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Tagging Tutorials, Part III YouTube

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>

which produces this:

You must own the video to tag it. So, unlike Flickr where friends can add tags, you need to ensure that all the tags you think are relevant are added. You can always add to your own tags later.

Written by: Creech

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Community Member Spotlight: Stacy Narayan


Information Architecture Inst. (IAI)
Nonprofit Commons 10
iainstitute.org
Stacy Narayan/Stacy Surla

Why is your organization in Second Life?

To look and see what the practice of information architecture has to offer in the design of shared information spaces, like Second Life. To look and see if any IA-type work. Second, to use SL as a platform for our worldwide community of practice
So, we got an island so members can experiment, use it as a sandbox, have a place to meet, and so on.

What’s your favorite place in SL that other nonprofits should check out?

NMC Campus is a must visit for nonprofits
NMC Campus
slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus/139/225/42

Written by: kanter

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Community Member Spotlight: Meet Rebus Mandelbrot

Matt Cowley, Webmaster, WMNF Community Radio
NPCommons Tenant: Space 30
Web Site

Listener-supported, non-commercial, Radio that plays eclectic music and progressive independent news and public radio news.

“We’re here to create a virtual radio station in SL, independent news and public affairs, entertainment and fundraising. We’d like to present speeches and talks for discussion, put on concerts, and things we haven’t realized are possible yet.”

Written by: kanter

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Qumana

I was asked by a colleague if I would write a "How To" on Qumana.  I’ve been using Qumana now for several months to post to three different blogs–dogstar.org, imagespace.blogspot.com, and secondlife.techsoup.org.
What is Qumana?

  1. Qumana is a free blog posting package that allows you to craft offline and post once you have completed editing your narrative.
  2. Qumana is a tagging tool that allows you to easily control what tags are used.
  3. Qumana allows you to insert ads if you want.

The software includes a very simple text editing menu bar that allows you to colour text, use bold, italics, underline, and crossout.  You can justify to the left, center, right or full block.  You can use bullets or numbered lists.  You can quote and indent.  It makes embedding pictures simple, will link for you and has spell check.
Qumana allows you to manage as many blogs as you like.  The process of adding a blog is simple.

  1. Choose "Blog Manager"
  2. Click "Add Blog"
  3. Enter the URL of your blog
  4. Let the system know what kind of blog you utilize
  5. Enter your username and password
  6. BLOG

When you are ready to compose..

  1. Fire up the software
  2. Choose "New Post"
  3. Craft your text
  4. If you have tags already set on your site, click "Refresh" in Categories.
  5. Click "Save" to come back later
  6. Click "Publish Post" to post your text.

It really is that simple.  So, download Qumana.  It is available for Mac and PC.

Written by: Creech

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Tagging Tutorials–Part II Blogs

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.
The second benefit is allowing your posts to be easily pulled into tag based feeds.  Technorati allows easy setup.
Many blogs will have a field for tagging.  So, as an example we’ll use Drupal as an example.
How do you tag a Drupal Blog post?

  1. You need to have rights to post to a blog.  In the case of the Nonprofits in Second Life site, contact Creech Antwerp (Matthew Saunders) at matthew.saunders [at] westaf.org or at matthew [at] dogstar.org if you are a member of the project and want to become a blogger.
  2. Underneath the "Title" you will see a section called "Tags".  The Drupal database collects and saves all tags and will attempt to auto fill it for you.  If you see a similar tag match it so your post will be referenced with other like posts.
  3. Separate tags with commas.

Who can tag a Drupal Blog post?  In general…

  1. The author.
  2. Someone with administrative rights

If your post is related to the Nonprofits in Second Life project, please tag your post with npsl particularly if it is on your own site.

Written by: Creech

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Tagging Tutorials — Part I Flickr

My next few posts will deal with tagging on different social networking sites. This first tutorial will focus on Flickr.

In all the social networking sites that you might post to, there is something in common–tagging. Simply put, tags are little pieces of data that let people know what your information–whether it be an image, a video, or text–is about. For example, you could tag a picture of the castle in Warwick, UK on Flickr with "Warwick castle UK England" and when someone searched on these criteria would have the following results returned:

Click on me: [warwick castle UK England]

Who can tag on Flickr?

  1. First you need an account. If you already have a Yahoo! account, then you can sign up quickly using that account.
  2. After logging in you can tag a) your own photos b) photos of those who have set you up as a contact c) photos of those who are in the same group as you

How do you tag on Flickr?

  1. Log in
  2. Go to photos you are allowed to tag
  3. Look on the right side, you should see the current tags of photos
  4. Click on "Add a tag". If your tag is more than one word, use quotes around the tag.

How does tagging benefit you?

