This is a spectacular presentation from Clay Shirky at last month's Web 2.0 Expo. He makes a compelling argument that the time-sucking power of television has masked a huge pool of creative and collaborative energy out there... and that social media are all about unleashing that energy – at TV's expense:

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You're looking at how an online community can work, and save you a lot of aggravation.

This is a traffic jam curing itself: an entire block of downtown Vancouver traffic a few days ago, with every car, van and truck in reverse. They're inching their way backwards, in concert, away from a stopped truck that had jammed Hamilton Street from Davie to Helmcken. (The Google Map's right here.) And all without police intervention.

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It's the start of our favourite season here at Social Signal: the run-up to Valentine's Day. For us, it's a celebration of love, togetherness and community.

And what better way to express that togetherness than through a podcast? That's why we're launching a new experiment, Bedtime with Rob and Alex. It's a podcast that captures the knowledge, insights and passions of our online community and Web 2.0 explorations -- whether that involves a new way of looking at online collaboration, or a new piece of software for looking at online pictures.

As partners in both bedroom and boardroom, we get to explore these questions 24/7. (Don't you talk about RSS aggregation after your baby wakes you up at 3 a.m.?) But we've long noticed that our most creative, wide-ranging conversations often happen at the very end of the day, as we're comparing notes or sharing what got us most excited. (Not that kind of excited. Usually.)

And now we're ready to see whether our king-size bed has enough room for two adults, two kids, a dog and an iPod. For the next ten days (just until Valentine's Day!) Bedtime with Rob and Alex will share our conversations as we wind down. Check it out and let us know whether what happens in the bedroom should stay in the bedroom, or whether you're enjoying the chance to eavesdrop.

Our first episode, What's missing from the Web 2.0 menu? (recorded February 4th) asks why there are still unmet needs amidst the overabundance of social web applications. Would Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo! help fill in these gaps....or erode the quality of existing solutions?

You can subscribe here. Tune in and let us know what you think!

P.S. For those of you who are curious about Alex's solution for menu-planning on the Mac (as discussed in the podcast), it's a program called YummySoup. It lets you import recipes from sites like Epicurious and Martha Stewart, and turn ingredient lists into grocery lists.

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Social Signal has worked with many different non-profit organizations, of varying size and means, to create a variety of social media sites, of varying scale and ambition. One thing that just about every non-profit client (and most for-profit clients) ask is about the return on investment. How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments? And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?

It's easy to get fixated on the shiny toys of the Web 2.0 world: the latest invitation-only beta of the hottest new collaborative technology using the coolest whatever. Nothing wrong with that; our natural affinity for cool and new helps provide a built-in audience for technological innovators.

But the bright glare of technological promise can obscure its social impact... and not just the negative effects that technology's critics are fond of citing.

The social web holds enormous promise for social transformation. Alex recently posted about how you can help steer the web toward that promise, but it's also worth asking: just what makes us think the social web could be so transformative?

Bear with me for a minute, because answering that question isn't as easy as it might look. Before you can say whether a particular technology can bring about change, you need to have an understanding of how social change happens... an understanding that's likely to evolve throughout your life.

And one way my understanding of change is evolving is through the 2006 book Getting to Maybe by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Quinn Patton. The authors take an in-depth look at several cases of social innovation from a range of perspectives: chaos and complexity theory, behavioural psychology and even biology and ecology.

Drawing on examples from the so-called Boston Miracle to Brazil's fight against HIV/AIDS to the creation of the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network*, they found tremendous diversity – but also important areas of common ground. And that led the authors to offer a series of recommendations (framed as advice to a philanthropist looking to support social innovation).

Have a look at them... and see if you aren't as struck as I am by their alignment with the social web (italics are my comments):

1. Support vision, people with a strong sense of calling, and emergent possibilities.

One of the most powerful characteristics of the social web is the way it has tended to give the highest profile to those who combine passion with clarity, and transparency with authenticity. And the recombinant possibilities of features like tagging, RSS, aggregation and social networking create an environment where complex interactions can lead to emergence.

2. Support intense interactions, networking and information exchange among those who have the potential to tip a system in a new direction.
3. Remove barriers to innovation [and facilitate new interactions].

