AVIF Volunteers in Kenya: 10 June 2007

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Commoncraft

I wanted to thank Beth Kanter, again, for explaining .. in 2 lines and a hyperlink what an aggregator does .. she took me to Commoncraft's funny / quick  & informative video here which again leads to further education. Subscribing is important, of course.

Technorati Tags: rss, beth kanter, avif

SQUIDOO

I've just been sent a fantastic gift by Megan Casey

Editor-in-Chief, Squidoo.com :

It’s about setting up an eBay store, then a Squidoo lens, then a

Flickr account for your photos, then a YouTube video .. and linking them all together to introduce yourself and increase traffic, for free. Personalized signposts

Pointing everything back at each other… is a little unclear .. your Flickr to

your eBay, your eBay to your Squidoo, your Squidoo to

your Flickr AND your eBay, and all of them from your

blog. I needed a little more instruction on how to do this, but its fairly easy to "

Mix in a little del.icio.us tagging and StumbleUpon

favouriting" to achieve results.

Megan writes "Squidoo is called a co-op for a reason. Success is shared.

The better your friends do, the more traffic you get. And

in a nice twist, the better your competitors do, the better

chance your lenses have of getting found as well."

This can only be a good thing.

Its encourages to go back to the idea of selling our communities wares on eBay, even with the large postal costs which we can't seem to avoid.

I'll get on it immediately, come back soon for the new store opening, in the meantime you can donate a percentage of your own sales to AVIF !

Technorati Tags: squidoo, free traffic, blogs, kenya, children, AVIF, volunteer

Friday, June 15, 2007

Other really helpful technologies

I'm posting this, Brami, on the blog :

Brami Jegan is writing an article for us and was asking about the technologies we use, being an online charity.

Here are a few more :
Aggregators .. e.g Afrigator .. spreads the word about what we do automatically using RSS feeds (really simple syndication)... I think thats how it works anyway.
RSS - People are so so busy these days, its just the fast pace of life because we can do so much more, so much more quickly with the internet now .. Feeds / RSS is just a way of checking local stories / news / blogs / updates by having the headlines sent to you, not the whole blog (kind of !!)

I, personally, am always busy, I spend 10 hours a day most days on this laptop answering email enquiries and learning new technologies to promote what we do, gain more interest - as well as a lone parent to 2 primary age munchkins - so I don't have time to keep up to date with certain blogs .. some people do.
In fact, some people manage to make a steady income from writing blogs every day .. its like Sex and the City, Carrie's Column .. they make money writing down their own thoughts and experiences. Unfortunately I don't get time to read them .. it amazes me that people do.

I'm also becoming so accustomed to the internet now that I actually get annoyed when I have 4 or 5 errands in my local town and I'm having to drive there, wait in traffic or wait in line .. because they're things I can't buy online or get on eBay or something, instantly !! If only life was as efficient as the internet. I think this is where my loathing of bureaucracy comes from .. so much red tape just doubles or triples your workload .. another example is commuting to an office to earn money, which loses you so much time and money ??

I'm digressing, a common problem with the internet .. another technology is www.flickr.com, photo sharing .. digital photos can be stored online now but each photo can be tagged with keywords so if someone puts in 'kenya' or 'poverty' into Google they may well be shown a link to our photos on Flickr .. also available via the Blog .. its just another way of increasing visibility, getting more people aware of what we're trying to do.

Look on the blog again (reason I hardly ever speak to anyone anymore is that you can't direct someone to the internet quickly .. there are no hyperlinks in speech !!) The blog now features a Frappr Map .. another way to create a network of people, I've asked all the volunteers to add themselves but people are busy and no one has yet !!

Technorati automatically promotes a blog to the vast population too .. but I'll have to stop there because I really don't know how it does that. There are a massive amount of technologies that I'm using but have no idea how they do what they do eg www.feedburner.com

For donations online we could do a lot more if we could afford Justgiving's fees but we
get help from eBay's Charitable arm, Missionfish allowing people to donate %'s during an online auctionand much much more

....just so long as we get more people aware of what we're doing and more volunteers commit to coming over or just volunteering online via Nabuur.com, which enables anyone, anywhere to simply log in and assist a project from the comfort of their home or office. Devised by the ex-CEO of World Wildlife Fund, NABUUR (means Neighbour in old Dutch) is a wonderful technology and I'd like to promote it more. I currently help in a project with a group of dairy farming women.

Thank you, Brami, for all you're doing.

Kindest regards
Alison

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Absence makes the heart grow faster

Apologies for our silence and delay in response as I've been in the Isle of Mann for the Centenary TT Road Races. Having now returned to a mass of emails and spam I'm slowly wading through them and will respond as soon as I get to you.

Kindest regards
Alison