To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Social Networking Sites Move Into Charity World – NYTimes.com – "Crowdrise, Jumo, Causecast, Causes on Facebook and others try to use social networking and crowdsourcing to build interest in charities and causes, and to help them attract donations. … But to many in the nonprofit world, the value of the sites remains to be seen. For one thing, they hand partial control over charity brand names and trademarks to users who are often unknown to the nonprofit groups they support. And virtually all of them ask users to pay to donate."
• Target community for best return on social media efforts – My recent interview with the Nonprofit Business Advisor is out! I talked with Kelly Sullivan about some of the most common mistakes or myths nonprofits have about social media, as well as opportunities to get started strategically. Would love to hear your thoughts and additional pointers you share with nonprofit leaders looking to dive into social media!
• An Important New Foundation Blog | Tactical Philanthropy – Great post from Sean about a new blog from the Peery Foundation. Does your organization have a blog? I'm interested in what you think about the reflections Sean shares and what you've learned from running your blog. "The reason I’m excited about the Peery Foundation blog is because I think that Dave and Jessamyn get that social media is best understood as a conversation and a conversation is most interesting when you focus on listening and learning. They’re even willing to take listening to extremes, such as this recent post by Jessamyn in which she attempts to crowdsource her own annual review by asking readers who she has interacted with to give her feedback on how she’s doing. While she offers the option of emailing her the response, she encourages people to post their feedback as a public comment."
• Get Your Group On: Introducing Posterous Groups – The Official Posterous Posterous – "Today we’re announcing Posterous Groups, a new service for communicating privately with your friends, family and colleagues." I use Posterous for my personal blog and have found it to be a easy platform – curious if others are using it for their organization or community group and if the groups feature is something you'd like to try!
• Yes, Finds Pew Study, People Will (and Do) Pay For Digital Content – "For a long time – right or wrong – content on the Internet has been synonymous with "free." Free music. Free videos. Free access to your local newspaper. Free blogs. And so some have worried that people might be reluctant to actually spend money to buy digital content if they can already find it (or something similar) online without having to pay. But a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project should assuage some of those fears. In fact, almost two-thirds of Internet users have paid for digital content."

Thank you for all those who follow my contributions on the SSIR blog and continue to spark interesting and challenging conversations on this blog.  I’m so thrilled to be part of this community!

Check out the Top 5 SSIR Blog Posts!

Visit my Alltop page here!

I’ve combined some of my favorite RSS feeds from the NPTech community, Social Entrepreneurship sector, and Philanthropy news.  Obviously there are many more blogs and news sources that could be included, but I didn’t want to overwhelm anyone right away.

I’d love to hear the blogs you recommend get added to the Alltop page, so it can function as the ultimate blogroll for this community.  Just leave a comment with your recommendations and I’ll add it!

Why am I using Alltop?  I think it’s a great way to poll together the most recent posts from blogs and new sources around the web in a customizeable and shareable way.  It’s an experiment and I hope you’ll join me!

Visit the Alltop page and let me know your recommendations!

“All over the UK, organisations will be using the focus of this day to run their own events and activities. Check out the Ideas Bank for some tips and stories to help you plan a successful Women’s Enterprise Day. Search using ‘women’s enterprise’ to bring up lots of activity suggestions.”

But, my world, and I think yours, is wider than just the UK.  In honor of today, I’d like to shine a bit of spotlight on The Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre and the Blogs for African Women.

The Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre works to encourage Nigerian girls and women to learn about and use technology as a means of empowering themselves socially and economically. W.TEC, is a Nigerian non-governmental organization working to encourage Nigerian girls and women to learn how to use technology as a means of empowering themselves socially and economically.

This is done through projects which build technology skills among women, as well as other technology literacy workshops. W.TEC will also research and publish works examining pivotal issues related to how African women use technology, barriers preventing or limiting technology use, and strategies for more efficient technology use.

“Blogs for African Women (BAWo)” Mentoring Project was created by Ore Somolu and Sokari Ekine as a way of encouraging and supporting Africans who want to start blogging. Initially there will be a pilot project limited to Nigerian women.

I encourage you to check out the W.TEC and BAWo – get involved if you can.  It feels great to share your experiences across the cubicle; just think what sharing around the world feels like!

Learn more about Women’s Enterprise Day here.

I was already familiar with the blog, and Social Butterfly’s twitter, too.  But, I realized the blog wasn’t in my RSS reader and thus I was missing many wonderful posts!  I suggest that if you are interested in social media, marketing, and the intersection of the two, you subscribe as well.

Social Butterfly’s post about Blog Action Day, really caught my eye.  Here’s how it begins:

What is poverty?

In researching the answer to this question, I couldn’t escape the purpose behind a campaign by the Association of Public Health Schools and the Pfizer Foundation recently created called “What is public health?” This campaign works to better brand ‘public health’ to the public, while also raising awareness, education and encouraging participation in the public health conversation. Participants are asked to put red “This is public health stickers” on items that they feel represent public health. My challenge: What would this look like if the question: “What is poverty?” was asked?