Conversation, content, connection and collaboration are the lifeblood of the social web. It offers tools to discover others who share your sense of calling, communicate with them across barriers of time and distance, and share ideas along the entire spectrum of media, from the crispness of text to the richness of video.

4. Speak passionately about the things that really matter to you. Give voice to those you serve who live the problems you want to attack.

The social web's killer application is self-expression – in particular honest, passionate self-expression – and the way it extends the ability to speak and be heard to a larger swath of the human race than at any time in history.

5. Practise expressing your vision and calling in a way that helps you attract others of like mind and commitment. Be mindful and attentive to the reactions generated by what you say, and use those reactions to form powerful alliances for change.

Take the emblematic medium of self-expression the social web: a blog. Its simple interface allows you to post quickly and easily; its culture encourages you to speak not only with facts and statistics, but with stories and self-revelation. Its newsfeed allows people to subscribe to your blog and then follow it – again, quickly and easily. Tagging allows your content to be discovered by like-minded people. And commenting, trackbacks and keyword search feeds provide a network of conversation and reaction.

6. Watch for the simple rules that sustain and hold in place the existing system, and work to understand the attractors that will need to change and be confronted in the processes of social transformation. Expect that when real change starts, your own interactions as well as those of others will change. Expect this to feel risky.

The disruptive effects of Web 2.0 technologies have already caused waves in fields like the news media, entertainment and politics. (Ask George Allen how he feels about video-sharing sites some time.) I wouldn't claim for a minute that social media's disruptive impact is predictable, or that they are without their own hierarchies and power structures. But their potential for traversing those structures is enormous.

7. Support social innovators in getting to maybe by helping them articulate their passion and commitment. Don't prematurely force the passion and commitment of social innovators into the boxes of operational goals and logic models. Rather, stimulate and capture the early articulation of the problem as a baseline for use later, when more formal evaluative thinking becomes appropriate and helpful.

One of the things I love most about the social web is the space it leaves for innovation, and the value it places on an interesting failure. Combined with its cultural openness to self-expression and self-revelation, and you have a space that, at its best, is especially well-suited as an arena for experimentation, floating ideas and honing your vision.

8. Watch and listen for those who articulate a vision that you share, who are acting on a calling that inspires you. Watch for individuals from whom you can learn [...] Consider your own calling. Perhaps you, too, will find yourself called to social innovation.

Moving almost seamlessly from passive surfing to active participation is one of the most common stories I hear from the social web: you start by reading blogs, wind up commenting on a few, and before you know it you're starting one of your own. You watch YouTube videos, feel moved to leave a few video comments with your webcam, and start to find your own voice. That, and the ability to discover like-minded potential collaborators, can create a powerful upward current for participation.

9. Allow for imperfections – in yourself and others.

Just off the top of your head, how many Web 2.0 sites have been in beta, oh, forever?

Much of this, I'll readily admit, is still in the column of potential. And the coin is still in the air as to whether Web 2.0 remains a venue for freeform collaboration and creation, or succumbs to the drive to transform it into a rights-managed, closed-platform equivalent of cable TV with a mouse.

But the potential is there. And I suspect the social web broadens the field of potential social innovators well beyond what even the visionary authors of Getting to Maybe had imagined. That's critical... because with humanity facing a bewildering convergence of global-scale challenges ranging from climate change to poverty to peak oil, we need all hands on deck, and the full innovative and imaginative power of our species brought to bear.

* Full disclosure: PLAN is a client of ours, and Getting to Maybe was a gift to us from them.

Just how much should you fear the Social Signal vendetta of the week™? Not that much, it turns out: no sooner had I written my tirade against LinkedIn Answers than I spent the evening answering them. The key to my change-of-heart? The discovery of a groundbreaking technology known as cutting and pasting. Sure, I'd rather have pulled my LinkedIn Answer with the miracle of RSS, but this is a decent plan B.

So, without further ado, here is my answer of the day, in response to the following question from Seth Rosen:

Which nonprofits are using Web 2.0 technology in an innovative way to listen and talk with their clients and constituents and further their missions?
A lot has been written about Web 2.0, or the social web, to communicate and share information. Have you seen nonprofits do this effectively? How are they using the power of the web to spread information and have virtual conversations with their supporters?

