Ed Batista

The Slate 60

Today Slate unveiled their ninth annual list of the 60 most generous American philanthropists.  (Here's an intro, and here's the list.)  A few noteworthy gifts

• Bill and Melinda Gates topped the list with $3.4 billion to their foundation (although $2.7 billion of that was just a pledge.)  It's good to be a Gates!  It's also good to be a librarian, as Global Libraries are one of the Gates Foundation's major funding priorities.  My wife's a librarian, so I know how vitally important these institutions are, and how rarely they get the attention they deserve.
• Pierre and Pam Omidyar came in at # 7 with $173 million to their foundation, which has been reinvented as the Omidyar Network.  I hate to rain on this parade of generosity, but I'm still a little skeptical of this new enterprise.  I understand the desire to be something more than an old-school foundation that just writes checks, but I'm not sure that the Omidyars have achieved that goal.  The new site--and the organization itself?--seems to revolve around...discussion boards.  I'm hoping there's more to it that I'm just not aware of--perhaps someone will clue me in.  To the Omidyars' credit, apparently they also gave away another $79 million--they didn't tell Slate who they gave it to, for some reason, but at least they're spreading it around.
• At # 9, Sidney Frank, who gave and pledged $142 million, including more than $100 million to my alma mater, Brown University.  Yes, I realize that's noteworthy primarily to me, but hey, it's my site. 
• Right behind Sid at # 10 is Mr. Mayor himself: Michael Bloomberg gave $138 million to various causes.
• Oprah Winfrey clocked in at # 24, giving $50 million to her foundations.

And the folks who just missed the list are worth a special mention, too.  According to Slate's Jodie T. Allen:

Donald E. and Violet Himebaugh finished 61^st, just keeping them off the Slate 60. The Himebaughs bequeathed $16.3 million to the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region in Appleton, Wis. Donald Himebaugh had worked as an accountant and office manager for a grocery wholesaler in Appleton, and his wife was a Spanish teacher at a local high school. Apparently the Himebaughs amassed their fortune through careful saving and investment. Their final bequest, comprising their entire estate, followed upon earlier gifts to the foundation.

The primary purpose of the list is to inspire some competitive giving among the plutocrats, and if the increased amounts are any indication, it's working.  Samuel and Aline Skaggs topped the first Slate 60 in 1996 with a $100 million gift--they'd be tied for 13th place today.

But I also hope the list serves to highlight the importance of individual giving in general.  Total charitable giving in the U.S. was just under $241 billion in 2002, according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel, and the vast majority of that--over 76%, or nearly $184 billion--came from individuals.  (Corporate giving and foundation grants together accounted for just over 16%, or $39 billion, and bequests accounted for the rest.) 

"Corporate Blogging" = Oxymoron

Doc Searls takes a promoter of "corporate blogging" to task (gently).  He writes:

"Corporate blogging" is so ironic it's nearly an oxymoron. Having "a system in place to monitor what is being said" seems more consistent with ending a conversation than with starting one.

But, credit where due. Sally Falkow (whose blog is Website Content Strategy) is trying to do a Good Thing here: getting companies to talk, and to engage, in  human voices, with real people.

Her problem — the same one all of us have — isn't with setting up practices, policies, strategies and so on. It's with trying to frame an understanding of blogging in too many ways at once, and losing track of its core virtues in the process...

Haywood

Haywood had an 8-year run, ending in 2000, that culminated with Men Called Him Mister and We Are Amateurs, You and I.  I'm mighty sorry they're gone, but if it had to end, "Amateurs" is a hell of a swansong.  I never knew them when, but they've been in heavy rotation ever since I first heard them--probably courtesy of Gimme Noise (horrid, absolutely horrid site--but the girl's got good musical taste.)  They're hard to pin down stylistically--plenty of emo-ish introspection, but they can kick out the jams, too.  One reason to love them--Ted Pauly, vocalist and guitar player, transparently pimps "Mister" on Amazon: " This record by this band is great! I love this record the most of any record I own, even though I am not in this band!" 

