NPSL: Nonprofits in Second Life

In my intersection with other nonprofits through the NPSL group and on the TechSoup site I am expanding my focus to deal with emerging technologies in general and how they can be utilized by the nonprofit community as a whole.  My background is in the arts, so expect to continue to see some bias for that industry but my personal experiences over the last two years have shifted my sense of self toward social justice (although being Canadian probably has something to do with that too.)

Aggregators are tools that allow you to access the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds from different sites.  You can tell that a site has a feed if you see this icon on the page.  Aggregators allow you to mix the feeds from many sites into a single place.  In other words, no need to surf when an aggregator can deliver the content to your desktop.

Some of my favourite aggregators include:

Social networking sites are gathering places.  When they are successful, they build community.  That community can interact through chat, forums, blogs and comments, virtual environments, text messaging and wikis. 

Skype is a terrific tool.  It is a software based phone that allows VoIP calls anywhere in the world.  If you place a Skype call between computers--your computer and the computer of the person on the other end--the call is free.   It costs pennies a minute to call to a cell phone or land line.

Skype will allow you to do video calling, share documents, and IM others on the Skype network.

REVVER is a video site similar to YouTube.  The company is quite a bit smaller than YouTube.  The number of videos on REVVER is much smaller than on YouTube.  While it is a little guy, REVVER is my preferred video site. 

Why? 

The small guy is more likely to try and work with content providers.  You can post messages to the forum on REVVER and get a response very quickly.  The REVVER staff are quite likely to email you directly if you have something you need/want to have resolved.

If you don't know about YouTube you must be living a sheltered life... YouTube is a video sharing site that has successfully captured a huge portion of the Internet video market. It has come under some criticism for allowing large quantities of copyright material to be pirated and uploaded onto the site. None the less, YouTube is a powerful tool that can be used by the nonprofit community to raise awareness and market.

What do I need to post and tag on YouTube?

I was asked by a colleague if I would write a "How To" on Qumana.  I've been using Qumana now for several months to post to three different blogs--dogstar.org, imagespace.blogspot.com, and secondlife.techsoup.org.

What is Qumana?

Tonight Frank gave a group of us a turorial on how to manage the land in our little community. Having never thought about what goes into managing a sim before, I was impressed by how well thought out the system actually is. I'll probably start out by using WESTAF as a guinea pig to reset the name and so forth, but once I've got it under my belt let me know if you, a tenant, needs help. I'm happy to see what I can do for you.

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Offices are being allocated to the tenants and it looks like we might start furnishing very soon. If you are interested in who is being housed where, check out the Flickr page below and mouse over the image.

NPSL (Thanks Missouri Humanities Council!)

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Greg left a note mentioning the free monitoring service, Monastic. It doesn't have as much functionality as SiteUpTime.com, but you can monitor 100 sites. If all you are doing is trying to track when your site(s) are down then it seems like this might be a better solution than SiteUpTime. So, as an experiment I have both monitoring systems monitoring the Tech Soup in Second Life site. If I have any revelations, I'll share.