Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / September-13-2007


Marshall Kirkpatrick Joins Read/WriteWeb
I'm very pleased to announce that Marshall Kirkpatrick is joining Read/WriteWeb as a Lead Writer, starting this Monday. Marshall teams up with Josh Catone in this role, meaning that Read/WriteWeb now has three daily writers (including myself). Marshall will focus on breaking news for Read/WriteWeb, something he is very skilled at and which will complement Josh and I well. Josh's role hasn't changed - he will continue to provide daily news and analysis. My own role will change a bit - I will still write daily on R/WW, but focus more on analysis. Also of course having Marshall on board allows me to spend more time growing the business.In order to join R/WW and work more on his independent consulting practice, Marshall has resigned from his role as Director of Content at SplashCast Media, a media syndication company. Many of you will remember Marshall from his previous job as lead blogger at TechCrunch. Before that, Marshall was the editor of AOL's Social Software Weblog and...

SilverStripe - Open Source CMS Has Support From Google
Content Management Systems (CMS) aren't the most sexiest applications in the world. When you think CMS, you probably think Vignette, Interwoven or a similar enterprise-level product. Those systems are usually bulky and difficult to use. At the other end of the spectrum are blogging platforms, such as Movable Type or Wordpress, which are renown for being fairly lightweight and easy to use - but often they lack the high-end functionality (content approval process, version control, reporting, etc) required in a CMS.In the middle of this spectrum (Enterprise CMS -- Blog Platform) lies SilverStripe, an open source CMS system developed by a small company out of Wellington, New Zealand. It has a simple web interface and was built using PHP5, an alternative developer framework to the more popular web 2.0 framework Ruby on Rails. SilverStripe was recently named as one of 5 finalists in the Most Promising Open Source CMS Award, part of the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards held by Packt Publishing....

Kiva.org Crosses $11 Million in Microloans to Developing Nations
San Franciso-based Kiva.org, a microfinance non-profit organization founded in 2005, is one of the best success stories of the charitable web. In just 2 years, the site has funded nearly 17,000 loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, and last week the total amount of those loans crossed the $11 million mark.In late March, 2005 Elizabeth Omalla, a woman from the town of Tororo in Uganda, received the first Kiva.org loan for $500 to help expand her burgeoning fish selling business. Shortly there after 6 other entrepreneurs in developing nations received loans from the site, in total worth $2,150. By September of that year, all seven initial microloan recipients had repaid their loans and Kiva.org was launched to the public. The company incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in November, 2005.Within a few weeks of the site opening, founder Matt Flannery left his job at TiVo to work on the project full-time; later he would be joined by Permal Shah, who was...

Non-Profits Web Tool Kit
We're focusing on non-profits and charities on Read/WriteWeb this week, and with that in mind, we decided to take a look at what web-based tools exist to make running and organizing a non-profit or charity organization easier. It turns out, there are many of them.We've organized the cream of the crop into the tool kit presented below. It's likely that we missed some tools that could be used by charities, non-profit organizations, or other groups to run their online operations, so please feel free to leave your favorite sites for this type of work in the comments.Creating a WebsiteObviously the first thing you'll need when bringing your non-profit organization online is a web site. Grassroots.org offers free web hosting and web design services to non-profit organizations. Unfortunately, their offerings are not very up-to-date (i.e., it appears their free hosting does not support PHP or any other server-side scripting language), and 100MB of file space might not get you very...

deliGoo Mashes Google with del.icio.us
deliGoo is a nifty new add on for Firefox 2.0+ and IE 6.0+ that mashes up del.icio.us with Google Custom Search. The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user's del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag, or all of the bookmarks under a single tag from a single user.This can be very helpful for people who want to find something from among many untagged bookmarks, or for people who don't care to bother with tags but still want to get some utility out of del.icio.us. deliGoo can also be helpful to search among the collective knowledge of a large group of people (i.e., if I search only among sites tagged with "MySQL," I am presumably searching among the knowledge of a bunch of database gurus).Unfortunately, deliGoo has some oddities and drawbacks that make it less useful than it could be. One of the major things that jumped out at me is just how useless the Firefox extension actually is. The purpose of the extension...