Before I write the rest of this slightly snarky blog post, let me preface it by saying that I am 100% pro-environment.  After all, the environment is where I keep the majority of my stuff, such as my house, car, and cat.  I would like to keep the environment as is, and I applaud ‘green' programs that aim to protect/restore/embiggen the earth.  However, I also believe that the majority of these programs are doing so simply for PR.  Call me a cynic, but it's true.  "Going Green" makes your company seem more family friendly and nicer in an otherwise cold, dark world of business.  In an attempt to rid myself of this pessimistic view, I scoured the Internet for five examples of companies or organizations that truly seemed to harbor an honest spirit of environmentalism.  In no particular order, here is a list of them:

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I currently own a fifth-generation iPod that is about to breathe its last breath.  After damaging the screen over a year ago, I have been waiting for the release of the next generation of iPods so that I could justify buying a new one.  Now that the iPod Touch is releasing a 32GB version, I figure the time is nigh.  But what to do with my old iPod?  It has given me many years of dedicated service in avoiding the awful remixes played at the gym, so it deserves a proper afterlife.

Unfortunately, according to Second Rotation, I would not receive a lot, if anything, for my poor MP3 player in resell.  I suppose that this hilarious parody from MadTV should have tipped me off sooner.

Fortunately for me, there will soon be another option for my dilemma.  According to the PR Newswire, The US Post Office is going to start a "Mail Back" program that will be featured in approximately 1500 post offices across the nation, including locations in San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.  Consumers will be able to use free envelopes (postage-paid) to mail in inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players.  Postage for the envelopes is paid for by Clover Technologies Group, a company that recycles, remanufactures and remarkets inkjet cartridges, laser cartridges and small electronics. 

The Group refurbishes and tries to resell your mailed-in item.  If this cannot be done, its component parts are reused to refurbish other items, or the parts are broken down further and the materials are recycled. Clover Technologies Group has a policy that the company does everything it can to avoid contributing any materials to the nation's landfills.

Sounds good.  I know where my current iPod is going once I purchase the iPod Touch (which will be obsolete in two weeks, I estimate).  Next step, saving up $500 for the new one.

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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Every once in a while we like to point out how non-profits and charitable causes can harness the Internet to better achieve their goals, and this post highlights the successful efforts of Goodwill of Greater Washington using a blog — about fashion.

True, Goodwill is about community development projects like job training for lower income folk and sales from used and thrift clothing helps fund such programs, but fashion is not one of the organization's main concerns. 

However, it understands that Napoleon Dynamite and others find cool second-hand threads at thrift shops to don.  These hipsters frequent thrift stores since they know that the fine line between "thrift" and the more haute couture adjective "vintage" is razor thin — price.  Further, many high end boutiques buy some of their stock at places non-profit second-hand stores and jack up the price.  Why can't organizations like Goodwill cash in more on "vintage" as well?

To counteract this trend, Goodwill here in DC hired Em Hall to write the DC Goodwill Fashion Blog in order to attract more customers to the stores.  Through this blog she spotlights (and, dare I say, markets) trendy items found on the racks and even auctions off higher quality and more haute items.  In some cases, these items fetch a far higher price through the on-line auction than a transaction in the store.  Thus, Goodwill gets more money to devote to its community projects.  In fact, Goodwills in other parts of the country have approached Ms. Hall to try similar blogging ventures.

This is a creative way that a non-profit organization has used a blog, and the best part of it is that blogging is cheap and easy.  But it does require some creativity and, in this case, a good sense of fashion.

Hat tip: Rachel Martin and Win Rosenfeld of NPR's The Bryant Park Project.

I know it isn't Friday. But since I wasn't around this past Friday, I decided to catch up today (Monday).

This time of year, so many people are searching for the best gifts for their techie family members and friends.  I got to thinking…why not combine the love for gadgets with a philanthropic spirit?  Here are some great technology-inspired gifts that have the added benefit of helping others.

