On May 27 and 28th, the third NetSquared will take place in San Jose California. The idea behind NetSquared is to explore the use of the Web and emerging technologies to foster social change.

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I have been asked to present on Drupal as it relates to social change and the non-profit community. My background is heavily rooted in the non-profit world, having worked for various arts based non-profit companies. I also studied arts, technology, theatre, and non-profit management at Virginia Tech. My presentation will occur on the 27th between 4:45 and 5:45 pm.

The Knight Drupal Initiative is a grant program designed to foster development in the Drupal project.

Knight Foundation is a Miami-based non-profit grant making organization. Since 1950, the foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide.

My Wife and I just got back from Roger Waters in concert at Denver's Pepsi Center and all I can say is WOW. It was clear from the first set how politically vocal Waters is. Through visuals, inside an abandoned school George W. Bush is compared to Stalin and goes on to comment on how his "Texas education must have *expletive here* you up when you were young".

Part way through, a giant pig with slogans on it related to religion, torture, and war floated around the Pepsi Center. Smack dab on the spot the pig's genitals would have been seen was a peace symbol. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper suddenly appeared in the air and slowly floated around the space. Each and every one read "√ for Obama".

His anti-war message was loud and clear declaring that Briton is the poodle to the USA's bulldog.

A few months back, I was sent a review copy of Drupal 5 Themes by Ric Shreves from Packt Publishing. I have been thumbing through it since, and despite some odd editing I have found it to be very easy to read. The examples strongly illustrate concepts through out.

I look for "useful to not-for-profit" tools, sites, and resources. Recently a new site called nonprofitlist.org has been developed. The site is broken up into each of the 50 states and you have a choice of clicking on a state like Florida or using the list below the map.

Our goal is to map all of the non profit organization in the United States.

1,901,373 votes. 10 Categories. Drupal, a WebWare 100 Award Winner! There were over 5000 nominations, 10 were chosen in each of the 10 categories.

Drupal has been announced as a winner in the category of Publishing and Photography. There will be a Webware Party at Web 2.0 in San Francisco, Thu Apr 24 16:30 – 18:00 (PDT) including a booth crawl which will honour each of the winners.

The expo will be held at:

Moscone West
747 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

If you'd like to register, point your browser at the Web 2.0 Expo and fill out the form. The event will be free if you use the following code when registering--websf08wbw.

The conference will have 10,000 attendees. It will be a great opportunity to look at how Web 2.0 innovations are changing the way we look at the Web with Drupal as a recognized leader. If you can, show your support and attend the party.

Twitterspy is a site full of ajaxy goodness. It follows the live twitter stream and automatically updates the page every second or two. The stream runs between thirty seconds and a minute and half behind the live stream. New tweets pop up at the top of the page and the old ones fade slowly out at the bottom of the screen.

I am somewhat dubious that the site actually displays all live tweets. Each post appears about a second or so apart. I'm pretty sure that Twitter has more than 60 posts per minute. Posts that I've made don't seem to appear on the page. MicheleM (the developer) has started a Google Group discussion to solicit feedback on the project which sheds light on why this might occur. First, Andrew Badera surmises the public timeline only updates once every four minutes. Second, Nathan Rixham goes on to indicate that there is no easy way to poll often enough to capture all tweets as there are 300-400 tweets per minute running through the system.

This is a pretty neat proof of concept, but is limited in it's use. There are no settings that allow you to target an individual or your own stream. I would likely make use of it frequently if I could customize the output. So @michelem, any plans to make this a configurable tool? That would turn this from being a neat experiment to being a truly cool tool.

Recently Laura (pingVision's President) mentioned a screencast tool she thought might be helpful in developing video content.

Screencasting is a terrific way to engage in online demonstrations, allowing for a more engaging experience than using still shots. I have used tools like SnapZ Pro, which work quite nicely, but most tools require that you capture your screen actions, your audio, and/or your video seperately and then edit them together using something like iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, or Avid.

Vara Software has developed a tool called ScreenFlow that melds all capture and editing into a simple-to-use software package. ScreenFlow not only captures your screen, video, and audio but during editing allows you to zoom, pan, and highlight portions of your screen in a fairly intuitive way.

At Drupalcon Boston, Kevin Bridges (of pingVision) and John Mahoney (of Popular Science) were interviewed after plenary was completed and pingVison's work on the Popular Science site was recognized. It was a short discussion on the collaboration between pingVision and Popsci in the Drupal development of the Popular Science site. The interview was posted on the Sun Media Cast site.

Want to take a listen?

As Apple has become more popular, it seems that the reports of bad service have been on the rise. This makes sense--if you increase market share, more people will be upset. However I have friends who have experienced extremely bad service.

My G5 iMac has had its mainboard replaced once and until today its power supply once, both covered under Apple Care. A few days ago, my iMac started spontaneously shutting off in an un-ceremonious way. I'd be in the middle of something, and the screen would just go dark. Then two days ago, it just STOPPED powering up entirely. This is just the same behaviour as I had seen when the first power supply went bad. I sighed and set up a Genius Bar appointment for today over lunch. Because Apple Care on this computer had expired and because the power supply was over 90 days old and I really wanted my computer back up and running with the least fuss I was resigned to the following:

1. I am going to have to buy the part
2. I am going to have to pay for labour
3. I am going to have to wait 10 days + to get my computer back

I went into Apple Store and sat down to wait for my turn braced for a miserable experience. I was called up a full 10 minutes earlier than my appointment time. Then the events kind of blew me away.