I know you want that flashy new red Treo. Or maybe that new Bang Olufsen Serene phone for a mere $1275 or so. Or maybe you’re holding out for the cell phone equivalent of Sasquatch, the Apple iPhone.

Whatever.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not immune to the siren call of any new geeky gadget, least of all a shiny new handheld device with that lets me do something that I wasn’t able to do yesterday. It’s just that, well...

My closet is starting to resemble the island of misfit toys.



There are some old cell phones in there, along with my Powerbook 145 (4MB RAM / 40MB HD / Black and White screen!), old video game systems including the Sega Game Gear, a G4 Cube and other assorted computers along with a collection of cabling that time forgot (SCSI, Parallel, ADB, AAUI-10B2/10BT Ethernet adapters - I have cable issues). It’s a virtual museum of yestertech.

So it was with great glee and not a little bit of melancholy that I read this article about ReCellular, Inc. They are in the business of rounding up old cell phones, repairing what they can and recycling what they can’t fix. The refurbished cell phones are resold into markets that have the same lust for getting CNN piped live into their handset that we do here in the US.

Makes me wonder if the same kind of effort would be successful with old computers, or if in fact someone is already doing the work.

In either event, recycling or refurbishing yestertech beats the heck out of having it collect dust in my closet. Or sitting in a landfill and leaking toxins into our water supply. Or being disassembled by children in some far off corner of the world.
If you’re interested in reading more about the recycling of electronic waste, High Tech Trash comes highly recommended. If you’re more academically inclined, there is research being done there as well. Information on an effort to help companies in the high tech supply chain track the material composition of their products is also available.

Time to clear the closet of all that old tech that you just never know if you’re going to need again someday. Trust me, SCSI isn’t making a comeback.

Google has rolled out a customizable version of their search functionality, so now anyone can roll their own custom search engine. Here's one I made and cheekily decided to call Social Edge Re:Search:

It searches a limited number of sites in the social entrepreneurship field, such as Omidyar.net, Changemakers.net, Kiva.org, GlobalGiving.com and the like. If you Google "job listings" you are going to find a whole heck of a lot of Monster.com and HotJobs listings before you ever find listings from companies seeking social entrepreneurs. If you Re:Search "job listings" via the search box above, you will find job listings from the sites that Social Edge (in this case, me) has pre-selected as being relevant to the field of social entrepreneurship.

I've never been a big fan of customizable functionality that you link to from your site, and even though the search is integrated into this blog post, it still takes you off of the site and onto Google's site. At least it does by default. There is also the option to have the results hosted on your own page as well, and a Google AJAX search API available if you wanted to get really fancy. If this functionality is of use to your customers, take a little extra time and make it part of your site. Who knows? Re:Search might make it into the upcoming redesign of the Social Edge website, and if it does, rest assured that it will be fully integrated.

Also by default, ads are included in your results. If you don't want the ads to show, there is a checkbox for 501(c)(3) non-profits, universities and government agencies to turn the ads off. If, however, you are interested in making a little extra coinage, you can connect it to a new or existing AdSense account.

You can also share the burden of managing the custom search engine with others. By default, visitors can volunteer for this "privelege", or you can choose to restrict it to people you invite, like your unsuspecting co-workers.

One word of warning is that this is brand spanking new, and I've already come across one Safari bug related to some Ajax-y input for adding new sites. Worked fine from Firefox, but I haven't tried it out on Windows at all yet. I'm sure the Safari bug is just an oversight, since Google is working to make sure they're very Mac-friendly. Not surprising given that their CEO is now on Apple's board.

More information is available on John Battelle's SearchBlog.

It’s beautiful. It’s tiny. It’s a bright, shiny shade of red that is just breathtaking. Yes, it’s the new iPod nano (PRODUCT) Red. I want one in the worst way, but I can’t justify it. Not even if I bought a pair of Nike+ shoes and convinced myself that I would start running again, ignoring the fact that the last time I went running George Michael was still with Wham!

The (PRODUCT) Red campaign is a fascinating example not just of typographic excess, but of the corporate sector aligning with the social benefit sector in order to support social change. With $10 for each red iPod sold going to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis an Malaria, it’s not hard to imagine that the campaign will be a fiscal success.

