This morning our client and philanthropic partner, Washington Area Women's Foundation, launched a redesigned version of their website, thewomensfoundation.org.  The Women's Foundation works in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to better the lives of women and girls through community outreach, education, and grants.  The Women's Foundation is a fantastic organization that contributes an immense amount to communities of struggling women in the Washingon, DC area. 

We worked hard to get the site ready in advance of the Women's Foundation's annual Leadership Luncheon, which was held today.  We are hopeful that the new website helps the Women's Foundation connect with kindrid spirits out there on the web and in the blogosphere. 

Some notables about the new Washington Area Women's Foundation site:

• The Women's Foundation is blogging!  We think this is extremely exciting.  Several members of the Foundation will be writing blog entries on a regular basis, discussing the news, philanthropy, and women's issues.  We encourage everyone to check out the blog and comment on some of their recent entries.  We are hoping a real conversation takes place on this blog.  Here's their first entry.
• We built the entire site in Wordpress.  This enables members of the Women's Foundation to update all text content easily and quickly when they need to, in addition to having all the latest blogging bells and whistles are their disposable.
• The site includes a searchable database of the Foundation's grantee partners, which allows volunteers and contributors to search through the various organizations that have received Women's Foundation help in the past for volunteer and internship opportunities, as well as for opportunities for funding and contributions.
• The site successfully brings to the forefront the highly personal and emotional stories of those that The Women's Foundation has helped, and also those people on the Foundation's staff who enable the organization to operate on a daily basis.

Best of luck to the Women's Foundation with their new Web program!  And be sure to check our their blog, as they really want to participate in the discussion online.

Described as the "first ever collection of electronic anthropology" and "a digital mosaic of humanity," the Yahoo! Time Capsule project, created by Internet artist Jonathan Harris, will be continuing to collect contributions from anyone and everyone for the next 29 days. The resulting collection will be "projected onto an ancient pyramid and beamed into space before it is presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, until 2020." (Note: The "ancient pyramid" is, according to Lifehacker 's Gina Trapani,  the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, Mexico.)

Contributors are asked to upload any writings, pictures, video, sounds or drawings and categorize it by the following themes: Love, Anger, Sorrow, Fun Faith, Beauty, Past, Now, Hope, You

For more information about the project, or to make a submission, click here.

Researchers from OpenNet Initiative (ONI) released an excellent report last year on the scope and degree to which China filters Internet content. Though quite a few countries filter Internet content, the researchers agree that "China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world." They describe it as "pervasive, sophisticated and effective" and it is supported by a number of laws and regulations that tend to make Internet Service Providers, Internet Business Owners and Internet Content Providers agents charged with carrying out the government monitoring and censoring plans.

Though there is no way to be completely certain of China's exact process for reviewing sites, tests conducted by ONI confirm that filtering takes place on a multitude of levels. While a great deal of content can be (and is) blocked by a list of search terms (some of which can be easily guessed, but most of which are not public knowledge), it was confirmed through the study that the filtering system is actually dynamic in nature, which has made it difficult to conclusively describe the system. (more…)

We’ve written often here about social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape that give users control of what appears on the sites’ homepage through voting.  Until a few months ago, these sites were really geared towards techies, so they were largely ignored by politicians and advocacy groups. 

Now that these social news sites have built an audience and expanded their focus beyond technology news, political groups are starting to pay attention.  And by “starting to pay attention” what I really means is “starting to manipulate.” 

I’m on a lot of political email lists.  A lot.  WIth increasing frequency, these emails from politicians and political groups are asking recipients to vote for their content on social news sites like Digg in addition to asking me for money or to write a letter to the editor or call talk radio.  Here is an example of a typical call to action.

Right or wrong, these social news sites are becoming an emerging battleground for political campaigns and advocacy groups. 

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Update: The folks at Blip Tv contacted me and corrected my statement that YouTube was the first company to allow bloggers to imbed third party video content on their own sites. Blip TV launched that feature one month before YouTube. My original post follows.

As far as I know, YouTube was the first video service to allow users to copy a bit of code and play videos on their own blog or website.  It was a brilliant move and is a big reason Youtube has been so successful. 

Lately, some of the video services have been innovating in terms of the features and functionality they are including in their embeddable video player.  So following are my ranking of the embeddable video players for some of the major video sites, with the best listed first. 

