So, last week I was complaining about how monitors don't fold, so nothing on the web is above the fold. This week? Our New Entrepreneurs podcast series has been picked up in iTunes, and is featured in their New Releases section on the Podcasts homepage:


Above the fold? Not that important. More important is that it is at the home page level instead of being on the Government & Organizations section or even farther down in the Non-Profits section. In this medium, we're getting the same visibility as ESPN, Gallup - and clonepod. The net isn't constrained the way paper is, it is three dimensional, hierarchical... Are social entrepreneurs going to usurp the attention of those who want sports news? Video games? Politics? Probably not. Then again, why not?

Apple, thanks for featuring us. It helps us to see that the world isn't solely focused on sports stars, teenage pop-divas and the like. There is a desire for more relevant content, and it is nice to see a venue where that rises to the top.

Lately it seems as though the tech world hasn't been keeping up with accessibility. It's easy to overlook accessibility issues when you're in a rush to get things out to market, and it seems that closed captions have been one of the casualties of the market. I recently sat in on a conference session that dealt with accessibility issues in the Web 2.0 space, and as aware that all the cool whiz-bang features AJAX and Web 2.0 methodologies bring us aren't always developed with everyone in mind. It's still a young market, and I'm glad to see efforts made to close the gap here. What I didn't realize was that closed captions had taken such a hit.

It's understandable with the explosion of video podcasts that not everyone is adding captions to their videos they make in their mother's basement. We haven't done so with the X-Interviews - yet - and really, a lot of people are just starting to get the hang of getting video on the web at all. What surprised me, however, was that HDTV shows and digital downloads were either missing captions or they were difficult to access. I don't know anything about HDTV standards, but it seemed to me like this was a ridiculous problem to have with a technology that was designed to allow more information to be included in the stream, not less.

The digital downloads were less surprising, but still - Quicktime has included closed captions since 7.2 and the iTunes store sells TV shows that have already been captioned. Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. Somebody at Apple must have thought so too, as the new version of iTunes with it's highly touted ringtone feature also includes support for closed captioning. My iPhone is perpetually set to vibrate, so there's little concern that people watching a movie with me will be interrupted by the Commodores "Brick House" if my partner calls me. For me, the closed captioning support is a much more relevant and welcome addition.

It is supported in podcasts as well, as you can see in this SpaceGeek podcast. It's also a nice way to take video shot in one language and make the content available to people who speak other languages.

Hopefully, Apple will update the listings soon to provide an easy way to tell if a video is closed captioned or not. Right now, I can't tell what is or isn't. I searched for closed captioning and came up with one season each of 24 and Stargate - but neither mentioned if they actually were closed captioned. Still, it's a step in the right direction. The new iPods are also supporting captions, though I haven't seen that myself as of yet.

I should also note that Google Video supports closed captions, and has a nice, visible marker denoting videos as such. It's great to see this start to happen, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses. Hopefully there will be some decent, inexpensive automatic captioning applications soon so that everybody can include them in their videos easily whether they are filming on a big Hollywood sound stage or in their mother's basement.

We're still a little bit stunned here on the Edge. We knew that Global X had a huge following, but bigger than the President of the United States? Well, yes, it appears that he does. The X-Interviews has been at the top of the iTunes Goverment & Organizations charts since shortly after we went to press last Tuesday. George W. Bush trails X in the #2 slot with his weekly radio address.


This doesn't mean that we're planning any inaugural festivities in DC. Global X is an international sort and can't be tied down to a single hemisphere, much less a single country. Maybe if the World Bank comes a calling he'll step in and lead that august body, but for now we're keeping X on the Edge.

What it does mean is that people are interested in the stories that social entrepreneurs have to tell. It means that it is easier than ever before for you to tell your stories to the people who want to hear them.

So what does it take for you to join Global X at the top of the iTunes charts? Does it require hiring a video production staff and buying a lot of highly specialized equipment?  Does it require a plethora of technical expertise to get the podcasts feeds published?

