Okay, I'm wracked with guilt. On this blog, and then summarized in our eNews, I used to round up articles from around the internet that I felt would be useful for nonprofits choosing software.
I really liked doing it - I thought it added great diversity to what was covered in our own articles, and I feel strongly that winnowing through the huge amount of stuff out there to find truly useful things is an important editorial service in of itself. And I don't know if anyone else noticed, but it meant that you could search the Idealware site and find many more articles than we have actually written.
But it's really, really time consuming - I was spending a solid 10 -15 hours or so a month on it, unpaid. In particular, you really need to go out of your way these days to find good coverage of anything other than Web 2.o tools. I stopped trying to systematically cover what's out there in August, as it just didn't seem to make sense - with an extra 10-15 hours, we could do another original article, for instance. We started the Ask Idealware series instead, which is considerably less time consuming for me, and also (hopefully!) adds good new content into the world.
But I really miss the article roundup, especially as part of our eNewsletter. I feel especially guilty as it means our eNews has closed down from being a roundup of the world of content to now focus almost exclusively on our own. Does anyone out there miss it too? If so, any thoughts on how we can carefully filter the world of content down to a useful summary in less time, or actually make money to cover that time?
