Nptech

The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location. ...

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling. Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site. ...

Back before the Afghan and Iraqi wars, when it seemed like every month there was a different global summit in the news (primarily because of overblown and misleading reports on the protests surrounding them) I had an idea for a site that would aggregate the reports from a variety of NGO and citizen journalism sites covering the summits. It would have been a complement to indymedia and protest.net and would have provided aggregated RSS feeds which other sites could embed. ...

Facebook appear to have given in to pressure over the debacle I wrote about a few days ago. According to their announcement: Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice. ...

There have been rumours upon rumours that facebook was going to launch something for musicians soon, and that they were also readying a new advertising system. Today it turned out that not only were they doing both, but both are part of the same strategy. Announced by Leah Perlman on the Facebook blog, facebook’s new ads system breaks down into two parts: “Brands” can now create Facebook Pages, which combine some of the functionality of a personal profile with that of a group. For “brand” you can also read company, artist, campaign, or nearly anything else that might want to advertise. “Social Ads” allow Facebook to target ads at people based on their friends’ activities. So if I were to make a certain purchase, mark myself a fan of a band, or rent a given DVD, and facebook knows about it, facebook could tell my friends about that and sell them a related product. David Emery was quick to write up some thoughts on how this development could impact and help bands. While the immediate option to create a clear presence for something people might be “passionate about” is clearly significant, he’s absolutely right that it’s the “Social Ads” that have the potential to truly change the social advertising game as they leverage data more completely than has been done before. The intrusive possibility of them is potentially quite scary and as clear leaders in the field, we can only hope that facebook are making privacy central to this new approach. ...