(1) Netscape Player

Best features by far.  Allows you to easily grab the video for posting on your blog in different sizes and shows the number of votes and comments the video has attracted on Netscape.  Two small gripes: it doesn’t work in Netvibes and I find the player design a little too colorful.  For these embeddable video players I prefer extremely subtle designs that look good on every blog/website.  Overall, a great job by Jason Calcanis and the Netscape team. 

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Love watching movies? With in store movie rentals at Blockbuster and other similar stores costing about 5 bucks a pop, if you’re an avid movie watcher, participating in a movie-by-mail service is definitely a wise choice. Blockbuster and Netflix have two extremely popular movie-by-mail programs, both of which are a great deal. The two companies sport similar movie options, and neither requires you to pay postage. So how do you choose which service to buy?

I started out as a Blockbuster customer about a year ago. I was enticed because Blockbuster and Netflix plans are identically priced, but Blockbuster offers free in-store rentals every week on top of your online movie rentals. At first, this proved to be a fantastic deal. If I ended up without a movie from the mail, I could stop at the Blockbuster store and use my coupons to pick up a movie for free on the way home from the office. After a few months of doing this, however, I basically ran out of movies I wanted to rent at the store. Blockbuster stores do not have anywhere close to the rental options offered online, and while the store gets new movies every Tuesday, it’s easy to run out of things in the store you want to rent. And, isn’t the whole point of having a movie-by-mail service that you don’t have to go to the store to get movies?

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Like many others, I read this brief article on CNN.com entitled, "China bloggers surpass 30 million."  The articles says there's about 34 million blog sites, but the more important number is the number of actual bloggers — more than 17 million according to the article.  That's a few folks, but not all that many if you consider that more than 105 million persons in China have access to the web — but it's a lot of people for all those censors to worry about (and the number's expected to more than double by 2010).

In this morning's USAToday, there's a good article about the growth of libel suits against bloggers.  in the side bar on the left-hand side, "The Bloggiing Boom," are numbers provided by Technorati, the blog search and directory service.  Technorati says there are some 53 million blogs, 12% of them in Chinese.  This would mean that here are only 6.4 million Chinese language bloggers.  

There are likely differences in counting, and the Chinese government surely doesn't include Taiwanese bloggers.  But that's still a big difference, with the CNN number about three times as large as the Technorati figure.  No matter, there are lots of Chinese bloggers and their number will grow dramatically over time. Maybe even to the extend that it becomes the predominant language of the blogosphere.

While browsing Consumerist the other day for updates on the Krempasky vs. Popken debate, I noticed that one of the posts reported that Consumer Reports has introduced a Consumer Safety Blog. I'm a big fan of consumer advocacy and think it's a great idea. However, I can't say I'm taken with the site right away.

The blog has some obvious design problems. The features on it look pretty solid, but this screenshot depicts several details which make this blog unappealing to me.

1. Posts: I can't see the title of more than one post. While the headline "Cocaine Energy Drink" does grab my attention, I'm not seeing anything else, including the one that's on dorm safety (which is actually titled "Ed Comeau: Firefighter" as though it were paying tribute to Mr. Comeau), the one about Playskool's product recall and the one on bike safety. These headlines immediately would give readers more of an idea about what the blog is about than just the one on the Cocaine Energy Drink. (more…)

It is just sort of a fact that very few trade associations blog.  One of the few that does is the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), whose blog is called shopfloor.org.

Not only does NAM blog, it does so very effectively.  What makes shopfloor.org work is that it is written by real live human beings who have opinions.  Sure, some people aren't going to agree with NAM's point of view.  But regardless of your politics you have to respect NAM's willingness to participate in the conversation online.  What they are doing is extradinary for a DC-based trade association.

Following is a Q&A with Pat Cleary, the Blogger in Chief at shopfloor.org.  Listen to what he says - Pat is a true innovator whether he'll admit it or not.

(1) When did NAM start blogging?

November of 2004.

(2) Where did the idea to launch the blog come from?

I had always wanted to do one. Was the head of Public Affairs when we started it, went to Gov. Engler and he said “go.” It’s important to note that he didn’t say “What’s a blog?” He’s very tech savvy, gave us the green light, for which we are eternally grateful. Most assns are stuck at that step, awaiting a green light from the boss.  (more…)

You can make yourself a free, categorized and searchable archive of news on any topic for reference and monitoring using free web-based RSS reader Bloglines in tandem with major news aggregators. This is not something that is immediately apparent, but it's still relatively simple. Here's how to do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose.  (more…)