Monthly Archives: February 2007

AAUW related blogs

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Okay, I couldn’t decide whether to edit the previous post or add this link as a comment. So I decided to start a new thread for “AAUW related blogs”. If you have others to recommend, please register, login and post a comment. I’ll add new ones (probably found through feedster or other blog searches) as comments as I find them.

  • Absinthe – An empowerment blog for pissed off female scientists and academics. See also 2/19 post: “Letter in support of Kay Weber” with a call to action to lobby LAF for support of staff at the national labs.

AAUW in the blogosphere

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Continuing the Web 2.0 discussion, here’s my current list of AAUW “blogs” or sites generating RSS feeds. Not all are active:

aauwnys.blogspot.com
gilroyaauw.blogspot.com
blog.myspace.com/aauw
aauwtexas.blogspot.com
www.aauwlandsdale.org
rwc.aauwnc.org
news.aauwnc.org
asheville.aauwnc.org
careaders.blogspot.com
aauwmidland.blogspot.com
aauwsiue.blogspot.com

www.aauw.org will enter this list on the next redesign – scheduled for launch in June 2007. In the meantime, there’s a kludgey, member-maintained RSS feed on the “What’s New” section on the home page. Use www.bbvx.org/rss/whatsnewaauw.xml as the feed. (See a video of how to insert this into your Google home page at wiki.bbvx.org. Of course the same technique would work for the RSS feed on any of the above blogs.)

Branch certification

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Would it be possible to come up with a process to “certify” branches? Initial thoughts –

  • Branch would demonstrate commitment to mission appropriate for its size and its community
  • Branch would demonstrate technology expertise to allow Association to make assumptions about how it can deliver information to the branch.
  • Financial reports in a standard form

Would phasing this in over, say, five years be possible? Would it make sense to charge a per-branch fee to those who cannot receive information electronically? Who, exactly would administer this? Who would “sell” it to the branches?

Alexaholic

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The recent FastCompany mentioned alexaholic.com, and that led to an interesting half hour of experimentation … The site takes up to five domain names and builds a graph showing their web traffic.

AAUW.org, LWV.org, BPWusa.org, NOW.org, Feminist.org — interesting to see all the traffic is fairly low, but LWV had an enormous spike around the election.

WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com (easy sign-up blogging platforms) — WordPress is overtaking TypePad, but Blogger is much larger than the two combined.

WordPress.org, Drupal.org, Joomla.org, Plone.org, Mamboserver.org (content management systems that may be appropriate for branch/state web sites) – Joomla has consistently the most traffic, except for a WordPress spike shortly after the release of WordPress 2.1 in January. Drupal and WordPress run neck and neck, but all three are the same order of magnitude. Mambo and Plone were in the pack until mid-2006, when, if you can believe the graphs really say anything, the other three took off while they’ve gradually declined to an order of magnitude less traffic. Now for open source software, web site traffic can be a measure of the size and engagement of the community, so Joomla may be worth another look.

LinkedIn.com, Zoominfo.com (both kinda “corporate” networking sites) vs. Myspace.com and Facebook.com — MySpace is far and away the winner. My impression of LinkedIn as “MySpace for grownups” may be misleading since MySpace also has blog and web-building features, so the comparisons here may not really be fair.