So I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I end up looking at this fairly nondescript statuary. What was the significance of this?
The museum had a placard next to it (which I will reprint in its entirety):
Marble inscribed statue base
Roman, ca. A.D. 160-170
Fletcher Fund, 1926 (26.60.70a,b)
The base is said to have been found near Rome, but the inscription is in Greek. It records the dedication of a statue in honor of Pompeia Agrippinilla, a priestess, which was erected by fellow members of the Bacchic cult to which she belonged. Listed are more than three-hundred Greek personal names, together with some seventy Roman names; about one-third of the total are those of women. The names seem to represent all levels of society, from senatorial rank to slaves, and are ordered according to stuats and function in the cult. Their titles give some indication of the size and complexity of an ancient sacred procession. They included a leader (possibly dressed up as Bacchus), priests and priestesses, bearers of images of the god, bearers of mystic baskets, cowherds, torch bearers, a phallos bearer, a flame bearer, an instructor, men and women dressed in skins of newly sacrificed animals, sacred cave guards, and large nubers of followers called Bacchoi and Bacchai.
This may be a donor wall akin to the sort of thing nonprofits put in the entrance to their buildings or on their websites. Apparently, the need to honor the donor has gone on for quite some time! Sadly, the need for bearers of mystic baskets and a phallos bearer has gone the way of the dodo.
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Tonight, I got to listen to a marketing class over at St. John’s college over in Queens, New York discuss the use of social media and how it would apply to Autism Speaks (I work there now as their Web architect). They were just as immersed in it as much as anyone else and they were all so very young (at least to this 41 year old). It’s amazing to me how quickly popular culture has picked up on social media. It’s only been five years since work started on Twitter and notice the use of “140 characters” as a lyric by a boy band.
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Convio (CNVO) went public yesterday! The IPO did quite well considering the circumstances.
When assessing the two tech IPOs of the day, the second being a hardware manufacturer, an industry analyst said:
“You can keep selling the same (software) code over and over again. On the hardware side, that stuff is obsolete. By the time it is released, there is already something better in development,” said Morningnotes.com founder Ben Holmes.
Convio was hoping to raise $56.5 million with this IPO. The good news for me is that I can now more easily follow Convio in the same way I follow Blackbaud. Unfortunately, the market is down today so it looks like Convio’s stock price will stay at the $10 range today. It did go up as 10.885 on it’s opening day. I hope Convio’s stock price rises as we certainly need more competition for the Blackbaud juggernaut.
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And I think the readers have so far voted Perla Ni, head of greatnonprofits.org, to be the ultimate game changer. I’d like her to keep that lead and to do so, I urge you all to consider throwing in a vote. She’s trying to create a Yelp for Nonprofits which is sorely needed in the nonprofit world. Any time I see someone promoting democratic oversight of nonprofits, I’m all for it.
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Over the weekend a deadly tropical storm slammed into the Philippines, causing severe flooding in urban areas and affecting tens of thousands.
Tuesday, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a tsunami with waves 15 to 20 feet high that crashed into the Samoa islands, destroying homes and taking lives.
Then yesterday and today two successive and devastating earthquakes struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leaving thousands buried in rubble and in desperate need of aid.
Groups funded by the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership are deployed in all three Pacific Ocean emergencies to provide vital communications services that enable relief workers to deliver food aid and emergency supplies.
I don’t have much to say except that I’m finding it difficult to find links to the appropriate aid agencies that will help the victims in this crisis. If you have any links I should place in this article, feel free to include them in the comments.
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Lewis Kelley from the National Forest Foundation has asked how much it would cost for their organization to blog. The purpose of this post is to discuss a basic yearly budget that encompasses setup costs, labor costs and online services. Let’s do some of the basic math.
An alert reader has asked me for a chart on the effect of blog entries on site traffic. I took the time to create a little data table from the Google Analytics reports for APA for Progress. Please be aware that the Jun-09 figures were run on 6/22 so the figures are incomplete for June. These figures run from 1/1/2009 to 9/31/2009. In essence, I’m adding 3 months of extra data.
As you can see in the chart above, there’s a high correlation (.883) (previously .945) between the number of blog entries and the level of site traffic. There’s also an even higher correlation (.903) (previously .820) between the number of blog entries made per month and the number of Google searches that drove users to the site. The correlation numbers have switched mainly because some of the original content on the site in the last month turned out to be tremendously popular and generated a lot of social media buzz. That drives the correlation figures down and especially so for the correlation between blog entries and site traffic. That the correlation got even stronger between blog posts and Google traffic pretty much validates my thinking about blog posts, SEO and Google search traffic. Blog post volume does more to enhance your Google search traffic than it does to enhance your general site traffic volume. However, if your content quality goes up due to the practice involved in making posts and strategizing that comes with it, don’t be surprised to see your site traffic rise in an uncorrelated way with your blog post volume.
I’ve been doing some research lately on building websites for a political advocacy group, Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (APAP). I haven’t been posting lately because I went down a VERY, VERY deep Drupal, information architecture and SEO rabbit hole for the last few months. I would have written this post sooner but I really wanted to confirm a lot of my thoughts first with site traffic measurements. Basically, this is a story of how a very small political advocacy group went from zero to hero in roughly six months. This is going to be a long post so let’s get started. Read more…
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Check out Animoto for a Cause! I’ve been a long time user of Animoto and I’m actually a paid subscriber to Animoto. I’ve had a lot of fun working with their software to make vacation videos out of pictures I’ve taken. The way Animoto works is that you upload a bunch of pictures to their site and perhaps an MP3 for a soundtrack and their software creates a video out of your media. For nonprofits, this is a godsend especially since most nonprofits don’t have dedicated staff for making sophisticated multimedia. The time it takes to upload pics and video is nothing like the time necessary to create and edit a video. I highly recommend this software for nonprofits that hold frequent special events and want to promote them on their site. You can upload the video to YouTube and then embed it on your Web site for an instant promotional video of your work.
Here’s the PR blurb from Animoto itself:
Video creation platform Animoto® (http://animoto.com) today released Animoto for a Cause (http://animoto.com/cause), giving non-profit organizations and community activists free and unlimited access to the full range of Animoto’s services, both standard and premium. Animoto is the web application that lets anyone quickly and easily create dynamic, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music. Now organizations can use the service to promote their cause online in a multitude of ways, from posting and sharing videos on websites, YouTube and social networks, to downloading them to DVD for distribution at events. Animoto for a Cause launches with more than 20 participating charities, ranging from national to regional, and applications are now being accepted from qualified organizations, groups, individuals, non-profits, and activists.
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