Adding an events calendar to a Drupal instance is pretty easy thanks to Kjartan Mannes who authored the Event module and Gerhard Killesreiter who maintains it.

I was asked if I would add a Calendar to the Nonprofit Commons site--dedicated to nonprofits in Second Life--to aid in booking space across the two sims. We often have events, and sometimes they can conflict with one another.

The steps are easy. In this instance, I'm adding the module to a Drupal 5.x install.

I arrived today mid-afternoon in San Jose. Tomorrow NetSquared begins and tonight was a lovely Meet and Greet evening. I was fortunate enough to start meeting up with the Nonprofit Commons folks over hors d’oeuvres at the Hotel. It was such a pleasure meeting the folks I've been working with over the last couple of years but haven't met face to face. The only familiar (in a RL sense) face was Beth Kanter, who I've been friends with for quite a few years.

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.

NPSL on MSNBC. Cool.

Today is World Blog Day 2007. It was originally conceived of by Nir Ofir in 2005. The idea of the meme is that if bloggers world wide recommend one another, the community will become tighter. It is a way of becoming an ambassador of the world.

The rules are simple.

1. Choose five bloggers that you like and recommend them
2. Include the location of the bloggers
3. Tag YOUR post BlogDay2007
4. Let the bloggers who you have tagged, know that you have tagged them.
5. Put the BlogDay 2007 badge on your site

I was recently introduced to Virak's blog by my friend Beth Kanter. Virak lives in Cambodia, and may be the first video blogger there. Beth lives in New England. While not technically a SINGLE blogger, I am closely involved with the non-profit commons on SecondLife and we have a collective blog representing non-profits world wide. I owe my brother kudos. He is one of the reasons I blog, work for a startup, and have become a technology geek. He lives in Ontario and blogs, mostly, about VOIP and related technologies. Finally, I am so very pleased to have become associated with and a colleague of Greg Knaddison. He is partially responsible for helping me find my way to pingVision, a super Drupal house. Where is he located? Right this moment in Spain--but he is MOVING around.

In my intersection with other nonprofits through the NPSL group and on the TechSoup site I am expanding my focus to deal with emerging technologies in general and how they can be utilized by the nonprofit community as a whole. My background is in the arts, so expect to continue to see some bias for that industry but my personal experiences over the last two years have shifted my sense of self toward social justice (although being Canadian probably has something to do with that too.)

So, while the focus has been shifting over the last six months, expect it to be more apparent--including the updated header.

One of the sites I work on, Nonprofits in Second Life, has gone through two waves of spammers putting unsavoury comments into early blog posts--presumably to try and avoid detection from the site management. The comments have been lists of pretty unpleasant links.

Web 2.0 applications are supposed to allow for interactivity and immediacy. People expect to be able to submit content and experience instant gratification.

Spammers will target sites that they think will not have enough review to get content up on line for even a few days. This is a particular challenge for small nonprofits and volunteer based groups. Where do you find the man-power to review what is being posted on your site?

Eventful is a social networking site that allows loose or formal groups to create gatherings.  Groups can be based on physical location, interests, subjects, and events.

You can create groups or join groups that you have interest in.  You can search through the many groups that are available through a system based search engine.

To use Eventful, you first need to set up a user account.  To register, click on the top right register link.  Registration requires an email address, username, password, zip code, and year of birth.  You must accept the terms of service.  It takes about a minute.

If you don't know about YouTube you must be living a sheltered life... YouTube is a video sharing site that has successfully captured a huge portion of the Internet video market. It has come under some criticism for allowing large quantities of copyright material to be pirated and uploaded onto the site. None the less, YouTube is a powerful tool that can be used by the nonprofit community to raise awareness and market.

What do I need to post and tag on YouTube?

1. An account. Signing up is easy. Go to YouTube.com and click on sign up in the top right corner of the screen. Enter in the required fields and submit. You will get a verification email which with a link that you need to click on to activate your account.
2. Upload a video. This presupposes that you have videos ready to go. YouTube accepts a wide variety of different video formats including: .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG. Uploading a video is simple. First click on upload videos in the top right corner of the site. Second, enter in a name, description, and TAGS. For the Nonprofits in Second Life site, we are asking folks to use NPSL as a tag to identify it as related content. Choose a category and a language. Click "Continue Uploading". Browse for your file on your computer. Just like on Flickr, you can then decide who can see your video--will it be public or private to friends and/or family. Click Upload.
3. This will bring you to a page with a snippet of code you can use to embed your video into your Web site. In my case this looked like this...

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

Tagging on blogs can have multiple benefits.  The first is, if your blog is searchable, the tags prove to be a way for readers to find like content.  For example, on this blog (built on Drupal), if you click on a single tag it will return all results that match that tag.

Try clicking on "npsl" and see the result.  In Drupal, a function called Taxonomy makes this magic happen.  We could, in fact add navigation to the site that would match a given tag essentially creating navigation to content that will for ever expand.