The Essentials of Online Advocacy Begin With Email, frogloop.

The critical elements
1) Email communications (the most important and powerful tool)
2) Your website: enabling people to do things and attracting new supporters
3) Expertise: develop it or hire it - but don't ignore it
4) Campaigning actions: you need things for people to do

Beyond the essentials
5) Tracking and Analysis: knowing what works, what doesn't work and why
6) Time: having the time, effort and focus to deliver a campaigning action
7) Budget: to spend on creative content, promotion and/or external help
8) Plan: how your online contributes to your offline
9) Feedback channels: listening to supporters and learning how to engage them

Twitter: The first draft of history?, mathewingram.com/work.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Using Facebook Chat via Jabber, Facebook.com.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

* Communicate with their friends
* See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
* Set their statuses

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.