Do-it, the site which enables volunteer matching, has launched a range of blogs by volunteers.

There are a number of contributors to each of The Overseas Blog, The Students’ Blog, The Campaigners’ Blog, but we were surprised, or possibly just amused, to note that all 7 or 8 bloggers are female. Hopefully they’ve got some blokes lined up - wouldn’t want volunteering being seen as just a girlie thing, would we?

While on blogs, David Miliband, the minister reshuffled to head up environment food and rural affairs (DEFRA) has managed to ‘move’ his pioneering blog. That’s in quote marks as at present it still resides at ODPM but with a rebranding. And don’t confuse him with his brother Ed, now minister for the voluntary sector in the Cabinet Office.

I have just come across the eCampaigning Forum, an annual event since 2002. They describe it as an ‘eActivism Practitioners Community’ …aiming to share expertise, explore where eCampaigning is going, strengthen the eCampaigning community and increase our capacity to use new media to stimulate change. There is a wiki for various sessions (it was last held in Oxford in January) which may have material of interest - I haven’t explored fully yet.

This was linked from a description of the ‘Web 2.0 for Good’ event happening in London on 22nd May. This is billed as “the first event in the UK to explore how Web-based tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking can be used to promote social change and innovation.” It’s a shame that the main organisation seemingly behind this, Policy Unplugged, has a rather poor website itself, with no information on the event!

A couple of charity IT items in recent issues of Computing magazine:

Oracle donates database to UK Muslim charity. As part of a training project for a team of three graduate trainees …. they tailored the database to help analyse the nature of calls to the Muslim Youth Helpline charity, and make it quicker for information to be recorded into the system.

Barnardo’s revamp to save £1m for charity. An IT revamp will save £1m a year, which it will redirect into charitable work. Areas of change include installing the LiveLink document management system and consolidating 260 Novell systems across the UK into one virtual server.

From web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, looking at the latest web hype, an interesting suggestion in passing:

“Now, if only someone would make a Wiki solution with great usability that average people could use to author strongly interlinked hypertexts. That would be something worth almost any level of hype. The way to knock out Microsoft Office is not to reimplement its feature set from two versions ago in a different programming language. We don’t need bad copies — we need collaborative authoring of hyperspaces as opposed to linear documents.”

Sounds good to me.

I’d spotted this blog a day or two ago, but hadn’t quite realised that a) it had only just gone live and b) it’s the first blog from a government minister:

David Miliband’s blog at odpm.gov.uk

Miliband is Communities and Local Government Minister, and is in the Cabinet alongside Prescott (I won’t stoop to making comments on what a blog from the latter would read like). As the blog is hosted by his department he can’t indulge in party political points. He introduces it by saying:
“This blog is my attempt to help bridge the gap - the growing and potentially dangerous gap - between politicians and the public.”

It should be worth keeping a tab on.

Here’s eGovMonitor’s ‘First Minister of blogging‘ comment piece.

The New Media Awards, run by New Statesman magazine, this year has an accompanying blog covering “all things related to the convergence of politics and new media” and also looking at relevant projects.

A recent item looks at whether we are catching up with the US in using internet for political campaigning. http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nma/nma2006/blog/.

cybersoc.com, a blog which covers things like citizen journalism, internet research and online community management, is celebrating its first birthday in style next week (20th-24th March), with a high profile bunch of guest bloggers:

• Citizen Journalism: Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News at the BBC
• Online Community Management (well known in US nonprofit circles): Nancy White of Full Circle Associates
• Online Community Management: Craig Newmark and/or Jim Buckmaster from Craigslist.org
• Internet Research: Professor Stephen Coleman, Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds
• Web 2.0: Scott Rafer of Mobile Community site Winksite

Should be fairly interesting, if you are into this sort of thing. See www.cybersoc.com

An American collaboration site (wiki) on PR matters has established a section on ‘Non-Profit Blogging, Podcasting and Social Media’. I’ll try to keep an eye on any interesting developments relevant outside the States, but I do have to agree with them that “for now, it is easier to find sites writing ‘about’ nonprofit activities than actual blogs ‘by’ nonprofit organizations.”

NewPR Wiki - NonProfitBlogs.HomePage

[tags]nonprofit blogs, charity blogs[/tags]

An item on Computer Weekly says:

A disparate group of 50 non-profit US organisations have defeated AOL in its plan to start charging them for sending out bulk e-mail. …which could cripple their fundraising efforts. The group includes Oxfam America, Gun Owners of America, Friends of the Earth, and the AFL-CIO trade union confederation.

AOL has now said that non-profit organisations will be exempt from the charges.

Link to AOL backs down to non-profit bodies over e-mail levy.

Any regular readers may have noticed the dance around domain names for this blog over the last couple of months. There are reasons behind this madness, one of them being to clear the decks at voluntarynews.org(.uk) so it could be a place to develop our news pages further.

CharityBlog visitors are the first to learn that we are almost there - a couple of facilities we haven’t managed to set up quite how we’d like yet but you can get an idea here. (Basically using the same base as this blog but with extra bells and whistles.)

Reactions please!