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Friday Jun 30, 2006
Q: What's Rupert Murdoch going to do with MySpace?
A: He's not sure.
In an interview in Wired, Rupert Murdoch admits that there is no grand plan for recouping the $580 million he spent to buy social networking site MySpace.
"God knows what we're going to do with MySpace," he says... "We're just discovering what this thing can do."
With millions of young users all around the world there are plenty of possibilities, mainly for marketing and advertising. But there are dangers, not least that MySpace's success might prove to be short-lived as users move to other national or international sites.
Perhaps Murdoch has already achieved one of his goals, though: he's on the front cover of Wired and is the talk of the media and new media community at a time when his old media outlets are no longer so fascinating.
The only other way to attract so much attention would have been to give all his money away. And there's no sign of him being ready to do that just yet.
Posted by Tom Green ( 8:30 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Wednesday Jun 28, 2006
Company giving increases
Following on from Tom's post about Buffett's billions, the FT announced today that charitable donations from business donors increased by 15% to £1.07bn last year.
This is obviously great news and it seems like we may be on the verge of a step change in philanthropy in the UK. Having said that, the nature of partnerships with corporates is also changing rapidly.I think most of the changes are really positive - for the most part companies are willing to engage in open and honest dialogue with charities about how they can work together and create mutually beneficial partnerships.
However, as the nature of charitable giving shifts it's vital that charities have an equal voice, especially when it comes to working with companies. There's already a huge amount of energy and expertise out there in terms of making the right match between corporates and charities and as long as this continues I think we'll see more and more productive, mutually beneficial partnerships. Posted by Sam Thomas ( 3:24 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Monday Jun 26, 2006
Buffett's bounty
Fortune magazine journalist Carol J. Loomis didn't quite know what to expect when she arrived to interview billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
We were sitting in a Manhattan living room on a spring afternoon, and Warren Buffett had a Cherry Coke in his hand as usual. But this unremarkable scene was about to take a surprising turn.
"Brace yourself," Buffett warned with a grin. He then described a momentous change in his thinking. Within months, he said, he would begin to give away his Berkshire Hathaway fortune, then and now worth well over $40 billion.
The scale of this donation, which more than doubles the assets of The Gates Foundation, is staggering. Bear in mind that, according to NCVO, the UK voluntary sector as a whole has an income of £26.3 billion.
Interestingly, Buffett's ongoing donation is contingent on one of his friends Bill and Melinda Gates being directly involved in their Foundation.
Some seem confident that the money will be well spent.
...[the Foundation's] hard-headed focus is on the problems that most desperately need cash. Huge funds are raised in the west for heart disease and cancer, but much less for big killers confined to developing countries, such as malaria. Gates money has started to fill the gap, and now funds almost a fifth of polio research. The insight that prevention is better than cure is ruthlessly applied, so the largest grants ($1.5bn) have funded vaccinations that in the end will save more lives than any action to help the sick. Gates is applying a respect for efficiency learned in business to the allocation of his funds. If more philanthropists followed this firmly utilitarian approach, then we would be closer to slaying the global giants of want, ignorance and disease.
And The Economist (subscribers only) argues that: "Capitalism has demonstrated that it is the best system for creating great fortunes. More capitalists should show that it is the best for getting rid of them, too."
However, it has already been suggested elsewhere that Gates's personal qualities make him an unfit philanthropist. No doubt there will be renewed efforts from journalists to try and assess how well his money is being spent.
Posted by Tom Green ( 12:48 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Friday Jun 23, 2006
Charities Bill
The Charities Bill will get its Second Reading in the Commons on 26 June.
The big controversy concerns the proposed public benefit test that charities would have to meet. Some, like NCVO, think it doesn't go far enough.
NCVO believes that clarity is needed concerning how public benefit will be tested with respect to charities that charge high fees for their services. This will assist all charities that work for the public benefit and create a much-needed level playing field for the whole charitable sector.
At present, the Bill extends the public benefit test to all charities, on the basis of existing case law. However, for charities that charge high fees for their services, this means that they will only have to show that the less well-off are 'not entirely excluded' . This does not go far enough - anyone able to benefit from a charity's service must have a reasonable chance of doing so.
Public schools are the highest profile charities charging high fees. But with the power of their lobby it's hard to imagine that life will be made too difficult for them.