I read on, and encourage you to as well, but that question stuck in my head.  If we were going to try to put a sticker on everything that labeled it as, “This is Poverty,” how would we even begin? The definition of poverty, or at least as we think of it in public service work and public policy, is so vast and multifaceted.  The number of stickers we would need is unbelievable!

Then, as if she was reading my thoughts, I saw this tweet from my friend Audrey:

spinnerin:  Frustrated by people’s tendency to talk for everyone outside developed countries as though we know exactly what they need.

It’s such a fitting point.  When I first started thinking about sticking those “This is Poverty” stickers on things, I started thinking with my home town first, then my home state, and home country.  After that, I started thinking about London, and the UK as I’m now based here and learning a great deal about the world as it is here.  But to start thinking about puting those stickers on things in developing countries was almost unfair.  I can think of many things to put those stickers on, but I don’t live there every day nor do I face or even really understand the real issues, and definitions of poverty as they exist in developing countries.  By putting a sticker on those things, the issues as we see them from elsewhere, are we even setting the stage for help and change?

How do we first get the people IN poverty, to label things with these metaphoric and real stickers of “This is Poverty” so that help can be defined and created most effectively?

Thanks, Social Butterfly for giving me a moment to relfect on my own post from Blog Action Day, and rediscover your wonderful blog!  And, thanks to the Nonprofit Blog Exchange for connecting us!

Here’s an excerpt from her first post about how the web 2.0 community came together to develop hurricane08.org:

When Hurricane Gustav threatened to crash into New Orleans and bring more destruction to the city that never recovered from Hurricane Katrina, Andy Carvin, a social media strategist for National Public Radio, used his Web 2.0 savvy skills to take action and start the websites hurricanes08.org and hurricanewiki.org. The sites serve as an information aggregator for the latest information on hurricanes threatening the US and provide an easy way for volunteers to connect with communities.

“I thought we needed something that could connect the dots,” said Carvin. Once Carvin developed the idea he put up the “Bat Signal” and friends and volunteers including Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigs List and Deanna Zandt, a media technologist for progressive and grassroots activist organizations pitched in to help. Newmark helped promote the site while Zandt spearheaded the development of the wiki.  Read more…

I’m looking forward to Allyson’s weekly posts and seeing what the conversations and community are like on the Fast Company site.  Find Allyson’s Radical Tech blog here.  Congrats again!

Networking for Success is a project of the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre (W.TEC), which will teach women how to use Web 2.0 tools and other ICTs to effectively develop and advance their work. Participants will learn how to use these tools to initiate and manage projects; as well as identify networking opportunities with other organisations. This project builds upon the work of the Blogs for African Women (BAWo) initiative; an earlier project aimed at introducing blogging to young Nigerian girls.

This week, our topic is ‘How Social Media Can Help Nonprofits’ and I invite you to visit the blog to comment on my first post for this week to help ignite conversation with the program’s participants.  I will post again tomorrow and the women will begin commenting and posting their own thoughts later in the week.  I’d love to have you join the conversation!

• Organizational blogging case study
  Check out Priscilla Brice-Weller’s blog post from her presentation that offers a great, first-hand description and comparison of two organizations’ approaches to blogging.
• Online activism
  The Net2 ThinkTank question this month was “Is online activism good for social change?” but I was not back in time from the trip to participate with an answer. Check out the answers that other bloggers contributed by reading Britt’s summary here.
• Measuring social media effectiveness
  ROI has been a subject of conversation throughout the blogosphere for quite some time now and has even sprouted up as a popular conference session topic. Beth has a great post that includes questions to keep in mind when thinking about ROI for your own projects or for participation in these conversations.
• Twitter for news
  No, that isn’t supposed to say ‘Twitter in the news.’ Andy Carvin discusses how the NPR member station in Boston is exploring Twitter in their news organization.
• More Twitter, listening
  On the subject of Twitter, Beth Kanter and Beth Dunn point to an artist who is using Twitter to listen. Just like I have said before, Twitter (and other social media tools) are not one way megaphones, but talking and listening devices.

Phew! Glad I got some of those off my chest! So much reading still to do thanks to all that time without internet access. It may mean more lists and not long posts but I’ll do what I can!

Photo from zimpenfish

The guide hopes to inspire and inform by its simple tips and how-tos. It includes examples of advocacy blogs that cover the gamut of goals and causes. You can read more about it on Global Voices blog here.

What is Blog Advocacy?
Blog advocacy is using a blog to fight against an injustice. People use blogs to fight a wide range of injustices, such as wrongful imprisonment, government corruption, rights abuse.

I think that many people have said, “I really do care about an issue or a crisis or an organization’s work but I just don’t have the know-how to be a ‘blogger!'” Well, this guide is for you! There is so much terrific information sifted down to the simple approaches and directions. This is your ticket to squashing those nay-saying thoughts of not knowing how.

For example, one page (appropriately titled, “If you read just one page…read this one!”) describes what every advocacy blog should include:

• Background info
• Current updates
• A clear goal
• A “get involved” page
• A contact email

Download the guide and get started blogging for advocacy and social change now!

If you are already doing so, download the guide and do a self-test on things you are already doing and areas that you could improve on!