It was just a couple of weeks ago that Jess and I made our way out to Seattle for this year's N-TEN Nonprofit Technology Conference. This was the first event dedicated to nonprofits' online strategies that I've attended. Not quite knowing what to expect from each of the defined seminar tracks, I stuck with what I knew best: the geeky stuff.

Due to a compressed travel schedule, I was only able to make it to three seminars: Open APIs, emerging technologies and Web 2.0 security concerns. But despite the planners' attempt at variety, a recurring theme emerged in each of these sessions. The presenters would cover one or more fascinating, geeky and powerful technologies or sites, discuss how they were being used, then open the floor to questions. Inevitably the conversation would arrive at the same point: what can this actually do for my organization? To the presenters' credit, their answer was frequently an honest "not much."

The problem was a fundamental one. This year's hot topic was the collection of technologies that, in lieu of a clear definition, we've all taken to calling "Web 2.0". Flickr, del.icio.us and MySpace's URLs were furiously jotted onto hundreds of notepads by harried technical directors already planning their reports. But these sites aren't successful because of AJAX and rounded corners; they're successful because they're democratized, flat spaces — attributes that have allowed them to grow large and dedicated communities of users.

And while everyone at the conference wanted to build their list, many expressed an inability or organizational unwillingness to do so at the expense of control of their message. That's a perfectly legitimate choice, but it makes many of these newest technologies irrelevant.

I also found it telling what technologies weren't being talked about: virtually nobody discussed blogging or podcasting. I'm sure that's because previous NTCs have covered that ground pretty thoroughly — but I think some repetition might be in order. Given the number of times I heard attendees complain about their organizations' constellations of legacy Access databases, it was hard to believe that everyone had internalized the lessons of past conferences.

So that, I think, is the Big Thing I took away from Seattle: learning about the latest buzzword technologies is a good and worthwhile thing for nonprofits to do, but it's much harder to figure out how those technologies fit together with your supporters and mission than it is to figure out how they integrate with each other. Getting a web service to talk to your website is far simpler than getting your executive director to blog on it. Figuring out how and why you should use these new tools is the real question facing nonprofit technologists, and one that the sessions I attended left largely unanswered.