i’m sorry, i just don’t know

A recent report by G. Oliver Young from Forrester Research shows an increasing trend in organizations purchasing and using Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, wikis, widgets, podcasting software, etc.).

It is interesting that there seems to be a direct correlation between the size of the organization and whether or not they are actually buying Web2.0 apps. The larger the organization, the more likely it is to be buying or considering Web 2.0 applications.

via WebGuild

I’m not a programmer.  I’m a novice mash-upper.  I needed to figure out how to gather, aggregate, and publish the blog posts of community members to my existing website.  My constraints:  I couldn’t just set up a wordpress blog to do it.  I had to display this aggregation in our existing community website.  And, my current site did not support any additional forms.  So here’s how I did it…

1. We have a Society website up built on Wild Apricot that lets me set up members only pages.  I set up a “Submit your Blog” page there.
2. Since Wild Apricot has no API (boo!) into their data, I had to find an external form service, enter:  Wufoo.  The free account lets us build up to three forms.  They store the data (which I’m not concerned about because it is publicly available blogs) which we can access via an online API.
3. I manually (here’s the clunky part) add the feeds to Yahoo Pipes which publishes them out as one aggregated RSS feed.
4. This feed gets turned into a widget by me and Widgetbox.
5. I copy the code for the widget into my community site, and everything is right in the world.

Why a community site is good for an Association…  We want to be clear that we support collaborative engagement around issues relevant to our industry.  Only our MEMBERS can contribute to the conversation.  People are motivated to do this because it builds their online reputation- a powerful motivator as can be seen by the popularity of Web 2.0 apps that support online identity development and social presence (think Facebook- a multi-billion dollar company).

Widgetbox is an online repository of widgets for your website.  My favorites:

• Target Firefox Adsense - This widget only shows your firefox adsense to IE users.  So don’t bother your readers who are brilliant enough to use practically anything other than IE.  Besides, it’s only IE users who click on ads, right?
• Google Site Translator - Let people translate your site into their language.
• Meebo me - Chat with people on your site.

You can also “widgetize” your own blog or site to share with others, and produce or find iMix widgets that let you play mixes of music on your site.