From the category archives:

FYI Stuff

Calling on the good and willing to spread a worthwhile message

After 17 years in the field, working in front line humanitarian emergency response, of which 15 years in food aid relief, I took a sabbatical break. Taking a distance allowed me to discover an other side of the humanitarian work, something more longer term, but with no less impact: agricultural development. Over the past sabbatical [...]

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How to win the religious war on CMS’es?

“I need a website for my organisation”, people tell me, “which software should I use?”. I answer with an other question: “I want to buy a car. Which car should I choose?” The choice of a car depends on what you want to do with it: You need to go off-road? Transport goods? Race? Drive [...]

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Skype fails. Now what?

Since Microsoft bought Skype for 8 billion USD (“Don’t they know they could download it for free?”), it seems Skype had more downtime than ever before. Some of the problems are at the level of the server, but the most annoying problems have been the automatic (Read: “Forced”) upgrade to Skype version 5.3 on the [...]

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How to monitor your brand on the Internet

In the old days, public relations people would save clippings of newspaper and magazine articles mentioning their company or organisation. Even though nowadays, news travels much faster and spreads wider, it seems public media people often no longer have their ear on the ground. It sounds like a contradiction to me: In the current age [...]

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From social media “reach” to “impact”

When using social media for nonprofit causes, it is easy to get stuck on “reach”: the amount of visitors on your blog, “followers” on Twitter, “Likes” on your Facebook page etc.. Particularly for blogs, some actually take my tips on analyzing traffic figures really seriously. And that is good, but it should not stop there. [...]

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“dlvr.it”: RSS-to-Twitter tool now with statistics dashboard

If you want to tweet your latest blogposts and website updates automatically, you’ll need to use one of the “RSS to Twitter” tools I have described in an earlier post. “dlvr.it”, my favourite of the bunch continues to get better.

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Inspiration for Social Media Policy and Strategy

I am preparing a set of trainings and workshops on social media for CGIAR. One of the topics covers is the social media strategy and policy for their different research centers and projects. So I asked my friends in the KM4Dev and Web2forDEV communities for examples and inspirational literature.

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Survey: How NonProfit Organisations use Social Media

Earlier this year NTEN, Common Knowledge and Blackbaud surveyed 11,000 nonprofit professionals on their use of social media. Their findings are summarized in a free downloadable report. Here are some nice-to-know snippets which caught my eye, followed by my own observations:

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IFAD’s social media guidelines – A must read

View more documents from IFAD

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Shared hosting: Comparing GoDaddy with DreamHost

After my debacle with GoDaddy, I moved most of my high volume blogs to a HostGator Virtual Private Server. I still had some test blogs on GoDaddy’s shared servers, but as the speed and uptime of GoDaddy went from bad to worse, I recently moved several of these blogs to a DreamHost shared server. Here [...]

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US military hijacks social media for propaganda

The United States military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence Internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle [...]

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