Tagging allows others, like on the Nonprofits in Second Life site, to pull in images–see the Flickr badge on the left–from all sorts of people who have chosen to use the same tag. It also allows Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of that content that can pull in like images to a web page or to a RSS aggregator like Netvibes. Tagging allows your pictures to be found.

The tag being used for Nonprofits in Second Life is "NPSL."

Written by: Creech

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Free non-profit booth space available for Education Conference May 25

Stacy Hasselbacher (Lyra Hammerer in SL) sends along information about an opportunity for non-profits to put up a booth for an upcoming education conference:

As some of you may already know, on May 25th there will be a 24-hour conference: the Second Life International Education Conference: Best Practices in Teaching, Learning, and Research. Nonprofits may each have a 6X6 booth with a 25 prim allowance for free. You need not staff your booth for 24 hours; notecard givers are perfectly acceptable ways of communicating information about your organization.

I am the nonprofit liaison for the event, please feel free to respond if you have any questions or would like to sign up. There is also information on the event’s wiki, located at: http://slbestpractices2007.wikispaces.com/

Written by: rikomatic

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Infinite Vision Media announces pro bono SL marketing services for non-profits

I just got word that Infinite Vision Media is launching a Social Responsibility Initiative, an effort to allow non-profit and academic institutions to benefit from Infinite Vision’s SL marketing and networking expertise. IVM’s is launching this new initiative at the same time that they announce the creation of the American Cancer Society’s headquarters in SL created by IVM. According to IVM builder Hiro Pendragon, they plan on offering most of their services pro bono: “Part of the SL Social Responsibility Initiative is to assist these non-profits and good causes to secure funding from other sources to fund development of projects. i.e. Helping to come up with proposals with them for the potential funding sources.”

See below for the full press release:

Infinite Vision media CREATES SOCAL RESPONSIBILITY initiative

LAUNCHES PROGRAM WITH CREATION OF american cancer society’s second life presence

APRIL 27, 2007 — Infinite Vision Media (IVM), an interactive and emerging media studio specializing in developing social media in the 3D web space, today announced the creation of its social responsibility initiative. The program is being launched with the firm’s pro-bono creation of the American Cancer Society’s virtual headquarters in the popular 3D virtual world known as Second Life®.

IVM, well-regarded for its development of three-dimensional presences for corporate, non-profit and academic clients is launching the social responsibility initiative as a way of giving back to the community that afforded the firm’s creation and success. Drew Stein, chief executive officer of IVM, explains: “We think it’s important for the non-profit community to have at its disposal the level of Second Life marketing and networking expertise that corporate brands enjoy. The 3D web space offers marvelous opportunities for non-profit organizations to build community that expands their mission to a global audience.”

The firm, which has most recently developed a presence in Second Life for top brands Dell and The Weather Channel, has been involved with Second Life since its inception and is uniquely positioned to understand the power of the 3D web space as an outlet for an organization’s message and mission. “We’re honored to bring the American Cancer Society’s mission to Second Life residents. Cancer awareness and education messages need to be delivered in Second Life in a way that respects the American Cancer Society’s brand as well as understands the SL audience. We are able to bring expertise from both worlds to the table,” says June Peoples (Quirky McArdle), IVM’s chief operating officer.

One of the challenges for any non-profit looking to develop a present in a virtual world is the ability to demonstrate the effectiveness of that approach to potential funders in government and in corporate philanthropy. IVM will work with non-profit clients to envision the best possible use of the 3D web space, then help develop a proposal that can be floated to existing and likely funding sources.

The American Cancer Society’s headquarters will include office buildings complete with presentation and meeting rooms for cancer education sessions, a staffed link to the Society’s National Cancer Information Center , fundraising components, and green space and gardens that will showcase user-created art as an expression of the personal fight against cancer.

“The American Cancer Society has been engaged in Second Life through our signature fundraiser, Relay For Life for over four years,” said Randal Moss, the American Cancer Society’s manager of futuring and innovation-based strategies. “In building and opening a virtual headquarters in Second Life, the Society will be able to provide cancer information to more than 5 million Second Life residents and engage them in the fight to eliminate cancer as a major health problem.”

The American Cancer Society Virtual Office is being designed by IVM Creative Director Ian Tepoot (SL: Ethan Therian) with programming by IVM Chief Technology Officer Ron Blechner (Hiro Pendragon). Also consulting on the project and on IVM’s Social Responsibility Initiative is Dr. Karen Urbas (The Sojourner).

About Infinite Vision Media

Infinite Vision Media Inc. is a leader in virtual world development and interactive experience design. A full-service interactive marketing and emerging media agency, IVM develops three-dimensional presences for corporate, non-profit and academic clients. IVM works with clients individually to envision the creative possibilities of the 3-D environment and how it can help realize the potential of each mission or brand.

Written by: rikomatic