Archive for November, 2006
November 29, 2006
Welcome Lily Lowe Gammel
Jennifer and I had our second daughter this past weekend. Lily Lowe Gammel entered the world at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday, weighing in at 6 lbs. and 11 oz. Jennifer and Lily are both doing great. We’re slowly remembering all of our baby skills from when Ella was a newborn.
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November 22, 2006
Third Party Comments
I’ve talked to many people at organizations where they are interested in blogging but are concerned about liability from comments posted by third parties. Here is a bit of good news on that front: Court says blogs can’t be sued for postings - USATODAY.com
Bloggers and website owners cannot be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments written by third parties, the California Supreme Court has ruled. The court said only the original authors of comments published online can be sued.Legal analysts say the 34-page decision, issued Monday, is significant because it brings California in line with other court rulings across the nation that have upheld the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act, which protects website owners from legal liability in libel or defamation lawsuits.
“Bloggers and website owners can all breathe a very big sigh of relief,” says Gregory Herbert, an Orlando lawyer who specializes in First Amendment issues. “This decision adds more uniformity to the law and reduces the risk for liability for even individuals who are posting things onto website message boards and chat rooms.”
Associations are often concerned about anti-trust issues as well. I’m not a lawyer and do not know if this ruling would cover that kind of activity as well but it is at least a step in the right direction.
Spotted over on Gadgetopia.
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November 21, 2006
Hello! My Name is Big Association!
Listen to Ben’s gut: Who are you in cyberspace?
Given my propensity for transparency in social media, and what I perceive to be a backlash against marketing in the social networking arena, I think I would advise that individuals who want to involve their organizations in social networking view their participation as something they do as an individual on behalf of their organization.
When representing your association at a conference, you dont introduce yourself as your association. Why would you do this in a social networking setting?
In other words, if you want to represent your association in MySpace or Second Life, sign up as yourself with your own name, age, sex, marital status and weave information on your association throughout your profile. Be an agent of the association, not the association itself.
I have absolutely nothing to base this on except gut instinct.
My gut agrees with Ben’s. Social networking online is about individuals interacting. Therefore, you or your advocates must interact with others as individuals by being genuine and reasonably articulate about why your organization matters and why others should care.
You should only talk about the organization a little bit as well (this applies more so to avatar-based simulations). You don’t want to be the life insurance sales person at a cocktail party who refuses to talk about anything other than securing your family’s future.
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November 16, 2006
Yahoo and Microsoft Adopt Sitemaps Standard
Does your site offer a site map for search engine crawlers yet? It just became a lot more compelling to offer one now that Microsoft and Yahoo have begun supporting it:
In alphabetical order, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to all support a unified system of submitting web pages through feeds to their crawlers. Called Sitemaps, taking its name from the precursor system that Google launched last year, all three search engines will now support the method.
Providing a sitemap according to the specification will make it easier for the search engines to rapidly index new content you add to your site.
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November 15, 2006
Coding Like 1995
From Gary LaBranche at Association Forum: 100 Million Served
There were less than 20,000 Web sites in the world in 1995, all with limited usability [Gary probably means functionality here. -dg]. In the spring of that year, I served on a team charged with developing a Web site for an association, and recall the debate about including a membership application. Half of the team argued that it was a waste of time and no one would ever apply for membership online. The other half argued, “What the heck, it can’t hurt.”
The joke was on us. Just five years later, online applications were the leading source of new members.
Everything looks pretty obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it? What bothers me today is not that people don’t recognize the potential of the Web (they do to a large extent) but that poor knowledge of usability and design impedes their ability to really take advantage of it. Given that it is feasible for almost any group to enable online payment for transactions, the competitive differentiator online now often comes down to how easy it is to complete the transaction (assuming roughly equal value of product, of course).
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November 15, 2006
All The Bus Plunges That Fit
The rise and fall of the “bus plunge” story. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
This is a great story about how the New York Times developed an internal cultural bias toward publishing stories about buses plunging off of cliffs anywhere in the world. It all started as a artifact of needing to fill up random empty spots in the layout of a newspaper page.
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