One Laptop Per Child.  Through December 31, 2007, you can participate in OLPC's "give one, get one" program.  For $399, you get one of OLPC's laptops for yourself, and an additional unit gets donated to a needy child in a developing country.  

Oxfam America Unwrapped. On Oxfam America's website, you can purchase items in the name of your friends or family members that people in any of Oxfam's 26 operation countries need. For example, you can donate the purchase price of a camel. Your friend gets a personalized card with a picture of a camel on it, and an impoverished village will receive the camel or other needed items.

Kiva Gift Certificates. We've mentioned Kiva on TBR before. It's a great website that helps individuals "connect with and loan money to individuals and small businesses in the developing world."  Now, you can buy your friends Kiva gift cards. These allow you to donate money to Kiva, while the recipient of the card determines how it is spent and what project on the site will get the loan. (You can find a similar program at GlobalGiving.com)

Send an eTree. Have a friend who's into virtual reality? Send them an eTree at Mokugift.com.  Here, you send someone an "eTree" (sort of like an e-card) for $1. Your friend gets an email with some info about the tree and access to their eIsland, where all their eTrees grow online.  At the same time, Mokugift plants an actual tree in the real world, helping the environment.

And since this post is about giving, I'll give you a bonus link:

NonProfit Shopping Mall. This isn't actually a gift…but it's a place where you can find gifts for others. This site aggregates products from online stores where you already shop, like Amazon.com, iTunes, and Target.  These stores then donate a percentage of the purchase price to a charity of your choosing.

Good luck with your holiday shopping. Maybe this year you can combine your love for technology with helping others. 

We’ve written about the One Laptop Per Child project before on The Bivings Report. Now they have launched the Give One Get One promotion running through November 26^th. The way it works is for a $399 donation one laptop is donated to a child in a developing nation and one is sent to another child of your choice.

So why is this a big deal? It’s the only way that the public (read you – the "child") is able to get one of these laptops. At first I questioned the motivation for wanting one. Isn’t personal ownership of one of these cool, inexpensive and innovative laptops against the spirit of the OLPC project? These are supposed to be for the kids, right? I especially thought this when I saw this post the other day on Engadget.

But I think when all is said and done this is a good thing. Gadget crazy hackers get a new toy to play with and will probably make it 100 times as awesome as it already is, and a child in a developing nation gets a fantastic learning and communication tool. Plus as part of the promotion you get a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot Access worth $359.98 and a tax write off of $200 for the laptop you gave. It’s a win-win-win-win. Now all they have to do is keep up with production.

When Facebook Platform launched at the end of May , the move was met with surprise and delight from online marketers and software developers who have been hoping for a way to access the social network's huge audience of college-aged users.  The Platform allows software developers to design custom applications people can install for their profiles.  These applications have a wide range of uses, including advertising, fundraising, and apps that are just for fun.

I've seen the popularity of some of these applications first-hand, with many people in my circle of friends using the Graffiti App, which allows users to scribble on their friends' walls, and photo slideshow applications.  The popularity of Facebook platform has been formally documented: CNET reports that some 1,500 applications have been created since the launch of the Platform.  Installation of some of these applications has expanded incredibly quickly, with "some of the most popular [going] from zero to 850,000 users in three days".  Dave Morin, director of Facebook Platform told CNET that "This is unprecedented in the history of the Internet".

However, will this popularity be long-lived or short-term?  One Facebook app developer, Amit Gupta, argues that Facebook users may run into "application fatigue", causing the popularity of Facebook Platform to be more of a fad than anything else.  I tend to agree with Gupta.  Whereas MySpace users have shown constant interest in using widgets and other creative options on their profiles since the network's inception, Facebookers have relied on the system for its communication features rather than for the system's flexibility, which up until the last couple of weeks, has been non-existent.

