YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
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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]