Coming Soon: The Blog Tools Report!

I’m excited to announce ( a bit belatedly) our next detailed report: the Blog Tools report! In partnership with CompuMentor (home of TechSoup and Netsquared), we’re in the midst of working on a report that will investigate the blog features that are most important in the nonprofit space, review the ten blogging tools with the most market share, and provide comparisons and recommendations.

We’ve got an all star cast of contributors lined up to contribute their thoughts as well – Allan Benamer, Sonny Cloward, Beth Kanter, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Seth Mazow, Michael Stein (west coast), and Nancy White have all agreed to share their thoughts on what’s important in a blog tool and to review the final report.

Keep an eye out – the report should be coming around the end of May.

Don’t Let the Bozos Talk Sense into You

Guy Kawasaki discussed it in his keynote at this year’s NTEN conference, and someone else mentioned it to me recently: this idea that you can’t let “bozos” or naysayers get you down.It got me thinking.

I hate that statement.It’s the worst type of platitude – a dangerous one. It ignores one of the most difficult parts of trying to start something new: trying to balance your own vision and hope against possible limitations and doubt. You spend a lot of time hoping. It feels like such a good idea! Maybe in just another few months everyone will catch on and the whole thing will take off! But you can’t help but doubt as well: maybe I’m foolishly wasting my time and money trying to start something impossible.

The outside experts and the bozos and your friends and the naysayers – who are all in real life virtually indistinguishable, of course – have an important role in this. They balance your own perspective, which is by definition too close and too biased to be reliable. If everyone seems like a bozo and no one gets it, that’s not a good sign. Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Maybe you’re the bozo.

Don’t get me wrong. Some people are naysayers, and some advice is better ignored. Drowning in doubt obviously won’t get you very far. But disagreeing with your vision doesn’t make someone a bozo, and considering outside opinions is the only way to separate a good idea from a waste of your energy.

Two new articles: Content Management and Online Petitions

Two new Idealware articles have just gone up:

A Birds Eye View of the Content Management Landscape

A great overview of the content management market from Jeff Herron and Usha Venkatachallam of Beaconfire Consulting

A Few Good Online Petition Tools

Another in our "Few Good Tools" series - this time focusing on tools that faciliate online petitions

Resource Roundup

Are there just more good articles lately? I think it always just seems that way as I get close to Idealware eNewsletter time and I realize that I'm going to have to pare down the news and article links to a finite number...

Should Nonprofits Pay an Extra Fee to Have Email Delivered to AOL Users? (It's Common Knowledge)
We haven’t been covering the debate over AOL Goodmail fees much, but Jeff Patrick’s careful and thoughtful analysis of the issues is worth a read.

The Truth About Open Source in the Social Sector (CitySoft)
Nick Gleason of CitySoft’s thoughtful piece arguing that open source tools have not yet come close to realizing their potential in the social sector

Blogswana: Botswana, AIDS and Blogging (Committee to Protect Bloggers)
An overview of an interesting project that will send journalism students out to blog for people in Botswana who could not do it themselves

The Spware Battle Rages On (United Way TechNews)
An overview of what spyware is, where it comes from, and how to get rid of it.

RSS Explained (Phil Shapiro)
A nice article that explains not just how RSS works, but how real nonprofit people are using it.

Operating Systems Free to Roam

Apple Introduces Boot Camp
Apple introduces Boot Camp, beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run either Windows XP or OSX on startup.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Goes Free
Virtual Server 2005 is now available as a free download. Virtual Server allows multiple operating systems (now including Linux) to run concurrently on a single server.

Resource Roundup

My take on the best software articles for nonprofits from the last week or so…

Mapping the E-Mail Deliverability Chain (ClickZ)
I’m undecided if this article meets the “helps nonprofits choose software” criteria, but a great article nevertheless: it maps out all the different players that touch an email and weigh in on whether it should be delivered.

Help Desks for Handling E-Mail Inquiries (Web Marketing Today)
A quick but useful summary of why you would want a software tool to help manage incoming email, with some suggested tools.

Mapping an End to Hunger in New York City (TechSoup)
A case study of how the Coalition Against Hunger is using Google Maps to help local soup kitchens. And an example of my worlds colliding: CAH was one of my very first clients when I first started consulting with nonprofits.

Five Image-Editing Programs to Polish Your Web Site (TechSoup)
Another one from TechSoup - a useful feature comparison of five different image editing programs.

Campaign Monitor review (Digital Web)
A detailed review of Campaign Monitor – one of the bulk emailing tools that our contributors recommended in our eNews article.

How Can I Get My Software Included in Your Articles?

It’s an effective but stressful method of knowing that people are reading the Idealware articles: people who are distributing software tools have started pelting me with email. They range from complimentary and polite (i.e. “Great articles – just wanted to make sure our tool is on your radar”) to less than polite attacks for having somehow left their tool – obviously the best one available, of course – out of an article.

In an effort to head off a least a few of these, I thought I’d post a summary of how we determine the list of tools that are included in our articles.

The articles we are currently working on, in the Few Good Tool series (i.e. A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_email_newsletter_tools.php or A Few Good Low Cost Constituent Databases http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_low_cost_dbs.php) are created through recommendations by nonprofit technology experts who we select to contribute to the article. We ask the contributors to suggest the go-to tools that they have found to be high quality and good values in their own work. These articles therefore may not list the very best tools in the area, and certainly don't include every available tool, but are designed to provide a list of solid choices as if you had asked a trusted consultant. Thus, any given product will be included in this article series only if the contributors for that specific article recommend them.

There's obviously a downside to this style of article: it doesn't help organizations find really excellent but not very well known tools. These smaller articles are intended to provide just a base level of information while we're raising funds for Idealware's real meat and potatoes: much larger reports, as per our online donation tool report (www.idealware.org/donations), which will comprehensively cover particular areas. For these reports, we will much more carefully define the specific criteria by which software will be included, and reach out to vendors and the community to attempt to find all applicable tools.

So the short answer: there is no way to request your tool be included in one of the Few Good Tool articles. And for the more robust reports, we’ll make every effort to find you. If you feel your tool should be included in the Online Donation Tool report but wasn’t, that’s a good reason to email me! Let me know, and we’ll take a look at your product for the next revision of this report.