The tendency for people to join groups on Facebook for various causes has been proven in the past through politics, with people grouping together for candidates or issues.  But just as it's a question whether Facebook Apps will be a long-term tool, it's also a question whether people are ready to give money and/or be sold to through the social network.  Thus far, it hasn't been proven whether Facebook membership translates into fundraising dollars.

To judge how well some applications are doing at raising money, we did a little experiment. We checked out one of the fundraising applications, called Causes.  The app is by Project Agape and can be found by doing a simple search in the applications directory.  The way it works is that the application offers a directory of non-profit causes to which Facebook users can start a membership and donate money online.  Causes are grouped into categories, making them easier to browse through.  The directory was too large for us to research all of the causes, but to get a general idea of how fundraising through this app was progressing, we took a sample of some of the causes and compared their membership to fundraising history.  Currently, there are 9 categories of Causes.  We examined the first 25 causes (alphabetically) for each category, a total of 225 causes.

What we found is that membership for these causes is through the roof.  For the 225 causes we researched, there are a total of 615,415 members, an average of 2,735 members per group.  The "international" category, which includes groups like "Save Darfur" and "Fight Aids" has the most members, 206,277 (that's an average of 8,251 members per group.  The "religion" category, which includes groups like "Share the Gospel" and "Stop Islam Hijacking" had the fewest members, a total of 4,959 (an average of 198 members per group).

Despite the huge membership stats, fundraising stats are lagging far behind.  In total, $30,752 were raised by all the groups we checked out.  This may seem like a lot, but this averages to just $0.05 per member or $138 per group.  I think the key here is that becoming a member of a group or cause on Facebook is really easy and requires limited to no action.  This membership is, in most cases, merely a stamp on someone's profile that helps connect users to other like-minded people.  Beyond that, group membership on Facebook doesn't really mean much.  Making donations, on the other hand, actually requires college- and high school-aged people to contribute funds.  In most cases, this age group doesn't have a lot of spare cash on hand, especially for causes on a network which people have gotten used to using for free.

While I think Facebook applications like the work by Project Agape is a great idea and helps people to get a voice for their political/social concerns.  However, I don't expect these groups to have a lot of success raising funds on Facebook.

What do you think?  How will the new Facebook Platform affect online fundraising for non-profits? 

Take a look at our research data here.

Here at TBG, we firmly believe that our clients, whether they be corporations, non-profits, or political candidates, should use their websites as conduits for relaying narratives that will spur visitors to action.  Amnesty International's new Eyes on Darfur website (screenshot below) is probably the best example of this tactic that I have ever seen.

 A collaboration between Amnesty International and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Eyes on Darfur makes the atrocities happening in Sudan a reality for people otherwise removed from the situation.  Using satellite imagery, Eyes on Darfur shows the destruction of individual villages in Darfur and Chad, providing pre-crisis imagery of villages and pinpointing structures that have since been destroyed.  The site also uses this technology to identify villages that are still currently at risk. Satellite photos are accompanied by statistics, first-hand accounts, and official reports explaining the events in specific villages.  Visitors to the site can also read background information of the conflict, view photos from villages, and learn about the international response to the situation and what life in Darfur is actually like.

Mona Younis, director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the AAAS told the Washington Post that "The initiative is an example of how science and technology can be applied to expose human rights violations."

Not only is Eyes on Darfur a source of information, but it is also a platform for taking action.  Visitors can sign petitions, send messages to officials, and forward information to friends directly through the website.  The detailed visual information and emotional narrative about the situation in Darfur provide visitors with extremely compelling reasons to get involved, and the site infrastructure makes it really easy to do so.

It's great to see Amnesty harnessing the web for such an important cause.  I really encourage everyone to visit the site and show your support.

Fuzzy Zoeller is suing Wikipedia.

Well, at least, he wishes he could.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Fuzzy Zoeller is suing a Florida-based consulting company for vandalizing his Wikipedia profile.  The paragraph in question has since been removed from both Wikipedia and Answers.com (which draws lots of its info from Wikipedia articles), but according to the Smoking Gun, the entry included false information about Zoeller abusing alcohol and drugs as well as physically abusing his family.

