We're pleased to announce a brand new Drupal module...

...but first, the reason we created it:

No matter how appealing an online service is, users and developers alike always feel frustrated when their noses bump up against walls.

Facebook users feel it when they receive email messages notifying them that they've received Facebook messages... without saying what those messages contain. LinkedIn users have felt it when they try hunting for a news feed for their own LinkedIn Answers.

And Second Life users feel it when they want to find some way to connect their in-world activity in some way with the rest of the online world; with a few limited exceptions (and to their credit, Linden Lab is working hard to expand them), that can be an exercise in frustration.

Maybe we can help change that.

Introducing the Second Life framework, a free Drupal module that allows scripts within Second Life to interact over the web with applications running on a Drupal web site.

This is an enabling module, built for developers. It allows you to create new Drupal modules with cool Second Life-integration functionality, but doesn't add new functionality in and of itself. It's built to interact with scripts written in LSL, the Second Life scripting language. (We built it as part of a larger project within SL; more on that as it develops.)

The download package includes a sample module and a handy Second Life client emulator. (It lets you test your work even if you aren't running Second Life. That reduces development time and lets you write modules for SL even if your LSL scripts aren't ready yet.)

The module was created by Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits, our Drupal programmer of choice for brilliant coding. (Khalid is starting to take on mythic qualities. The other day, we mentioned to a friend who moves frequently in Drupal circles that we were working with Khalid. "Ah," the friend said, his eyes widening slightly. "'The Hammer.'" Apparently we aren't the only ones who think there isn't a Drupal problem out there that Khalid can't crack.)

He worked closely with LSL whiz Catherine Winters as they braved the idiosyncracies of LSL and mapped out the protocols needed for Drupal and Second Life to talk to each other.

We have our own cunning plans for employing this module, but we're eager to see how the community puts it to work. Exposing SL activity to the rest of the web? Bringing blog content interactively into SL? Using Drupal as a database for an SL script?

We hope this module will work alongside efforts like SLFeed to help break down the barriers that separate avatars from the wider world of the world-wide web. There's some amazing stuff going on in the walled gardens of the online world; it's time some of those walls came down so we can all have a look.

And if you're working with Drupal and Second Life, drop us a line. We'd love to know what you're up to.

Links: 

• The Drupal project page for the Second Life framework
• Khalid's announcement of the release 

User-based sites like Vancity's ChangeEverything.ca thrive on participation. And there's a lively community creating changes and blogging about them... which is a tribute to the community, to the site's compelling concept and to the work of community animator Kate Dugas.

Now Vancity wants to take participation to the next level.

Every community site has a large, often-untapped base of what are sometimes called "lurkers"; according to usability guru Jakob Neilsen, they're the vast majority of users. By giving them a quick, simple way to make a meaningful contribution, we think we can start them on their way up the participation ladder.

And the way we're doing that is a new feature called Nudge, which is being released today as a free open-source module for Drupal. (You can download Nudge here.)

It's programmed by the go-to guy for great Drupal module creation, Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com, and it works like this:

• When you see a blog post or change on ChangeEverything.ca, and you'd like to encourage the author to keep working on it, you click on the Nudge link below that post or change.
• The author gets an email message letting them know you're nudging them, along with an optional custom message from you.
• And you get the satisfaction of knowing you've given someone a little encouragement (and perhaps a gentle push forward).

There's an obvious appetite out there for small-scale participation (witness the popularity of a feature like "poke" on Facebook, which is like Nudge on the surface, but lacks Nudge's use of context and personalization). And it may well be that one of the tricks to getting people to start climbing the participation ladder on your site is to make the first rung as low as possible.

As Neilsen says, "The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop."

Nudge lowers the overhead for initial participation, but there's an added bonus: the encouragement it gives people to contribute more richly with blog posts and changes.

If you're looking to give participation on your Drupal-based site a Nudge, check out the module. And let us know how you're using it.

Rob and I are spending the next two days at NetSquared, in the company of 21 outstanding teams working on projects that harness social media tools for social change. We met many of these folks for the first time yesterday, in a pre-conference session that brought the projects together for an afternoon of collaborative idea-sharing and relationship building, and we were incredibly impressed by the commitment and creativity that these folks are bringing to their respective projects. As part of the NetSquared Innovators Support Network we will choose to work with one of these projects on a pro bono basis, providing them with their choice of a customized community participation plan, a recommended community feature set, or complete specifications for a new custom Drupal module.

But one of the themes that emerged in yesterday's conversation was the desire to foster collaboration not only among the 21 finalist projects here in San Jose, but among the more than 150 projects who participated in this year's call for Innovation Fund submissions. Like a lot of the folks here, we got really excited about quite a few of the projects that didn't end up in the top 21, and we started thinking about how we might support their work.

That's why we've decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn't in the room today. Next month, we'll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. Jodie Tonita of ONE/Northwest recently introduced us to Newscloud's founder and driving force, Jeff Reifman, and we immediately saw Jeff's work as exactly the kind of technology innovation that non-profits need now.

Using Newscloud, an organization's members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day's issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too -- quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it's got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud's value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it's very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself.