Nope.

Camcorders can be had relatively cheap these days. HD camcorders are shiny, new, expensive toys, of course, but you just need a basic camcorder to get things rolling. The web still isn't built for hi-def, and a regular camcorder can be had for under $250. You can add a tripod for less than $30. For higher quality audio, you might want to add a microphone, but you should be able to get by without.

We use Macintoshes here on the Edge, so we didn't need to get any additional video software. Every Mac these days comes with iMovie, a more than adequate and easy to use video editing program. Windows Vista comes with Windows Movie Maker for editing your movies. Higher end packages are available for both platforms, and there are inexpensive packages available for older versions of the operating systems as well.

To create the XML feed for iTunes, as I mentioned in previous posts, you can create the code by hand, but hey, let's make this easy. Feeder is an elegant solution for Mac, and The Podcast RSS Buddy is available for Windows as well as Mac. Submit the feed to Apple, and wait to see your videos in iTunes. While you're waiting, might as well publish to YouTube as well. It's easier than sending an email to Grandma.

That's all it takes for you to join Global X on iTunes and YouTube. How many social entrepreneurs can land on the charts at once? It would be fun to find out, wouldn't it?

When we started considering relaunching Social Edge last year, we thought about launching a Social Edge Media Empire®! Radio! TV! Movies! We're very humble here on the Edge, but our aspirations know no boundaries. Sure, we're small, but we could take on the CNN's, NPR's & Sony's of the world!

Alas, then we remembered, we're a web community. We want to build conversations, not transmitter towers. The cost involved in setting up a TV station or a radio station? Astronomical. The range? Not so hot. Our audience here on the edge is global, and we want to expand that global reach, not constrain it to any one place.

Still, we knew we wanted to expand our offerings in new ways in order to incorporate audio and video. We added audio in our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast series and video in Global X's series of X-Interviews. Yay! We had made a move towards being more media rich. Not an empire just yet, but hey, have you priced Colosseum sized real estate these days? Even in Second Life, virtual land is starting to gain in value.

Now, SocialEdge.org has global reach. Anybody on the internet can reach us no matter where in the world they are, government censorship not withstanding. (Is there a site out there that will tell you if your site is being blocked by a government? I would love to find one.) Still, Social Edge may be older than YouTube, but we don't get as much traffic as the average otter video does there. 5,546,204 views? 36,472 people marked it as a favorite? 7984 comments? I kid you not, this is what is more important to people than microfinance and social entrepreneurial scalability:


That's what we need here on the Edge: more videos of cute and fluffy animals! The lure of anthropomorphized aquatic mammals is the siren song of the 21st century.

So, we started our own YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/socialedge. Okay, I'll be honest, not a lot of people have visited our channels and watched our videos. Maybe we need to get a couple of social entrepreneurs to float in a pool holding hands. Any volunteers? We have a couple of subscribers thus far, but the main thing is that if you want to include an X-Interview in your blog, you can embed the YouTube code into your blog to do so. And it is free to post the videos, so if it never picks up much, we're not losing any money, just a couple of minutes each time we post a video.

For the next part of the expanding Social Edge Media Empire® we turned our attention to iTunes. As I detailed in an earlier post, I used a shareware app for the Mac called Feeder to create the XML feeds with iTunes extensions and then posted them to our site. I submitted them to Apple and we got picked up pretty quick. Peace Corps Entrepreneurs showed up the next morning, while the X-Interviews took about a week to show up. I was very impatient and emailed Apple to find out what was taking the second feed so long to get indexed! Nothing in particular, I just needed to be patient and voila! It showed up.

I had thought that it would link the two podcasts together on a single author's page, but that is something that Apple does manually if you ask them to. Our page is plain, but shows both our podcasts. Apple designs custom artist pages for the most popular podcasters, so maybe it'll be prettier someday. We've been very excited to see them rise on the charts, reaching as high as #3 & #9 on the non-profits sub-category list of top podcasts and #6 & #19 on the Governments & Organizations category. More rewarding still was to see the X-Interviews in the New Releases section of the iTunes Podcast home page.