Apple isn’t the only company to start shipping (Product) Red merchandise this past week. Bono and Oprah went shopping at the Gap to get some appropriately hued merchandise to kick off the campaign here in the states. And I can finally replace the Converse Hi-Tops I lost shortly after George went solo and left Andrew Ridgeley wondering how long he could make his pop star earnings last before reality TV would come along and provide washed up has beens a means of supporting themselves without appearing on Murder, She Wrote.

But the (Product) Red nano is the device that grabbed my attention as I am still hanging on to my first generation 5GB iPod, physical click-wheel and all. I’ve waited through the introduction of color screens, touch click-wheels, Nike shoe integration, games and video. Now I find myself waiting until they make a version with a larger screen. Some people are just never satisfied.

The most enticing new feature since I bought my monochrome version isn’t a shiny red metallic casing. When photo capability was added, an interesting by-product was that you could put Powerpoint/Keynote slide sets to your iPod and carry them around with you just in case you found yourself trapped on an elevator with someone with the means to fund your efforts. If you use Keynote, you can buy themes with slides that are optimized for iPod viewing. It also makes for a nice back-up plan in case your computer stops functioning before you give a presentation. If you have some videos showing what your organization does, throw them on there too and keep them handy for your next long trip down from the penthouse.

Lost in yesterday's headlines about North Korea + Nukes and Google + YouTube was another merger, that of Google + Social Edge:

Okay, this merger was strictly in my head, as I work on the design for the new Social Edge site, coming soon. Still, I envy a site design that is that simple, clean and pure.

Okay, I also envy the thought of having $1.65 Billion to play with, but let's not venture off into Fantasyland too much. $1,650,000,000. That's enough to build your own evil empire with:

As far as Google + YouTube, I have to admit that I don't quite get it. It seems to me to be an obscene amount of money to pay for something that you have already built yourself. Especially when so much of the content is of questionable copyright validity. I mean, what did Napster sell for? $8M.* What is the difference here?

Well, if I understand those kinds of questions, maybe I would have that $1.65B to play around with. Instead, I find myself wondering more and more about the advantages one finds in the social sector, where the competition that drives a company to buy up a competitor that has the same basic product simply doesn't exist. Then again, maybe I'm still suffering from an acute case of naiveté.

Still, I think that one of the interesting things that can happen in the social sector is that the different organizations supporting social entrepreneurs can excel at different parts of the puzzle and integrate our work together for the benefit of the whole sector. Utilizing a common identity system is the most obvious first step, but there are plenty of other ways for the work we do here to integrate with the work others do in the social sector.

Right now, I'm more concerned with getting the revised Social Edge site wrapped up and in your hands, and then with the inevitable clean-up that follows such a task. It'll be interesting to see how things shake up after that. More interesting than building the same things as everybody else and then trying to mash like things together like they do over in the non-social sector.

Working at the Social Edge is a humbling experience. You can go through life thinking that what you do for a living, what you do with your life has meaning. You can believe that what you do makes a positive difference in the world, that your life has some sense of minor gravitas - and then you meet someone like Victoria Hale or Gary Cohen and you realize that there are levels of degrees. We can’t all quit our jobs to teach children in Nepal to read - can we? So what do we do instead?

My task-at-hand is to rebuild the Social Edge web site. I have been working on this endeavor for a couple of months now, and the fruits of this labor will be coming your way in short order. The biggest difference that you will find once we relaunch the site is that it will be better integrated and it will make it easier to find information and to contribute your thoughts and ideas to the discussions that take place here.

Obviously, this work is not on par with the work that a lot of the folks I am privileged to meet here at Social Edge do, or with the work that a lot of you in the Social Edge community do. My hope is that the new Social Edge site will be a solid foundation on which to continue building the Social Edge network of social entrepreneurs and helping you to make the world a better place for all.

When the site launches, there will be some new features that I will talk about in the coming weeks, but mainly, we are building with an eye to the future, trying to make sure that we have a good technical base that will allow us to deliver new integrated features to the community quickly and with high quality. I see it as the next step in enhancing our ability to connect the pieces of the social sector’s long tail, create critical mass and enable those who want to work in the social sector to do so.

One thing I have learned in my time at Social Edge is that a community of principled, dedicated individuals can get things done that a handful of individuals simply cannot. I look forward to getting our handiwork into your hands and seeing what we can make of it together.

What do you want to see on Social Edge?