In the previous posts, I discussed Facebook and Twitter. While these two are very popular, there are many other social networks on the Internet. Many of them are for a specific community, or are popular in certain geographical regions. Following are those alternatives that would be of interest to an American Legion Department, Post, Unit, or Squadron.
MySpace
While not as popular as Facebook, MySpace is a very large social network. While there are users who accounts on both, the percentage is very small. If you do a search of MySpace, you will find a solid representation of The American Legion from National down to individual Posts.
While MySpace is classed as a microblog, it also supports email, blogs, photos, videos, and music. It takes a bit of experimenting with their page layout, but you can create a reasonably good looking page. The best appropach is to study other American Legion pages and then build your own. The are easy to change, as they are nothing more than arranging building blocks called Apps.
Yammer
Yammer is a social networking service for companies and organizations. Yammer uses the domain of the users email address to determine the company affiliation. For example, all e-mail addresses ending in mtlegion.org would be part of a single social network. Yammer is an excellent tool for intra-organization communication.
Ning
Ning is a create your own social network site. Ning has tools for finding friends, and building your network. Due to a change in Ning's policy, there is no longer a search engine for finding social networks. However, there is a Ning Social Network that lists those who which to be listed.
Ning takes far more work than any of the previously mentioned options. However, it is the most flexible for building an open or closed social network.
SocialGO
SocialGo is another site that allows you to build your own social network. Unlike Ning, SocialGo is a pay-as-you-go service, although it does offer a very limited free plan.
Yahoo
In terms of social networking, Yahoo is not really a great site. However, it is a good source for an e-mail account, if you cannot get one from your Department. American Legion of Montana offers e-mail accounts to all posts, units, and squadrons withing the department.
Beyond Yahoo mail, the features that you may use are Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Internet Messenger (YIM), and Flickr (for photos).
Google
There is no short way to explain all the Google applications. Your Gmail account is the key to accessing Google's product. In terms of features, Gmail offers far more features than Yahoo mail, including chat. Orkut is Google's social network. However, the majority of users on Orkut are in Brazil or China, with US users making up about 17% of Orkut's user base.
Google Talk is their Internet Messaging (IM) product, which is similar to ICQ and AIM. Picasa is for sharing photos, and YouTube for videos. Of course, Blogger is their blogging product, on which this blog is hosted.
Summary
The above sampling of social works demonstrates that the Internet world is changing. Email and static Web sites are giving away to the dynamic interaction of social networking. Instead of subscribing to e-mail list, you can follow Twitter streams, or Facebooks live feed. Services such as Yammer bring the concept of social network into the organization.
Every service has its own adherents. The temptation is to try and reach every community, by participating in every social network. This can lead to the ever present danger of a site containing out-dated information. When looking at The American Legion's MySpace page, I noticed a reference to VetCam, a service which no longer exits. Yet, there was no reference to Burnpit. The point is that becoming over extended can lead to orphaned pages on some social network.
Friday, January 29, 2010
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Standing Orders:
Constitutions and By-laws. The American Legion is a resolution based grassroots organization. As such, The American Legion National Commander is the only spokesperson of the organization. Although personal comments and voices of dissent are welcome, any posted messages/items, implicitly or explicitly denoting representation of the whole organization not adhering to the resolutions passed by the National Executive Committee will be removed without notification.
Do not post messages/items that are unlawful, harassing, defamatory, or abusive.
Do not post Hate Speech, defines as "any comments intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, moral or political views, socioeconomic class, occupation or appearance.
"No spamming or flooding. Don't repost the same message/items or very similar messages/items, more than once. Relevance. Interesting posts that are off the current topic are acceptable. When that happens, we'll try to start another thread, and move the comments over. However, banal or repetitive off-topic posts lower the value of the conversation for everyone and may be removed.
No impersonating. Impersonating someone is not acceptable (however, impersonation of comical intent will be tolerated with reserved right to censor and/or reject base on our interpretations).
Links. Do not post stupid random links.
Copyright and the law. You own the copyright in your postings, but you also agree to grant to The American Legion a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicenseable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, play, and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to any such work worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any media now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content. In other words, if you post a good comment, we may use it in our publications. If you do not wish to grant such rights, do not post to this site. You may not violate, plagiarize, or infringe on the rights of third parties including copyright, trademark, trade secret, privacy, personal, publicity, or proprietary rights. Phew.
Standing Orders:
Constitutions and By-laws. The American Legion is a resolution based grassroots organization. As such, The American Legion National Commander is the only spokesperson of the organization. Although personal comments and voices of dissent are welcome, any posted messages/items, implicitly or explicitly denoting representation of the whole organization not adhering to the resolutions passed by the National Executive Committee will be removed without notification.
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