Search Me Redux

Why can't I find a (free) site search tool that works?  The Technorati searchlet that I installed recently on my day blog isn't working any more--it only searches the entire web and ignores instructions to search just my site.  Not helpful.  So I've put the Google search box back (TypePad makes it easy.)  But it's an imperfect solution at best.  It's not updated all that often (at least for a little ol' site like mine), so it excludes terms from recent posts.  And it includes terms from my sidebars, so you get a lot of false positives when searching for someone in my blogroll, for example.  PicoSearch had its own problems, so at this point I'm out of ideas.

Open Source Marketing

More good stuff on marketing from the folks at Change This that raises some challenging questions--and presents some tremendous opportunities--for nonprofits and advocacy groups.  James Cherkoff of Collaborative Marketing believes that marketers should be taking lessons from the Open Source movement.  He writes:

BACK TO THE SOURCE
Consumers are no longer happy to sit back and be fed a brand and its values. They want to interact with the ʻbrand sourceʼ in the same way that Linux programmers want to get their hands on the programming source code. That means giving consumers access to the brand and inviting them to co-create. Open Source marketers understand this and make it easy for customers to get involved with a brand and affect its direction, maybe even its values.

Let's Get Small

Chris Houchens of Shotgun Concepts challenges you to rethink your marketing strategy in a pithy Change This manifesto:

Your marketing works not by telling everyone that your product is great. Your marketing works when you have one person believe that your product is great. This is hard to do and it certainly wonʼt get done with a national TV buy.

Luckily, some people have caught onto this truth. Instead of BROADcasting to consumers, they are NARROWcasting. Firms now exist to create word-of-mouth for your company just by using your product on the streets. Online marketing can now zero in on specific online users. Direct mail companies can tell you more than you want to know about the people not just living in a certain zip code, but individual streets in that zip code. And on it goes.

Abandoning "Complaint-Based Activism"

Michael Shellenberger is an unconventional political strategist and advocate whose work poses a fundamental challenge to progressives' traditional "complaint-based activism."  (A delightfully apt phrase.)  Co-founder of the New Apollo Alliance, a "coalition within the labor, environmental, business, urban, and faith communities in support of good jobs and energy independence," and founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive advocacy shop/think tank, Shellenberger was recently interviewed by Marc Polonsky of The Sun on Why Liberals Need to Abandon Complaint-Based Activism (sorry, PDF only):

Public Speaking

R. Todd Stephens has a good list of public speaking tips.  I particularly like his last one:

Be a Host not a Speaker
Before the session, try to meet as many people as you can. Even if you only talk to the people you know, others will get the feeling that you are an approachable person. Try not to spend more than 2-3 minutes with any one person; bounce around. If your session is large, you may only get to say hello with 5-10 people, but these folks could be your supporters that you focus on during the session.

Robert Scoble. Silly?

Rick Bruner of Business Blog Consulting calls out Microsoft's Official Blogger Robert Scoble for insisting that lack of RSS on a marketing site is a firing offense.  (Bruner's already on record as an RSS skeptic--and he cites some Jupiter analysts who take his side as well.)  Bruner & Co. are right to give Scoble some grief about his obsession with RSS, but they're missing some of the other good points he's making.  A marketing site that uses only actors and no real people, that streams videos but doesn't make them downloadable, and that lacks permalinks is a crappy site.  And although the developers shouldn't be fired merely for leaving out RSS, perhaps the $100,000 they wasted should come up in their next performance review?

Adaptive Path

My post below on Jesse Garret's Ajax primer led me to take a closer look at Garret's company, Adaptive Path.  They're a user experience design shop, and they have some great resources on their site, ranging from paid reports on topics like "How Labels Affect Usability and Branding" ($20) and "How ROI Changes User Experience" to free articles on topics like "Making a Better CMS" and "Metadata for the Masses".  Very cool.