As it turns out, it wasn't rocket science. If your organization has audio or video that you think a larger audience would benefit from than traditionally pass through your site, take a look at publishing on iTunes. It won't take long and is a small added step to your publishing process that could expose more people to your organization's purpose and mission. Just don't be too popular, okay? We like seeing ourselves listed in the top podcasts and don't need you coming in and kicking us out! Maybe in a year or two there will be enough podcasts from Social Edge members to warrant a new Social Entrepreneurs category in iTunes. Now that would be the start of a real Social Edge Media Empire®!

The Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast has been featured as New & Notable for the nonprofit category in iTunes, and has risen to #7 in the list of top podcasts. If you have checked out the podcast and loved it, you could always leave a review over in iTunes

The X-Interviews are also available on iTunes, though they don't show up yet via the search. Not sure why, but if I find out I'll be sure to let you know.

Our YouTube channel isn't getting much traffic yet, but it is early.

So, what do these three things have in common?

Oh, sure, it's easy to say that all three offer a view of a possible future, but that would be too easy. And yes, all three feature an air of mystery about them. What is Year Zero and its web campaign all about? What were they thinking making a prequel to Star Trek? (Oh, they're doing it again? *sigh*) Who is Global X?

Still not the answer I was looking for, but wow! I never realized that NIN, Star Trek and Social Edge had so much in common! And this week, all three are new on iTunes, where our Peace Corps. on the Edge series of podcasts can now be found. With a little bit of luck, you might also be able to see the X-Interviews there as well by the time you read this. If not, they are available over on YouTube all tagged up and ready to be linked to in your blog, if you so desire.

If you have your own podcast and want to publish it in iTunes, you pop the feed url in here and Apple reviews the feed before publishing. A standard XML feed works okay, but iTunes has it's own custom extensions that you'll want to include as well. If you're a Mac use, there's an app called Feeder from Reinvented Software that even gives you a preview of what your feed will look like in iTunes. I'm sure there's something similar for Windows as well, or you can add the extensions by hand in your text editor of choice.

Now if only there was a Star Trek/NIN video mashup to wrap things up... ah! Here it is:

Last week I talked about how to rob a bank. Okay, not really. “Bank robber” wasn’t an option for career day in high school, and with good reason. No medical benefits. Oh, and the whole it’s immoral and you’ll end up dead or incarcerated if you choose to pursue it thing. Pshaw.

I also talked about going where the viewers are. A lot more people go to YouTube than will ever go to yoursocialenterprisenamehere.org. You have videos? Pics? Podcasts? Post them to your site and post them to YouTube, Flickr and iTunes.

It’s not enough, however, to just take your current content and stick it up on these sites. Web 2.0 is all about motion. It’s all about what’s there today that wasn’t there yesterday. Posting things once might get someone to your site once, but how do you stay in their conscience? How do you lodge your message into their cerebellum?

I give you the wise words of the fox in Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince:

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. First you'll sit down at a little distance from me - like that - in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you'll sit a little closer to me, every day…"

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If for example, you came at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is ready to greet you…”

Or in the words of another Prince:

There’s joy in repetition.
There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

Etc. Etc. Etc. (And yes, I realize that pulling lyrics from an obscure album track off of the soundtrack to Prince’s last motion picture brings up the obvious question of why he never made another motion picture? Endorphinemachine could have been turned into a franchise with the right supporting cast. Hollywood, take note.)

Posting a single podcast to iTunes? Fine. But tell the fox that you’ll post one every Thursday and he’ll start to anticipate it’s arrival. Whatever type of content you have to post, do it on a regular basis. Don’t expect immediate results, as relationships with an audience takes time to develop.