Posted by Tom Green ( 3:57 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Wednesday Jun 21, 2006
Scream now if you're still young
There's been a bunch of stories circulating the past few months about a high-pitched noise which is only audible to young(er) people. Companies started experimenting with idea of using this sound as a youth-deterrent.A local shop in Britain was first off the mark, playing the sound as a way of keeping 'hoodies' from congregating outside the store. Swindon Council got in on the act and blasted it through speaker systems in the city centre. Crawley Council has joined in while one company even claims to supply a home-system based on this idea; you can use it to keep unruly teenagers from hanging out near your home.
But now the tide has turned, due to the coming-together of ruthless marketing executives and teenagers with naturally mischievous temperaments. As the story goes, some kids decided the 'mosquito' noise, as it has been dubbed, would make for a perfect ringtone - they would be the only ones that hear it so they could have their phones on in class. Before long, the ringtone was circulating around playgrounds across the UK.
Not long after, the people who peddle Jay-Z answerphone messages and South Park screensavers to teenagers for exhorbitant prices saw this for what it was: a great opportunity to fleece the ringtone to the mass market (£3 each, thanks muchly). Now it's one of the biggest selling ringtones on the market and going to become a worldwide "craze".
But what does it actually sound like? And would us... slightly older... people really not be able to hear anything? It was time for an office test. I played the sound file in the office to see whether it would split people by age. And the result? Julia (26), Delanthy (26) and Paul (25) immediately covered their ears. Hannah (29) and Jim (30) sat there wondering when it would begin. Needless to say, I didn't hear a thing (at 33). But then Claire (28) could hear it. Hardly scientific, but if it's just teenagers they are looking to deter, there are a few 20-somethings round here who will also be avoiding Swindon City Centre.
Do your own test by downloading the file here - and let us know how you got on. Posted by Dom Waghorn ( 2:15 PM ) Link to this post Comments[2]
Tuesday Jun 20, 2006
Podcasts become the voice of the charity sector
Recently there have been quite a few examples of charities podcasting content on a whole range of issues. There are some in the States such as the NetSquared podcast and here in the UK charities are slowly starting, for example the NFP Podcast, St. John Ambulance or The Media Trust Charity Voice Podcast.
We've put some audio content on TheSite.org now - you can hear all about "Coping with Stress", "Visiting a GUM Clinic" or "Safety for Women". What seems to be different about these compared to most third sector podcasts (apart from St John Ambulance) is that they're aimed at our beneficiaries - young people - rather than donors, supporters or voluntary sector colleagues.
Podcasting could be a great way to reach new audiences (even McDonald's now have their own podcast - with the slightly sinister title of "The McDonald's You Don't Know"), but it works best when it's relevant and really targeted to an audience that are comfortable subscribing to them. It's not that offering donors a podcast about their favourite charity is a bad thing, I just think as a sector maybe we could be using this technology in a more innovative way.
So does anyone know of any other great examples of innovative charity podcasts aimed at beneficiaries, rather than colleagues or donors? Posted by Sam Thomas ( 8:53 AM ) Link to this post Comments[2]
Money, money, money
Another volunteering-related challenge for the new Minister for the Third Sector, Ed Miliband. As well as needing to sort out the outcry over the latest advice on expenses for volunteers on benefits he now needs to deal with a public plea for more funds from Volunteering England (VE).
In a letter to the Minister published on the VE website, the organisation's Chief Executive, Christopher Spence, laments a significant short-fall in their most recent grant.
...the final settlement was 45% less than we asked for and included no allocation for three important strands of work, previously funded as projects, all of which have a direct bearing on Volunteering England's capacity to deliver the ambitious strategy for modernising the volunteering infrastructure nationally, regionally and locally outlined in Building On Success. Officials at the VCGU have also told us that this year there will be no project funding available to supplement strategic grants.
Spence suggests various ways in which money could be carried over and topped up, but it's hard to escape the feeling that there are hard times ahead. The government-funded volunteering sector has enjoyed boom times in recent years with organisations like VE, TimeBank and YouthNet the recipients of many millions of pounds. Last year, for example, around £7 million was spent on the Year of the Volunteer.
With the government as a whole now tightening its belt and new youth volunteering charity ,v, the main focus of attention, Ed Miliband could find that Spence's letter is the first of many that he receives from organisations that feel left out.
And with the Tories apparently putting the Third Sector at the heart of Compassionate Conservatism, don't be surprised to see volunteering sector leaders starting to flirt with that nice Mr Cameron.
Posted by Tom Green ( 8:45 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Thursday Jun 15, 2006
I want some manners now!
A great little example of how the instinct of certain sections of the UK media is still to blame young people for society's ills, graced the pages of the Telegraph today (15th June). Lovingly entitled, "Why are the youth of today so rude?", it was cobbled together by a guy called Thomas Blaikie (who just happened to be peddling his book, "Blaikie's Guide to Modern Manners").The article's so delightfully patronising and so splendidly pompous, that it wonderfully demonstrates the truely self-serving cry of those who tap their glass and shriek, "I want manners!"