Here's my response:

We work with a wide range of non-profit and change-oriented for-profit organizations who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation. Some of the best practices we note:

1. Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation, rather than a general mandate. For example, the UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
2. Invite your community to make contributions other than money. Non-profits often experience "donor fatigue" because so much of their public interactions hinge on asking for money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions -- whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes' Share your Story project).
3. Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations. The web is just that: a web of interconnections. Succeeding in an internetworked environment means working effectively with others, colllaborating, and interacting -- it's not just about getting your own message out there. So being a good 2.0 non-profit means engaging with conversations and ideas on other blogs. Change Everything, a project of the Vancity credit union, is in the middle of a contest that will award $1,000 to a non-profit organization -- and the contest has fuelled a great deal of interest and awareness of non-profit activities in British Columbia.
4. Don't feel that web 2.0 means building your own online community. In fact, it's a lot easier to ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools -- whether that means fostering internal collaboration by choosing a common del.icio.us tag to use when storing your favorite web sites, or creating an iGoogle page that lets you constantly see the latest news in your key issue areas, or creating a photo-based petition on Flickr (check out the Oxfam example). Or try setting up a Facebook group -- we attracted 1300 people to a Flickr group within 3 weeks of launch. Once you're comfortable with the idea of web 2.0, you can starting thinking about whether it makes sense to build some community features into your own site.
5. Be gentle with yourself, and your colleagues. It's a big challenge for most non-profits to shift from message delivery to conversation, or from approaching your members as donors to seeing them as content contributors. For organizations that have been all about the message, and have approached that for decades from a paradigm of message control and careful rollout, it is a genuine (and at times frightening) adventure to bring your audience into the conversation in public, and before you've got everybody lined up to stay "on message". Be patient with colleagues who need to get comfortable with this new approach.
   
6. Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences. A great way of doing that is to track the "nptech" tag on del.ici.ous, where people from all across the nonprofit sector share the latest resources on nonprofit technology activities; it's a great place to find blog posts or tech developments to comment on. And Compumentor's NetSquared project is dedicated to helping non-profits make the most of web 2.0.

 

How do you create a site that keeps people on your pages? By creating a site that's easy to leave.

Traditional web design often focused on keeping people on a site by reducing the number of exit points: with few or no external links, the logic goes, people will stay longer.

It doesn't work that way. The Internet is designed for hyperlinks, lateral exploration, serendipitous discovery. When you cut off exit routes, you're cutting off your site's circulation, and you're creating a stagnant site.

And people don't like to visit sites that feel cut-off from the rest of the Net. Just think of how annoying it is when you get trapped in one of those spam sites with the endless pop-ups: window after window opening until you think you'll never escape. It doesn't make you want to visit that site again, does it?

Healthy circulation -- in and out -- is even more important in a user-driven community. The experience of porousness, of connectedness to the larger Internet, is crucial to user engagement and participation. Think of some of the most popular Web 2.0 communities: Technorati, del.icio.us, digg, even Facebook: all of them build engagement through porousness, through pulling in the best of the larger web and letting users tag, remix and search it.

What comes in must go out, of course. All of that bookmarked, tagged, aggregated and shared content points to external web sites: people come in and out of these sites all day long.

And that principle of porousness doesn't just apply to sites that are deliberately set up as content archives. Any online community can benefit by embracing porousness: by highlighting, aggregating, republishing and remixing the best of the larger web.

Porousness can mean something as simple as adopting a tag for your site, and inviting people to tag their external blog posts with that tag so you can republish their posts. By making it easy for people to contribute to your site -- without requiring them to do their blogging on your own platform -- your site's content and freshness expands. You get a ton of inbound links from all those people blogging about you (hello, Google!) and you get lots of people reading about you on those external blogs.

What's in it for the bloggers? Traffic back to their own sites -- from the highlights you're republishing on your blog, linking back to their original posts. Yes, you're pointing YOUR visitors to THEIR external blogs -- but you're getting back many times the energy and interest from all these folks now blogging about you.

