Summers Over Once Again

Over the long weekend I finally managed to get started on a new project I've been excited to get involved with - a new website for the Sigida Keneyali health project in Mali that I blogged about in January. Our good friends at Orchid Suites were kind enough to donate the software and hosting for this group, which is tackling public health in the poorest part of the Bamako area. I'll let you know when we launch the site. Meanwhile, here's a post labor day assortment of tidbits that have been brought to my attention by friends over the long weekend. 1. IT at NPOs: Non-Profit Tech Recruiting. Via my friend Marnie Webb's blog, I happened to read this article from Information Week. Reporting on a survey conducted by Johns Hopkins University of recruitment at 790 organizations, the article reports that non-profit organizations find recruiting technology staff particularly difficult. Perceptions that non-profits pay less, provide less attractive benefit packages, and offer less chance for professional advancement were cited by the recruiters as reasons candidates were reluctant to sign up. The study also noted, however, that only 37% of non-profits surveyed were trying to recruit tech staff, while 84% were trying to recruit professional staff in general. 2. Blogging: Why Full-text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views. Tinu Abayomi-Paul points out this little piece that argues that people who put only snippets in their blog's rss feed instead of the full text of their postings, hoping to lure people into their site to finish reading, actually diminish the number of real visits to their site. The article is fairly convincing, and led me to immediately change my feed to provide the full article. 3. Mobile: An Open/Standards-based phone to debut. I got twigged to this offering waiting in the wings by a posting by Riche Zamor on Facebook. OpenMoko is a GNU / Linux based platform for mobile device software development. The company will be releasing their phone, the Neo1973, sometime in November. The Economist says OpenMoko, an initiative aimed at developing all the technology for a mobile smart phone based on non-proprietary Linux software, is everything the iPhone could have been but is not. 4. And now for something completely different. Just in from Wired: Powerpoint-based Pecha-Kucha takes Tokyo by storm.