EchoDitto

There's been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the traditional print newspaper, sparked by Eric Alterman's article in the New Yorker called "Out of Print". It's an interesting discussion that made me examine my own news-procuring habits.

Sorry, print newspapers, but for me you're already dead. I most recently touched newsprint this weekend while I was balling up pages of the Washington Post to help get my campfire started. Before that, I can't even remember. I know that there are many of you out there who can't live without your morning paper (or papers), but that ain't me.

Now that spring is here (well, maybe not so much in NYC, but it's coming!), thoughts turn to chocolate bunnies, March Madness and of course, spring cleaning. It's a good thing that EchoDitto recently launched the new Seventh Generation website to help smart, environmentally conscious consumers not only find the right cleaning products, but also connect with like minded individuals. Some highlights of the new site include:

• consumer-generated product reviews
• forums for discussing the environment, new product ideas, healthy living
• a new corporate blog called 7Gen, in addition to the Inspired Protagonist, SVG President Jeffrey Hollender's well-respected blog

South by Southwest was an absolute blast. I could go on and on about the panels I attended or the people I met, but I'll just say they were all awesome. Instead this will be about what I saw as the overarching themes of the conference: accessibility and data ownership/transferability.

Big Point #1: Everyone is online. We're all aware of this, but too few of us produce work that is accessible to anyone besides english readers in standard web browsers. What about assistive technologies? What about non-english readers? How will we deal with localizing our work? There are some great projects to help with the creation and maintenance of content in multiple languages. More and more, we're going to have to make use of these things.

It’s been three months since I started at EchoDitto—hard to believe, right? I wanted to share a few trends in my life since I’ve been here.

1. Personal content. In the world of non-profits, the personal voice is not the preferred voice. In fact, the preferred voice is generally one that uses words like “community building” “stronger, healthier families” and “together, we can make a difference.” It got so that every time I went to write something, those words miraculously came out, without my even trying. Now, nearly everything I read is written by a real person, and you can tell. Unsurprisingly, I trust the content so much more.

The summer after I graduated from high school, my friend Tracy and I took off for a six week adventure through Europe. This was 1994, and the word "Internet" and "cell phone" were most definitely not part of our vocabulary (although I would guess that some of my co-workers were already online at this point, being the forward thinkers that they are). Armed only with a "Let's Go Europe", we treked our backpacks from hostel to hostel, occasionally calling ahead from a local pay phone to reserve a room at our next destination. Each week, I'd call my parents collect to let them know I was still alive, and to catch up on the news from home. Sometimes I dropped postcards in the mail, many of which arrived long after I returned from my trip.

I have a confession to make.

For the past year or so, I have been merely "going through the motions" of using the newest social networking technologies.

True, I have been dutifully maintaining (ok, "maintaining" may be too generous) my MySpace and Facebook profiles. I signed up with Twitter and I've even twittered more than 20 times (granted, that's over the course of two months; I've already been chided for my lame tweets). I use the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed, and even started a personal one. One thing I'm on top of: I'm a dedicated updater of my Gmail status messages.

But the usefulness of all of this just hadn't clicked for me. Until today.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like the world of enterprise software has much to do with the work we’re doing building and empowering online communities and movements. What could the world of massive databases running of 30 year old tape-based mainframes have to do with training tomorrows leaders in the fight for the environment? Surely the email servers that run the blackberries and stock tickers and acquisitions databases for the Fortune 500 companies are only similar to our online organizing campaigns in the features of their most basic technologies, with the way in which these application are made and function being like day and night, right?

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

I spent part of Saturday at the Berkeley farmer's market (well, one of them) visiting with a good friend and enjoying some truly perfect weather. One of our first stops was, of course, for coffee. The Blue Bottle Coffee Company had a booth where they were slow-brewing coffee cup by cup, as it was ordered, slow-food style. I ordered a special New Orleans iced coffee that was roasted with chicory and cane sugar -- it was pretty amazing. Something about the scene was particularly poignant, so I whipped out my Treo, snapped a pic, and dutifully emailed it up to Flickr with a simple caption before i forgot where i was.