Our clients and colleagues in the non-profit sector often ask us to help them integrate news into their online communities. They want a way to bring their members and supporters the news that is relevant to their issues and interests, and ideally, they want a way for their audience to interact with those stories and engage in meaningful conversation around the latest news. Newscloud offers that potential, but right now organizations need to either convene on the Newscloud site itself, or install their own version of the Newscloud platform.

We're going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud's features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we're going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites. We'll use our own clients' needs as the basis for developing the module's specifications, but we'd love to hear from other organizations about their own needs for news sharing and commenting, so that our specifications can reflect the needs of as many organizations as possible -- just leave your comments on this post, or e-mail me directly (alex at socialsignal dot com) to get involved.

We'll keep the NetSquared community posted on how this experiment evolves. And we hope that other members of the NetSquared community -- technology assistance providers, developers, funders, and participating projects -- will think about how they might help or collaborate with one or more of the 150 projects that have profiled their needs on the NetSquared sites. The time, advice and support of this community can help each and every one of these projects move forward, and advance the state-of-the-art in using social media for social change.

One of our favourite collaborators, Courtney Miller of Floatleft, is the Drupal theming genius behind a cool (and cool-looking) new site that just launched. She told me about it today: Stories for Change.

Stories for Change aims to connect and extend the network of workshop facilitators and organizations that have come together in community-based digital storytelling workshops. The site provides a space for members and visitors to share their favorite curriculum ideas, post the stories they create, and engage in meaningful conversations around the stories they watch. The power of community digital storytelling workshops rests in their ability to inspire, connect, and incite action within and between local groups; the goal of Stories for Change is to further nurture that spirit online.

Theming, by the way, is the process of altering the design and interactivity of a default Drupal installation (which, out of the box, is kind of bare-bones and generic-looking, recent worthy advances notwithstanding). Courtney's amazing at it, and we're lucky to work with her on as many projects as we do.

Meanwhile, Stories for Change itself looks like a wonderful project, and it'll be fascinating to watch this site grow and evolve. Congratulations to Courtney and the team behind it.

We wish we'd been able to make it to DrupalCamp Toronto, but client business kept us planted firmly on this side of the continent.

Still, we were able to attend in spirit: by reading Khalid's (and others') terrific blog coverage of the event, and by oohing and aahing over his photo of the T-shirt. The DrupalCamp logo is brilliant.

(What's that, you say? You see the Social Signal logo on the back of the T-shirt? Why, yes – we are proud sponsors of DrupalCamp Toronto!)

Now, if there are any of those T-shirts left over, I suppose receiving a few of them might take the sting out of having had to miss the camp itself...

Roland at Bryght has written a lovely profile of Vancity's ChangeEverything site. And there is much wisdom in it:

ChangeEverything.ca is illustrative of an online community truism: after you have a solid and reliable technology infrastructure like Drupal to build an online community upon, the social i.e. the people part of the community matters more than the technology part.

Online communities succeed only if users participate. The number of opportunities to participate online is exploding (share your photos! rate your teachers! comment on this video!), but time is the new land: nobody's making any more of it. Increasingly, a user who decides to participate on your site is making a conscious decision not to participate on another one.

So for your online community to take off, you have to design for participation, starting with your concept. In the case of ChangeEverything.ca, that meant the simple idea of allowing people to think about the changes they wanted to make, and then blog about them.

But don't count technology out. We needed a clean, easy way for users to link blog posts to changes... and that's where some techno magic comes into the picture.

Enter Khalid Baheyeldin, one of the greats in Drupal development. We contracted with him to create the custom module that lets users link pieces of content ("nodes" in Drupal-speak) in lists – and Drupal, Khalid, our client and Social Signal being who we all are, the resulting module (with a little extra work by Khalid) was released to the community.

Between Khalid's work, some solid advice from Bryght on data architecture and Courtney Miller's theming and interface tweaks, the result was a platform that was designed from the ground up for participation.

So yes, there was some technical mojo, but all of it in the service of, and strictly applied to, getting people to take part in the community. We were setting a stage – which is just a venue for the actors to shine.

And shine they have. Kate Dugas, the site animator, has been brilliant, in turns charming, warm and provocative. The community members have responded in kind, to the point where I now regularly turn to ChangeEverything.ca myself for ideas and inspiration. Community, enabled by technology: that's what this is all about.

For a while now, folks like Google, MyYahoo! and Netvibes have been vying to be your home page. They've made it easy to create a custom page crammed with blog headlines, news updates, weather forecasts, the latest Hollywood gossip and more – whatever online info happens to catch your fancy.

The competition has been fierce... but every alternative has its little idiosyncrasies, tiny things that can drive you bat-spit crazy. 

While all of this has been going on, the open-source community hasn't been napping. Take the folks who develop modules for Drupal, the content management system we've used (happily and enthusiastically) in several projects so far.

Last month, Ayman Hourieh posted a tutorial for creating a drag-and-drop portal interface in Drupal. And now comes a new Drupal module called MySite:

MySite pages are designed to let users create a personalized summary of the site. As such, the MySite module duplicates the functionality of tools like MyYahoo! and Google's personalized homepage.

The module allows registered site users to create a MySite page that contains content from throughout the site. For sites that use the Aggregator module, users may also add feeds from external web sites to their MySite pages.

I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default: 

Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news. That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.

Read the whole story on WorldChanging.