of all evaluations (Steve Daigneault / Amnesty International and Tim Fullerton / OxFam America) and the overall evaluation of our session was very high.

Funny thing… the #1 presenter at the entire conference, based on evaluations, wasn’t even there! He was participating via SecondLife as an on-screen avatar. Barry Joseph from Global Kids did a presentation about “Games 4 Change” without even showing up. You can read more about it on Barry’s blog.

Keeping with my recent political theme… I saw on the site of Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate, video he mashed up from the debate. I was thinking… can he do that? Is it Fair Use? Did he get permission or pay? MSNBC putout some crazy rules for their debate footage, saying it couldn’t be used on the internet basically. Yeah right. Joe Biden ignored them, and I would also because there is no way they are going after a presidential candidate with a cease and desist order.

Then I just saw this from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

* CNN To Free Debate Footage for Remixing, Re-Use

When the presidential debates are aired by CNN on June 3rd and 5th, the public will be able to edit, remix, parody and publish the footage — without worrying about copyright violation. CNN has pledged to make debate footage available to the public “without restriction.” [Here’s the link to CNN’s press release on the subject.]

CNN’s decision comes on the heels of an open letter from a broad coalition of scholars, public advocates, and Internet entrepreneurs calling for the release of all debate footage under a Creative Commons license. Several major candidates have also joined the call.

This fight isn’t over yet, however. Not all future debates will be hosted by CNN. If MSNBC’s rules concerning re-use of footage of the May 3rd debate footage get picked up by other stations, some of the important discourse concerning the election of our next President will remain locked up by big media companies.

Like MySpace, YouTube knows that there are a lot of people motivated by their political views. And like MySpace, YouTubers have been doing their own political videos, interviews, vlogs, mashups, etc. And like MySpace, YouTube is seeking to formalize this interest into a channel, to ride the political wave until November 2008 and make their sites a destination for the politically active.

Last week, YouTube launched Citizen Tube - YouTube’s political vlog. They are pointing out videos on YouTube that have interesting political messages, doing interviews with candidates and the like. Funny thing, the video that is on this page today is the AVAAZ video that won the NTEN - See3 Video Contest.

Here’s YouTube’s explanation of why they launched Citizen Tube:

In a meeting with a major nonprofit this week, I was asked about the tension and issues related to Web 2.0 and losing control of content. It’s the magic question. How do we take advantage of user-generated content and user-controlled forums such as MySpace and YouTube without totally losing control of our brand? The answer is, very very carefully.

Even the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which has put big resources into these issues couldn’t escape serious problems. Their case is special, however. There are laws about having people doing things on behalf of the campaign — either they are “on-the-books” and you as the campaign have to account for everything they say and do, or they are totally “off-the-books” and you can’t even talk to them without fear of breaking federal election laws.

The Obama MySpace page was originally created by a volunteer, and originally didn’t say “official site”. It then grew and grew and grew and the campaign wanted — needed — to take it over and control it. Some of the info on the site wasn’t right, for example. This was not a random fan site, but the one MySpace page with his name in the URL. The person who created it then wanted to get paid for all the work he had done. Not happening. They should have spent the money and kept the fan. Now they have people running around all over the web calling them bullies.

You can read all about it on the techPresident blog.