"...if you were to go as far as suggesting to a young person that, in order to participate in conversation generally, he or she really ought to know who the Prime Minister is or what is meant by ''the Establishment'', you will be greeted by purple-faced outrage worthy of a pre-war colonel, albeit with a rather different vocabulary".
I rest my case. As is so often the subtext with this courteous diatribes, it sounds like Blaikie's gripe is more about lack of deference. And without getting all sociological on this blog, deference rests on the concept of hierarchy- a world in which people relate to you based on your status or position rather than who you are. Actually the rules are changing. With deference in retreat, for better or worse, people today have to think a lot more about how they relate to each other as real people- and not with titles bestowed from above.
The irony about Blaikie's whole article is that it is supposedly based on a report by Demos, 'Working Progress: How to reconnect young people and organisations'. Demos publicised it as 'Employers lack the skills that young people need' in their press release- which kind of tells you where they think the burden of responsibility lies.
Certainly there is an interesting debate to be had about changing cultural values and creating a productive working environment for all. But slagging off one particular group, in this case 'young people', has, shockingly enough, never been the best approach- begging your pardon Mr Blaikie.
Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 12:01 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Volunteers on benefits
Here's a challenge to test the metal of the newly formed Office for the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office: a new leaflet from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says that volunteers on benefits cannot claim lunch expenses from their host organisation.
Travel expenses are OK but, for the DWP, the case against lunch money is clear:
Q: Why doesn't my normal lunch count as an expense?
A: Because the amount of Income Support or Jobseeker's Allowance you get is already meant to cover the cost of your basic needs, including lunch.
The problem is that payment of lunch expenses is widely recognised as good management practice - partly because you are asking volunteers to be away from their home and therefore buying lunch is an expense and partly because it's a very small perk.
In the past benefits offices have been more concerned about the number of hours that people spend volunteering, worried that it might stop them finding a job. Now, according to the leaflet, the DWP have woken up to the fact that volunteering helps people get paid work...but volunteers on benefits will have to bring a packed lunch (even though fellow volunteers, who might be in employment elsewhere, can get their lunch paid for).
Volunteer managers are, not surprisingly, up in arms - members of the UKVPMs network are urging people to write to their MPs. Volunteering England has also taken up the protest, pointing out that the new guidance "contradicts a recent NHS publication that was cleared by the Department for Work and Pensions/Jobcentre Plus, in which the chapter on reimbursement clearly states food expenses are legitimate expenses."
Last month, in his first speech as Minister for the Third Sector, Ed Miliband said:
"Volunteering creates a relationship between individuals and communities who would often never meet each other. Millions of people volunteer in our country but how can we expand the reach of volunteering to reach across communities, sectors, age groups and background? How can we build social cohesion and community among young and old, different faiths, different classes with volunteering and mentoring?"
Miliband's job is to co-ordinate third sector policy across government. How he deals with this expenses issue will show us whether his political muscle matches up to his rhetoric.
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:40 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Tuesday Jun 13, 2006
Who is talking about you?
Do you know what people are saying about your organisation on the internet?Charities, just like companies and governments are being talked about in the blogosphere and on the wider internet. It's obviously going to be helpful if you know what people are saying about you. But with blogging, it also means that you can join in the conversation - by responding and chatting with the people who are talking about you.
There are some easy ways to find out where the conversations are. Here's how I do it at YouthNet.
Tracking the blogoshpere
Sites like Technorati, Yahoo and Google all have services which mean you can search millions of blogs at once for words or phrases. For example by going to Technorati and searching for "TheSite.org", I can see what articles, games or other content people are talking about and linking to on their blogs.
We recently noticed a spike in blog posts about a quiz we have on TheSite.org called How Dodgy Are You. People were posting it on their blogs and inviting their friends to play. They would then post it on their own blogs and before long, the quiz had gone... viral.
Logging blog mentions this way also brings up other unexpected things. Recently, we discovered a guy had been copying and pasting content from TheSite.org straight on to his blog - without crediting us. Watch out, the lawyers have been scrambled (read: we'll send the guy an email asking him to take them down).
It's also worth noting that sometimes you might think someone's talking about you but it's your estranged foreign sibling. Searches for "YouthNet" bring up results for other YouthNets. I'm pretty sure we're not running a Tabernacle Camp, or just generally Encountering Jesus but you never know.
