Some of the staff here at Connecting Up Australia have recently returned from a trip to San Francisco where they attended an annual Nonprofit Technology Conference hosted by Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) http://www.nten.org/ntc Apart from receiving some of the greatest hospitality the US had to offer, our staff were afforded the opportunity to hear great minds illuminate some very real technology issues facing the world today.

We heard Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/ a futurist, talk about the power of social media and the impact it will have on how we communicate in the coming years, and Eben Moglen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen a computer programming language designer come crusader for free software, talk about the issues arising from free as opposed to proprietary software usage.

Not only did these speakers inspire great debate on such issues, there were many other motivating speakers in the breakout sessions. These speakers provided not just philosophical viewpoints and discussion topics, but excellent ideas and practices for nonprofits to employ on return to their day jobs.

We have listed below some take home tips from the NTC Conference on how you can generate more interest as well as increase traffic to your website. And don’t forget, the spinoff of a good website with a clear message is potential supporters/members/fundraisers for your cause.

The Internet has opened up many possibilities for rights advocates. In order to make the best use of the online world for their campaigns, however, advocates need to know what services are available, how they can be used in an advocacy campaign, who owns them and their hidden dangers.

The Quick 'n Easy Guide to Online Advocacy (http://onlineadvocacy.tacticaltech.org ) developed by Tactical Tech (http://www.tacticaltech.org), aims to expose advocates to online services that are quick to use and easy to understand. The guide provide descriptions of online services including social networking sites, image and video hosting services, and services that enhance an organizations web presence.

The guide also offers advice on where and when to use these services. Case studies, security concerns as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various web services are discussed, with the aim of improving advocates ability to conduct online advocacy campaigns.

The internet services listed in the guide covers four main areas in which advocates operate: informing and communicating; documenting and visualising; mobilising and coordinating; and bypassing and accessing.

Author : Dirk Slater

Source : www.tacticaltech.org

Less spam, more ham

By: Chris Peters

December 2, 2008

If you’re not familiar with the term, spam messages are annoying, unsolicited email messages (usually advertisements for bogus products). Depending on who you listen to, spam constitutes between 50 and 90 percent of all email traffic. In addition to violating the law by sending you emails that you didn’t ask for, spammers often use their messages to perpetrate fraud on the people who respond. Unless you’ve been offline for the past 15 years, you know all this and you’d never reply to a spam email. Nonetheless, this deluge of unwanted emails can overwhelm you, fill your inbox and drown out legitimate messages. Furthermore, spam messages often contain spyware, viruses and other forms of malware.

As an IT manager or accidental techie, you have two main strategies for fighting spam. First, educate yourself and your colleagues about how spam works. The message here boils down to: Be careful about when and where you divulge your email address. See Things You Can Do to Prevent Spam for more information on the education and training approach. Second, you can use technology to battle spam. The rest of this article will focus on anti-spam technologies, also known as spam filters.

By Melanie Burke

Courtesy of www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk/

How usable is your website? Do your visitors find what they need? What kind of experience do they have? Will they come back again? You can answer these questions by carrying out user testing on your site and you can do it on a budget.

By: Yann Toledano
August 25, 2008
Courtesy of Techsoup.org