Zoeller, known for his slightly unorthodox temperament on the golf course, is known for being a jokester.  Example: check out these comments in a 2001 interview with Golf Digest:

Did any fellow competitor ever ask you to tone down the joking around? I've heard some guys say that you were a little difficult to play with.
Don't care. Tell them to speed up. Get ahead of me.

Some guys don't like the crowd getting into it, saying it affects their play.
Tell them to go look in the mirror. I don't hit their shots for them. Like firing caddies out here–caddies never hit a shot out here; what are you firing the caddie for? I haven't had a caddie in 27 years who ever hit a shot for me. I know they'd like to, but it's never happened.

You used to joke that your prescription for the bad back was "vodka and Advil."
You gotta tell 'em something. I do take a lot of Advil. But only when I'm on the road. When I'm home, I'm off.

Is vodka still your drink?
I'll even drink a few beers now and then. But then I might go home and not have anything for two or three weeks, a month.

A lot of the great characters in golf history–Hagen, Demaret–enjoyed their beverages.
That was a little before my time. Back then that was how all the guys played; they carried flasks in their bags. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's changed a lot over the years.
Yeah, but what else did you have to do back then? Think about it.

Now there's the fitness kick on tour.
The last five years, everybody feels that they gotta look their best out there.

Has that hit you yet?
Look at me! [Laughs.] I tell you, every time I get the idea of working out, I have to sit down until the thought leaves. I don't want to go out there and sweat. [Laughs.] Seriously, if I had a good spine, I'd probably do it. But I have no spine.

Even though Zoeller often made jokes like this in the past, there is a huge difference between joking around about vodka and advil and publishing malicious and damaging remarks about someone's character in a public environment.  Zoeller claims that the comments made about him on Wikipedia caused him "mental anguish" and "loss of income".

This brings me back to my original purpose in writing this post.  What kind of protection do people have against slander and defamation on sites like Wikipedia?  Not much.  In its disclaimers, Wikipedia clearly does not take any responsibility for the content that appears in the open-source encyclopedia.  It seems like the site is invincible: since most articles are written/edited by individuals not associated with the website, the encyclopedia is not necessarily responsible for the information that is published on its pages. As Fuzzy Zoeller discovered, you can't sue Wikipedia!

Wikipedia Disclaimer:

None of the contributors, sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages.

Since Zoeller and his lawyers can't touch the website legally, the pro golfer has approached the source of the comments.  By identifying the IP address of the original "vandalism", it was discovered the the comments came from a computer at Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami-based consulting firm.  Zoeller is suing the consulting firm in order to "put a stop to this. Otherwise, we're all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity ."

Zoeller's defense team is right. Online users should not be able to slander whoever and whatever they want on the Web with no recourse for punishment.  But should Zoeller be able to sue an entire company for something that most likely only involved one employee in non-business-related activity?  I'm not sure.  In addition, Should people like Zoeller be so concerned with false information appearing on a site that everyone knows provides unreliable information in the first place?  I'm not sure about that either.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in response to this event, "We try to police [Wikipedia entries] pretty closely, but people do misbehave on the Internet."

I think that situations like the "Zoeller Incident" speak to the structure of Wikipedia.  While having an open-source encyclopedia is in theory a great (if not utopian) idea, I think that the site needs a better system of identifying individual editors.  That way, individuals could be held responsible if they purposely publish false or damaging information to the encyclopedia, possibly discouraging the publishing of malicious or false content to begin with. 

Also, should people be able to sue Wikipedia?  It seems strange to me that just because of a few disclaimers, the site is free of any responsibility of the material that shows up online.  If a Wikipedia article is the source of a reputation-killing piece of false information, should the site's owners have to take some responsibility?  I think to some degree, they should.

I'd be really interested to see what other people have to say about this, so please feel free to chime in with your opinions.

