Adrian Sud, Web Developer

As a web developer, I feel no small amount of peer pressure towards using and building on Open Source technologies.  It’s usually a good thing: building on preexisting frameworks and projects that might fit most of your needs speeds development along, and avoids duplication of effort.  The mindset behind the Open Source ecology is wonderful too—developers, creating for the love of their trade, an overt admission that coding is what we love, and that sometimes recognition of a work well wrought is payment enough for the work itself.

Unfortunately, despite this pressure, I often wind up starting from scratch.  While I love coding for the sake of coding and am a big fan of many free and open source software (FOSS) projects, I do this for a living as well, and despite the Free Software Foundation’s assertions that “Free software is a matter of liberty”, many licenses do just as much restricting as they do freeing—they just do it the other way. A commercial license is all about ensuring that the rights of the software developer, or more likely producer, are protected. Open Source licenses, on the other hand, are all about limiting the developer or producer, so the control lies in the hands of the consumer.

1to1 media tapped Q’s CEO Tim Neill to discuss how global brands can reach international audiences by engaging in online conversations via social media. Tim also discusses the importance of social media monitoring and the need for community managers to support companies’ efforts to monitor online conversations, digest information cleaned from social media monitoring and engage their audiences online.

The full post is available on the 1to1 media website here.

agencyQ will co-host the next DC Sitecore User Group Meeting with NavigationArts and Siteworx on September 21. This time we’re taking our show on the road to Northern Virginia with an evening of networking and a discussion of the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite at Chima Brazilian Steakhouse in Tysons Corner.

Join us as we discuss the importance of analytics and share some best practices around what and how we can measure our website activity.  We will also explore the new Sitecore Online Marketing Suite and Analytics tool and look at some practical applications for improving business.

The agenda will cover:

• The importance of Analytics: What To Measure and How To Use The Data
• An Introduction to the Sitecore Analytics and Marketing Suite
• Q and A
• Networking

Plus, we’ll feed you! So what are you waiting for? Get the full details and register here.

1. Facebook Places: What It Is, What It Isn’t, And Why It May Change The World
By Augie Ray with Forrester

On August 18 Facebook announced its long-anticipated geolocation offering called “Places,” and the Internet went crazy. In what was the most popular post we tweeted this week, Forrester’s Augie Ray argues that “the most important contribution Facebook is making to the geolocation social space is not in form but scale.”

Takeaway: First of all, Places is neither evolutionary nor new. Foursquare and Gowalla beat them to the punch eons ago in tech time. While foursquare counts around 2.5 million users in its base, Facebook has 500 million. This means that Facebook is positioned to introduce the benefits of location sharing to a new and much wider audience. But the rub is in the very first paragraph of Ray’s post – while the popular Foursquare counts around 2.5 million users in its base, Facebook has 500 million, meaning Facebook is now positioned to introduce the benefits of location-sharing to a new and much wider audience. Facebook has an opportunity to change the way people approach social networking without even creating something new. How this will play out has yet to be seen, but the potential significance of this new feature is undeniable.

Have you given Places a try yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.

1. What Nonprofits Can Teach Brands About Social
on eMarketer

Even though corporate marketers have made a great deal of progress with their adoption of social media tools, they still have a long way to go. This post explores the success of social media adoption in the nonprofit sector and what corporate marketers can stand to gain from nonprofit marketers’ social media efforts.

Takeaway: As of 2009, 97% of large charitable organizations were using some form of social media. In contrast, 80% of companies in the Inc. 500—a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US—used social media marketing in 2009, and the Fortune 500 were even further behind. How counter intuitive that the companies most likely to have the human and financial resources to run an effective social media program are sitting on the sidelines while nonprofits are running about the field.

The issue at hand here isn’t so much quality as it is quantity – it doesn’t tell us how effective nonprofits’ social media efforts are, it only tell us that they are trying harder than their corporate counterparts. But this is still an important point. In 2010, very few businesses can afford to ignore social media all together. And while the results may be mixed, nonprofits are blazing the trail by embracing social media as a marketing tool worth employing. Have you taken the plunge yet?