Future:Media:Change

The hope and promise of technology to improve governance was on display at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum 2010. So too were the technologies created to make those hopes a reality. Some were not yet in beta, others had been in use for over a year; some had official presentations, others were mentioned as asides. Here is a rundown of the applications that were discussed.

Think big. Think really big. Double that, and you have an idea of why 1GOAL uses all caps in its name.

Today 1GOAL announced a mobile initiative as big as its goal to provide universal education: using SMS to invite 1.5 billion people to support the campaign.

The Internet has surpassed TV and radio as the most essential medium for Americans, a new study finds, and roughly as many people would choose to live without TV as the Internet if forced to choose. Given the usage metrics reported in the rest of the study, it’s no wonder. Here are highlights of its findings.

Top prizes in journalism were shared amongst a brand new model of nonprofit news production that places investigative articles in major publications; a cartoonist who transitioned from print illustrations to 45 second flash animations; a middling paper in a small market mixing old and new, and a traditional major market paper about to be swallowed by debt and handed to creditors.

A city awash with arms and with a homicide rate higher than most of the world’s conflict zones, Rio de Janeiro is suffering from a culture of fear. Affecting everyone. Filmmakers are aiming to tell stories that make a difference.

The ubiquitous calls to help Haiti by texting “Haiti” to 90999 last month, and the $41 million raised by the effort, may have opened your organization’s eyes to the possibilities of mobile messaging, but what are reasonable expectations for more run-of-the-mill mobile campaigns? To answer this question, M+R and MobileActive.org have released 2010 Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmarks. Here are the highlights of that report.

Twitter recently announced the introduction of Local Trends, giving people the ability to search by location-based trending topics. The race for location based information is on, but what does this mean for non profits? Can we capitalize on what may become the 2010 buzz topic?