One final note: none of these blog search services is comprehensive. Like normal search engines, they try and index as much as they can but can't cover everything. This is why it's worth searching all of them from time to time.
Automated
You can do this searching manually by visiting the sites and running searches, or with a bit of work, automate it through RSS, a type of content syndication technology. Technorati, for example, lets you 'save' searches and these can be provided through RSS. If you have an RSS reader (I use NetVibes and love it), then you can have the search results provided direct to you on a webpage. You just need to add the feed to your list. Posted by Dom Waghorn ( 12:20 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Inaccessible accessibility
As a non-technical person involved in website development I have just about got to grips with the original standards for web accessibility established by W3C. They're not exactly in plain English but the main points seem reasonably clear.
Unfortunately these guidelines have been out-of-date for several years. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are still in draft form but, according to Joe Clark, they are not going to provide the clarity that the industry needs.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 were published in 1999 and quickly grew out of date. The proposed new WCAG 2.0 is the result of five long years’ work by a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) committee that never quite got its act together. In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas. WCAG 2 is not enough of an improvement and was not worth the wait.
Clark goes on to attack the process by which the Guidelines have been drawn up and offers little hope for any improvements before they are finally published.
Accessibility should be a significant issue for all web developers, but for charities meeting set standards is often closely linked to their mission and a prerequisite of funding. It was hard enough getting definitive interpretations on the original Guidelines but now, more than ever, it seems that organisations will have to trust the judgement of their chosen experts.
By the way, if you're planning to try to get to grips with the new Guidelines you'd better clear the diary. Clark reckons the three main documents (the Guidelines, an explanation of the Guidelines, and an explanation of "general techniques") run to 458 pages or 159, 800 words. Good luck.
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:52 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Monday Jun 12, 2006
Debasers Go Marching On
The YouthNet Debasers softball team continued their winning start to the Charity League with a 39-7 victory against Breakthough Breast Cancer last week.
A storming middle innings and some tight fielding saw us take an unassailable lead before we all headed to the pub for some post match analysis.
We're up against Help The Aged this week who are rumoured to be one of the top teams in the league - keep your fingers crossed!
The YouthNet Debasers start their victory dance
Thursday Jun 08, 2006
Happy talk
Is the voluntary sector in general and the volunteering sector in particular just too nice?
Reading through the report on yesterday's 'debate' in Parliament to mark Volunteer's Week is like wading through melted down sweets ("Would the Hon. Gentleman agree with me that volunteers are all absolutely marvellous etc"). Of course praise for volunteers is merited, but doesn't the subject deserve something a little more substantial from our legislators?
A lot of public money is spent on volunteering and the voluntary sector - not always wisely. There are continuous reorganisations of government departments overseeing the sector. There are difficult issues to confront about how far volunteers should encroach on work that might otherwise be done by paid staff.
Yet there seems to be little real debate on any of these issues either within the sector, from the media, or from MPs.
One of the tenets of good volunteering management is that the best way to reward volunteers is to take them and their work seriously – praise only goes so far. Perhaps the same approach should be applied to the sector as a whole.
Posted by Tom Green ( 2:37 PM ) Link to this post Comments[1]Official: David Cameron no longer down with the kids
Oh David, you disappoint me!
Back in April I blogged here that the leader of the Conservatives was showing small signs of dragging his party into the modern era.
How naive I was. Yesterday, Cameron showed his true colours by playing to middle England with an attack on hip-hop music. At a conference of magazine editors, he put the knife in to Radio 1, and implicitly, Tim Westwood's Saturday night rap show.
He said:
'Do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?' Some people say that's part of the nanny state - I say the opposite."
This is a tough one for some pundits. The people who don't like David Cameron much but really don't like Tim Westwood don't know where to stand on it.
Westwood is usually lampooned (by other white people) as being a wigga; a white, middle class English guy who 'acts' like he's black. I've always found this a little disconcerting. Sure, Westwood is easy to parody, but the underlying message seems to be that black music is for black people and us whities should stick to our Coldplay and Kean records.
Anyway, back to David Cameron. Blaming music and films for crime is simple-minded and lacks any understanding of youth culture. People don't carry knives and guns because 50-Cent told them to; they carry weapons because they live in areas where there is high crime and they're afraid of being attacked.
Tuesday Jun 06, 2006
The $130 PC
Nicholas Negroponte has unveiled protoypes of a machine (previously billed as the $100 PC) that will spread processing power to the developing world.
