See What’s Out There

Today is a BEAUTIFUL day in New Orleans. It is perfect weather and even more perfect since I got a call from back home in Chicago saying they are expecting snow. Ha! Suckers.

The Nonprofit Technology Conference has been super so far. Yesterday, David Pogue from the New York Times (and lots of books) did the keynote. It was very entertaining.

I did two sessions yesterday. The first was about video centered microsites. The second about nonprofits using online video for fun and fundraising. I will be sharing some video from those sessions as well as session materials next week when I have time.

Modern technology being what it is, you can see David Pogue’s music from yesterday for yourself.

Thank you Javier Avellan Veloz.

And, here’s the original iPhone the musical.

I am in New Orleans at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, run by our trade association, NTEN - the Nonprofit Technology Network. There are something like 1,200 people at the conference this year, an amazing turnout. Holly Ross is the very capable Executive Director of NTEN and I interviewed her about the conference. She talks about David Pogue who is the keynote tomorrow and other highlights of the conference.

The web is changing fast as is our relationship to the software we use. I am a big believer in”cloud computing” or “software as a service” or whatever you want to call it. This is the concept that most of what we do on the computer will be done online, using the computing power of remote servers off in some server farm (probably owned by Google). Salesforce.com is a pioneer in this concept, selling even large companies on the idea of putting their data in an online system. The advantages are clear — nothing to install, no worries about backup, hardware, etc. always available online from anywhere you are.

This new world is a threat to Microsoft who still prints money by selling us their Office suite for hundreds of dollars and Windows for hundreds more. And so Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo! because, as David Pogue wrote yesterday, “Has it come to this? Is Microsoft’s innovation engine so dead that the only way it can grow is to buy other companies?” Mostly, yes.

The smartest nonprofits right now are turning to Google for pretty much everything. On Google you can run your email and replace your Microsoft office suite. It’s a huge savings in dollars (up front and for maintenance) and an even bigger savings in headaches. (Google gives away to nonprofit what they charge everyone else $50 per user per year for. So, being free, it’s really a great deal.) We just bought a Mac at home and my daughter said she needed Microsoft Office to be able to write her documents. Nope. Try Google Docs. When I explained to her that she didn’t have to use her thumb drive to transfer the file from one computer to her school computer — she just had to login to Google — she loved it. Nothing lost again, thank you very much.

Yahoo! doesn’t want to be bought by Microsoft. Who can blame them. Microsoft is the old school now and Yahoo! used to be the very essence of the internet. I am hopeful that Yahoo! can find a way out of it, but I don’t think they will. Microsoft is offering too much cash. In their negotiations, Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang would be wise to listen to Shpigler. He’s an Israeli — and I can tell you from my 5 years living in Israel that Israelis know something about negotiating. So, listen to what Shpigler has to say and maybe you can also learn something about negotiating too.

Our favorite conference of the year is the NTC - the annual conference of NTEN - the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network. This is the conference were more than one thousand nonprofit professionals gather to share and learn about how technology can advance the mission of nonprofit organizations.

I will be leading a session about online video — more to come on that — and we are once again a sponsor of the DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards, sponsored by See3 and NTEN — more to come on that also.

I am very excited that David Pogue, my favorite New York Times technology columnist, is the keynote speaker. For those of you who read this blog you know that I am a big fan of David Pogue. You can see previous posts from me on his work here and here.

So, register for the NTC today and meet us March 19-21 in New Orleans!

David Pogue does it again in this musical version of the iPhone story.

If you read this blog you know I am a big fan of David Pogue - the New York Time’s technology writer — generally and of his video work in particular. His videos used to be only on the New York Time’s site, which meant I couldn’t embed them here. But now they are loading them onto YouTube. Here’s his excellent video review of the iPhone:

I had a conversation recently with a community activist about politics and the web. This person told me that the behind-the-scenes phone calls and pressures, public meetings and traditional press were still how they did their work — and quite successfully. My thought was, “Sure, it works and it will keep working, but you ignore the web at your own peril.”

Two things that made me think about the web and politics today. I saw Al Gore on the Daily Show. (He was excellent — relaxed, funny, knowledgeable, compelling.) One thing he mentioned was how the web was beginning to become a check on the lame political coverage of the mainstream media. Traditional media might ignore an issue, but the web is all over it. And this pressure from the bloggers acts as a feedback loop to the press, a loop that we never had before. Gore suggested that if the net was as powerful six years ago as it was today, that maybe we wouldn’t have had so many yes votes for the Iraq war because the press would have been pressured to tell the American people more directly that Iraq was not responsible for 9-11 (which 70% of Americans believed and 50% still believe.)

The other item that got me thinking politics today was the most recent column from David Pogue. He stumbled upon a website called MAPLight.org. What they do is connect money given to politicians directly to the votes those politicians make. So for example, you can look up a bill, see which groups supported it and which groups opposed it, then see which of those groups gave money to which politicians and then connect the dots to how those politicians voted. This is all public information, but the web is making it much easier to connect the dots.

Pogue writes:

Now, not all bills exhibit the same money-to-outcome relationships. And it’s not news that our lawmakers’ campaigns accept money from special interests. What this site does, however, is to expose, often embarrassingly, how that money buys votes.

I probably sound absurdly naive here. But truth is, I can’t quite figure out why these contributions are even legal. Let the various factions explain their points till they’re blue in the face, sure — but to cut checks for millions of dollars?

And I think that as more of this information becomes easy to track, more people are going to demand reform and explanations from their representatives. You can watch MAPLight’s video tour here.