My NetVibes Flickr module did get updated with new pictures tagged “social entrepreneur” this week, so at least one person read my blog last week. Global X. He’s always cutting edge, ahead of the pack. Soon, I hope, there will be new photos tagged social entrepreneur on a regular basis. Certainly others will follow in Global X’s bold, trendsetting footsteps, no? Certainly pics of social entrepreneurs are at least as interesting as ones of people playing with Wii?

I have a diagram in my office that delineates the Elements of User Experience. It is a very helpful roadmap on how to conceptualize, design and develop a web site. You start with your objectives and the needs of your users and you work your way through functional specs and content requirements to your interation design and information architecture before working out your information design and then finally you get to work on the part that is usually the first consideration of web site development, the visual design.

It's a solid model to keep in mind when developing a web site, which is why I have it on my wall. It also gives me something to point at when somebody asks why making the site pretty is the last part of the process. Never underestimate the power of having outside expert opinion to point to when creating something new.

Once you have built your site, you might feel that your work is done. Take your team out and celebrate the accomplishment, but remember that your work is only just getting started. There's scaling to worry about, the acquisition and intelligent analysis of statistics and, of course, SEO - otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization or "How to get Google to notice me." Maybe there's an AdSense account in your near-term future. These are all important tasks, but there's more to your organization's presence on the web than just your web site.

The data on your web site is just that, data. Your site is one way for you to share that data with your intended audiences. It is one very effective way of sharing your information, but it is not the only way. Think of your web site as your store and your home page as your storefront. Your Google ranking will tell you if you're in a big shopping mall or a little strip mall. You can sell your wares, you can advertise to let people know where you're located and you can do a nice little business this way. Even in a strip mall.

Or you can find more places to display your wares/data. Starbuck's isn't content with having a store on every corner, including locations across the street from each other. There are 4 Starbuck's within a block and a half of my house, but they don't stop there. They also have mini-coffee shops in my grocery store, book store and convenience store, not to mention the Starbuck's branded ice cream and coffee beans on the shelves too.

Your data is your tall mocha mint frappucinno half-fat no whip blended whatchamacallit. You don't have to limit yourself to your local strip mall. Get it out there and put it to good use.

You could create a NetVibes module that keeps people updated with the latest postings on your site. Dappit.com/Dapper allows you to create "Dapps" that utilise your data by browing your web site and automatically figuring out what the data points are. It even lets you create NetVibes modules as a result. (Caveat - I tried this with two different sites with very different results - one worked fine, the other was, shall we say, confused.) You can create Widgets and Gadgets and put your data on people's desktops. Plenty has been written of late about Second Life. Share your podcasts out on iTunes. There are plenty of tools available now that let you open up your own little mini-site within the context of somebody elses.

It's a wild and wooly web out there. Don't get stuck in a corner, get entangled.

The Long Tail, as described and analyzed by Chris Anderson, is fun to apply to all kinds of markets that are affected by technology. The most obvious sector is the media and entertainment industry, as its products are easily digitized and are consumed in a very high profile manner. TV re-runs have been commodotized to the point where a pilot for a show based on the Aquaman comic book character hit the top of iTunes video charts. Obscure musicians can find a large enough following to justify following their muse.

Other markets are changing, and becoming deeper as well. Everything from the grocery store to the financial sector is being affected. Sometimes the changes are harder to discern, but they're there nonetheless. So what about the social sector?

Big "hits" exist in the social sector market. That much is obvious when the Gates Foundation makes the headlines on a regular basis, and the Jerry Lewis telethon raised a record $61 million over the weekend for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The head of this market is easy to spot and understand.

So what's in the tail?

I would argue that the long tail of the social sector is the domain of social entrepreneurs, and the work that they do is often enhanced or made possible by advances in technology that allow them to reach a targeteed audience of benefactors to make a focused impact on their cause of choice. From microfinance organizations such as Kiva to the targeted charity of GlobalGiving to entrepreneurs in the field giving their time and energy to make changes both large and small, the long tail is at work making it easier for individuals to make a measurable difference.