The ruggedized, two pound Linux desktop (Fedora) system, with mesh networking will sell for about $130 to $140 (san shipping) to governments starting in April 2007. Negroponte expects to reach the $100 price point by the end of 2008. The colorful system can turn into a tablet, and Negroponte said that it "will run like a bat out of hell." Pricing depends on how much RAM, but key is the display, he added. "It has to be sunlight readable. That won't be done until August/September."
I want one (not necessarily in orange).
Posted by Tom Green ( 11:00 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]Age discrimination in volunteering
Volunteering In The Third Age and Volunteering England have launched a campaign against Age Discrimination in Volunteering.
They want organisations to sign up to commitments including that:
- Everyone wishing to volunteer should be able to do so, regardless of age
- There are no arbitrary age limits and no 'retirement age' on volunteers
- Where insurance cover for volunteers cannot be obtained beyond a specified age, organisations should search for other insurers.
It's a very worthwhile campaign, especially at a time when so much attention is focussed on younger volunteers.
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:31 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Monday Jun 05, 2006
World cup volunteering
Yeh ok, this is a just a lame excuse to mention the World Cup. There is a real point I'd like to make though with this post. On the eve of one of the world's most high profile events, volunteers, as ever, are labouring under an incredibly low profile.
Over 15,000 volunteers have been recruited by FIFA since before January, and on do-it.org.uk we even did our bit to make sure there was a good representation of volunteers from the UK in Germany. If you're going we'd love to hear from you!It's interesting reading FIFA's approach to volunteering with footballing metaphors in bucket loads such as "kick-off training sessions" full of "team talks". Their FAQ answers with admirable clarity, the question that most prospective volunteers would probably be wondering:
Will I be able to watch the matches as a volunteer?
No. Many of our volunteer tasks take place well away from the stadiums.
I did learn one thing about the World Cup- apparently forget the football- the slogan for Germany 2006 is "a time to make friends". That kind of sums up the FIFA approach to volunteering- it's certainly not a "time to get into football matches for free".
Perhaps that slogan might give the UK delegation of volunteering MPs in the parliamentary football team food for thought? I'm sure they'd make friends if they gave their world cup tickets away. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their trip, our MPs demonstrate there is plenty of volunteering beyond the official FIFA variety. For example, there are 40 volunteers going with the Salvation Army to help raise awareness amongst fans about the exploitation of women trafficked into Germany.
If however you can't get to Germany in the next few days the great news is you can still volunteer to watch the World Cup. In fact you can do it from the comfort of your own couch. Now, who says volunteering doesn't offer something to everyone? Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 11:04 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Friday Jun 02, 2006
A job for youth: snitch on the file sharers
It's been a big a big week for anyone following movements in the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing world - and yes, there are some of us that fit into that category.(For those of you less inclined to read IT websites, a quick definition: file sharing is the process of making digital files - music, movies, porn etc - available for others to download over the internet. It's called 'peer-to-peer' because files are shared directly from the users' computers rather than from a central web server. Got that? Good, let's move on.)
On Wednesday, one of the biggest P2P directory sites was shut down by police in Sweden. Known as Pirate Bay, the site provided users with information on what files are potentially available for download at any one time.
Although very big and popular, Pirate Bay is just one of many sites that provide this sort of information. And although the music and movie industry associations were claiming this would be a death-blow for file sharing, in all likelihood other sites will soon replace it (in fact Pirate Bay is saying on its site that it will be back soon, possibly run from another country.)
This is the latest example of media owners trying to come up with ways to fight a war they just can't win. But shutting down P2P sites in Sweden is one thing, what is happening in Hong Kong is far scarier. Over there, 200,000 young people have been recruited by the Hong Kong government to report on websites they come across that host pirated content.
According to AsiaMedia:
"Senior Superintendent Tam Yiu-Kueng, of Customs' Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said the involvement of youth groups provided his department with extra monitoring capabilities."
I'm sure it has, but it does raise the question: what sort of 'youth group agrees to do government dirty work? Maybe it's a cultural difference but I really can't see British youth groups buying in to an idea like that. Or would they?
Posted by Dom Waghorn ( 1:30 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]Victory is ours
As I'm sure you're all dying to know, the YouthNet Debasers were victorious last night in their first game in the Charity Softball League.
A tense game saw us overcome Business in the Community 8 - 0 in the arena that is Regent's Park. A slightly below capacity crowd of 2 were enthralled as the Debasers took an early lead before restricting BiTC to no runs with some tight fielding.Next week we're up against Breakthrough Breast Cancer in Hyde Park - keep your fingers crossed!
The YouthNet Debasers - going for the Best Looking Softball Team in the League Award this year Posted by Sam Thomas ( 10:46 AM ) Link to this post Comments[2]