The alternative is to build a big wall to keep all those visitors locked in your own site. But any wall that keeps people in keeps even more people out.

I've just installed a nifty new widget on my personal blog. Called the Lijit, it uses Google to allow users to search my blog. Not a huge deal, you say? True enough.

But it does a lot more than that. Users can also search my entire Web 2.0 presence – Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, LinkedIn contacts and more. They can even search every blog in my blogroll. And I can track what visitors are searching for on my personal profile page, with popular search terms displayed in tag cloud format.

According to Lijit, they want to combine web searches with the filtering process we constantly pursue as we build our personal networks:

In real-life, people seek out advice from friends, co-workers, family, professionals, etc. Content is vetted though these social connections reducing the number of possibilities, and filtering for local relevance. This filtering is complex and it evolves through our entire lives. It is shaped by the experiences we have, the people we know, and the path that we take in life.

Lijit plans to build out the widget's features... including the inevitable financial incentives:

In the very, very near future we plan to give you interesting statistics about what people are searching you for, and who other experts may be that have that information. And, because you worked hard to write, bookmark, and read all that cool stuff we also plan to give you a way to monetize searches people make with your hard earned online ‘stuff’.

Because Lijit uses Google's Custom Search service, it requires you to submit a Gmail username and password (not necessarily – or advisably – your primary account). I felt a little queasy about that, although the site's Attention Trust certification helped that go down a little easier.

Some aspects of the service still aren't really documented. Just what a "Lijit list" is, for example, and what constitutes the "best" and "worst" hits on it, is absolutely cryptic to me; I couldn't find any reference to it in the help files.

That said, Lijit is still in beta. I'll be interested to see how that tag cloud evolves, and what uses people put the site to. Widgets are growing in popularity, so I'll be just as interested to see what other handy little gadgets this one inspires. I'll keep you posted.

Updated: First feature request – I wish you could opt to style Lijit yourself in CSS. Instead, the widget's Javascript snippet brings in a bunch of inline CSS styling of its own... including some that made it too wide for my blog's layout. I've had to rejig the page to accommodate it, which is pretty much the exact opposite of how a well-behaved widget should work.

We're just back from two days in Houston as the guests of ttweak, a marketing, communications and design firm that shares our belief that authentic, original voices are the best way to convey a message. ttweak's best-known work is probably their Houston It's Worth It campaign, but their extensive and varied experience also includes a number of video projects that let interview subjects, rather than narrators, tell the story. ttweak principals Randy Twaddle and Dave Thompson proved to us that Houston is indeed worth it, not only for the food (mmm, bbq. I mean mmm, Mexican. I mean, mmm, Cajun.) but even more notably for the almost unbelievably friendly people.

While we were in Houston we had the opportunity to meet with a number of ttweak's clients, all of whom reinforced our impression that Randy and Dave have mastered the art of bottom-up marketing campaigns -- and did so long before us johnny-come-latelys in the Web 2.0 world started yakking on about user-generated content. Here's some of the wisdom we gleaned from their example and their advice:

• Let participants speak for themselves. Don't drown out original voices with heavy-handed narration or moderation.
• Remain tool agnostic. If your goal is to convey a message, you'll need to choose a different medium depending on the message you're delivering.
• Production values matter. Don't kid yourself into thinking that people will see past your barebones interface to appreciate the depth or brilliant of your feature set. Appearance counts.
• Invest in your local community. Even if your business has a national or international reach, a solid reputation with clients in your own city provides a bedrock for growth.
• Build relationships with your client's entire team. During one client visit, we saw how ttweak's introduction counted with the CEO -- but we also saw Dave on hugging terms with the parking valet. We got a warm reception in the boardroom -- and a warm car waiting outside when we were done.
• Client service is the surest way to grow a business. Resist the temptation to cash in by focusing on a single hot product, or cash out by selling your company to the highest bidder.
• Do what you're great at. Over-reaching is the surest way to burn your client -- and your brand.

We're excited to work with a company that realizes Web 2.0 values of user engagement in all of its work. And thanks again to Randy and Dave for introducing us to their wonderful city!