The DC Examiner has an article this morning about the use of blogs by Washington-DC based non-profits. The article highlights the blogging efforts of our client, the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, and features a quote from me as well.

I’m of the opinion blogging is a no brainer for non-profits:

• It’s inexpensive. You can get a basic blog for free. And it is really not that expensive to hire a professional (like us) to put together a custom blog for you and help you get the most out of it..
• It’s easy to do. Technology has gotten to the point where anyone with basic computer skills can post. So anyone in your organization can quickly write posts.
• It’s a great way to tell a story. Many non-profits are doing great work, but nobody knows about it. Blogging is a great way to share your triumphs and struggles with the world.  You’ll reach people you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
• It’s a great way to raise money. If your blog is done well, people will read it and more people will learn about your organization. And if they believe in what you are doing, they’ll make donations.

Four years ago, MIT made a committment to sharing the educational materials from all of their undergraduate and graduate courses online, making it free and accessible to people around the world. More than 1400 courses from their OpenCourseWare site , ranging from Aeronautics to Nuclear Sciences to Writing and Humanistic Studies is available through written syllabi to video lectures. There are also interactive web demonstrations and complete MIT authored textbooks available for study. 

One of the best outcomes of this initiative is that it has inspired a number of other universities around the world to offer some of their own materials online to the general public.

Some examples of available courseware online:

• The University of Washington, Course in Practical Cryptology. This course has made all the videos, presentations, quizzes and homework assignments online.
• Stanford University, iTunes LecturesIn collaboration with Apple, Stanford introduced a number of lectures on a Stanford version of iTunes . (more…)
  

Way back when, I wrote a post about the undoing of James Frey and his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

We all know the memoir was a lie, a total fabrication.  I wondered at the time what might happen, whether the publisher would fess up and give readers a refund.  Well they are going to it seems, but of course, only after being sued.  In fact, it's basically a total recall — for a defective and falsely advertised product.

You can find more details of the refund at this blog here .

If you needed information about your city, it makes sense to head over to the metropolitan website to begin figuring out what's what. A research study by Cleveland State's Leo Jeffres and UConn's Carolyn Lin appears in Indiana University's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The study examines how the websites of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US represented their cities and how well their websites communicated with the public, both residents and visitors, through their sites. The researchers found that while some websites offer quite a lot of useful information, they still have a ways to go to be perfectly useful, especially since the Internet is recognized as a superior platform for democraticizing society and fostering community. 

Jeffres and Lin are, in their investigation, asking a larger question, of whether or not the internet can (and has so  far) help(ed) build and support community and engagement in civic life for a variety of stakeholders, not limited to current and prospective residents, business owners and tourists. In this study, they directly ask whether or not the sample of 50 major metropolitan websites offer the kind of diverse information/content one would consider of great importance to the abovementioned stakeholders. (more…)

> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”

As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have - maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post )  in regards to positioning and ease of use.

Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest - and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint - including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted  the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.

What he did next is interesting to me - especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below

If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.

At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here. 

It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.

I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?

Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post,  Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.

Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?

I’m watching this story with interest - leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

According to a Reuters article, the 1,753 residents of the farming village of Hansdehar have chosen to connect to the world via the Internet, in hopes that the Indian government might take notice of the poor condition of their infrastructure. From a link on smartvillages.com,  Internet users can see pictures of the village, read profiles of the residents,  learn about the specifics of the infrastructure problems of Hansdehar.

The website was the brainchild of Kanwal Singh, a former web developer for the Chandigarh government. His mother's house will be the set up for the first Internet station in the village. Once the connection has been established, the Internet will enable residents to seek out opportunities they would not have otherwise known existed.

 A number of residents already know what they would like to do on the Internet. Here's a sample:

• Get better prices for their crops by trading on the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange
• Publish an academic paper on mathematical theory and philosophy
• Find a marriage partner
• Apply to college
• Unite with other rural villages that have been ignored by the government.