Friday Links: July 21

Non-profit IT Staff Last month I pointed folks to "Today I Cried" - a blog maintained by an anonymous one-person IT department in a nameless Manhatten non-profit. The blog celebrated its one month anniversary with this summary posting. The author's daily musings provide a great window into the conflict between non-profit culture and a technologist's attempts to be proactive in resolving technology problems that are impacting mission. Non-profit blogging: Everybody's talking about you! Non-profit execs often shy away from starting a blog because they aren't sure their organization should be out there in an out-of-control medium. In this full-length article, non-profit PR maven Nancy Schwartz makes it clear they are already out there, and they'd better deal with it. What happens when control of your nonprofit's message(frankly, always an illusion)passes from your organization, and the traditional media, to your audiences? Well you better figure it out quick, because it's happening right now. Jeff Jarvis of Buzz-Machine had a run-in with Dell's new effort to be aware of the blogosphere that shows how NOT to manage your organization's new-media image. When Jeff complained about Dell customer service in his blog, a Dell summer retorted with a lengthy comment - here's just one morsel: I’ve been working with Dell the past three weeks researching trashy blogs that worms like you leave all over that frigen blogosphere Application Development Christine Herron has been taking on a lot of the big issues in the software development world lately. In her July 17th post, she tackles some of the real world problems inherent in the "web 2.0" promise of making all data and applications acessible from anywhere, including legal and security concerns, pointing out that while users are demanding user-anywhere convenience, they may expect to keep their data on their own servers. Toolbox: Speeding up Firefox. Steve Pietrek has a great programmers blog, "A Continuous Learners Weblog" Check out his July 14th post for some useful tips on configuration changes that will speed up Firefox's performance. And now for something completely different... From the Czech Republic, it's Functional Beer! Tags: nptech