When you have a MacBook Pro delivered, the nice shiny white Apple box comes inside a less shiny brown shipping box. In fact, the Apple box is suspended inside that shipping box by paper corner pads. While I’m stoked that these packaging pieces are recyclable (Apple does pay attention to the impact of its products), turns out they’re reusable too!

I noticed the spacing between the edges was the same width as Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, which are everywhere in my house. When I put the two together, they fit perfectly…then I thought about how I could use them. Sure enough, they are nearly the perfect height to work with the standard Thomas riser tracks. Very cool, and something new for the little ones to be creative with!

Whew, that’s a mouthful!

Over the last 12 months, I’ve been writing a (long-titled) book with my extemed collegue, Melanie Mathos. We are thrilled that 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide will be coming out in February 2012, and I’m sure I’ll write more about here on this blog.

in the mean time, if you’re into nonprofit social media and want to learn more about using it to engage, raise money, and measure your digital impact, pre-orders are available on Amazon.com.

I’m one of those social media geeks that never stops talking about how important listening is. So I often find myself presenting a session on the topic, as I did at the 2010 Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits. My good friend Danielle Brigida and I followed our session with a workshop where our students built a social media listening dashboard using RSS feeds and iGoogle.

I took the materials from that workshop and created the worksheet you see below. It can help you get a listening dashboard setup at your nonprofit. Feel free to download and use it to learn everything you can about your supporters!

I’ve blogged about this over at NetWitsThinkTank.com, but thought I should stick it here too. Enjoy!

We have a new tradition emerging here at the Norman house: on New Years Eve/Day we create our favorite things tag cloud! *here’s 2009′s* This year during dinner, we each wrote down some of the things we liked from 2010 (we help the little ones). Then I typed them up and sent them through Wordle.net, and whoop – there it is: a few of our favorite things from 2010!

Happy New Year everyone!

Back in late 1997, Gabo Mendoza single handedly changed the course of interactive communication forever when he unleashed Gabocorp.com (archive removed!) upon an unsuspecting design world. Flash had been around for a short time, but nobody had ever built an entire site with it. In fact, I’m not sure anyone had even thought to…except for Gabo Mendoza.

If you were designing back then, I’m sure you remember Gabocorp. TechRadar lists it as one of the 20 websites that changed the world – right up there with Wikipedia and YouTube. My team and I were working with Authorware, Director, and After Effects in those days, so Gabocorp’s super-smooth vector goodness blew our minds. I mean, it blew everyone’s mind. We wanted Flash. Badly.

By January of 1998, we finally convinced our manager to order a copy of Flash 2. When it arrived, my dear friend Tim Sisco and I huddled around my PC and began to play. We naturally tried to build something similar to Gabocorp, and spent about 30 minutes making what was basically a Flash doodle (turn your speakers on and see below). Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible – but this new platform had set us free. Tweening from color to color, mixing multiple audio tracks on the fly, and running things full screen felt like magic. It was crazy. The world would soon grow tired of Flash sites, but you gotta give Gabocorp credit for propelling the Internet several giant steps forward.

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First off, a huge happy new year to you all!

Today at lunch, Jen, Cooper, Graham, Zoe and I sat around our kitchen table, writing down all of our favorite things from 2009. It was fun reading them out loud, hearing what we had in common, and telling stories from throughout the year. Being a huge geek, I naturally thought a word/tag cloud might be the perfect way to visualize the year’s goodness, so I went to Wordle.net – because  they rock.

Here’s the 2009 Norman Family Favorites Cloud:

Last week I spoke at the 2009 Conference for Nonprofits, and one of my presentations was called 50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits. Organizations often have social media channels developed, and are just looking for ideas they can use to engage their followers. This presentation is a roundup of 50 things nonprofits can do on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, StumpleUpon, etc.

It’s been a while since I’ve linked back to my nonprofit tech blog, Webby Things. It’s been hard lately to find the time to eek out posts on a regular basis, but I truly love working with and helping nonprofits. If you’re into that sort of thing, here are a few posts from the last couple months you might want to check out:

• 9 Simple Things Everyone Should Know about Twitter Hashtags
• Find Your Local Social Media Club
• 6 Dogooding Webby Things Your Nonprofit Should Check Out
• Power to Your Peeps! Real-time Fundraising with Twitter
• 15 Clay Shirky Quotes That Blew My Mind at NTC

There. Now maybe I’ll get off my butt and actually finish the dozen or so drafts I’ve written. In the meant time, be sure to check out some quality dogooding tech musings at NetWits Think Tank, Socialbrite.org, or Beth’s Blog.

Last Friday I spoke on the social networking panel at the Charleston Green Business Expo. It was part of the Charleston Green Fair, where I also exhibited for Go Green Charleston. I always love having a chance to talk social media with excited people. I like to remind everyone that listening to an audience is probably more important than broadcasting to them. Listening really works, and can help you make smarter decisions.

I used these slides for an eight minute into on listening. I’m not sure how well they hold up without me ranting, but here they are nevertheless:

What problem can’t be solved with social media these days?

Our neighborhood was having trouble communicating, working together, and behaving like a true community, so we turned to Ning.com to help us improve that.

Using Ning it took only minutes to create a full-featured social network complete with groups, discussion forums, an event calendar, blogs, and photo sharing. After a few tweaks, neighbors were invited and The Longpoint Commons was born.

I’ve been working with online communities for years, and Ning has always impressed me with how easy it is for people to use. It seems like everyone who signs up immediately begins to write blog posts, join groups, or just build out their profile. A volunteer brigade, neighborhood crime watch group, and resident meetups appeared right away. It’s clear that social media makes it easier for busy, family-oriented suburbanites to connect. It really does take a village, and technology can make the village really hum.

I still have not read Chris Anderson‘s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, most likely because it is still sitting in my Amazon cart. The book examines the economy of free, and how it is evolving in today’s market. Whenever he speaks on this topic, as I saw him do at SXSW, he always gets grilled about why the book itself is not free (pssst, it is if you want to read it online). It’s not free because Chris needs to feed his family, who are apparently eating really well – Check out the price increase for “Free” that awaited me when I logged in today:

And yes, I’ll probably still buy the book!