On Friday I helped train 30 of the most important people in New York in online activism and social networking. I refer of course, to the women and men who work with young people after school lets out. These ‘Out of School Time Providers’ work with the kids from the neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates. If they can engage, motivate and enrich lives, then those kids have a better chance of getting to college, finishing high school, or at the very least, staying off the streets.

We went over the usual suspects: CRM, web 2.0, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Then we opened it up to questions and ideas for online projects that could be used as part of after school programs. This list might be interesting to others:

Kansas State anthropology professor Michael Wesch apparently recorded this stunning presentation on culture, life, modernity in the YouTube community mere blocks from DIA world headquarters.

(You might remember him from such video phenomena as this, whose virality he discusses here.)

This is 55 minutes long, but you won't notice the length one bit. Here's the project's blog.

Do you have an organizational page, Cause, or petition to share with the DIA community? Be a fan...cuz we're on Facebook, too!

A couple of weeks ago, Network For Good hit the streets with The Wired Fundraiser (pdf), a report on the growing phenomenon of ordinary people raising money for causes and organizations they support ... without said organization's involvement, and sometimes without even its awareness.

The key finding?

When Wired Fundraisers Talk, People Listen: Wired Fundraisers are regular people with a cause and a keyboard, and they are proving highly effective at fundraising for their favorite charity in an ever-widening personal sphere of influence online. That’s because today, the messenger matters even more than the message. People trust messengers they know, like friends and family. These messengers naturally communicate in the most effective ways – through personal means, in a conversational tone, and with great stories. A promotion from a charity can’t compete with that level of intimacy, authority or authenticity.

Wild Apricot Blog is rockin' a case study of The Humane Society of the United States in a discussion on how using both Myspace and Facebook to promote advocacy work is relevant, but even more important is knowing the difference. Kind of like the difference between apples and...apricots.

I think it’s a little too early to tell, but so far, we’ve seen more success with fundraising on Facebook, and advocacy on MySpace. This is mostly because of the third party applications that are available on Facebook, which make it easier to participate in group fundraising...Our advocacy banners are very popular on MySpace, but people don’t really have any place to put them on Facebook.

Our friends at OneWorld have a free teleconference this Wednesday the 22nd entitled Leveraging the Power of Online Communities.

It's a pitch, as free events are wont to be, whose hook is using social networking and community sites.

Building our Technorati Profile. I think Technorati just got a lot cooler. Or we did. Or both. Or maybe even neither.

Many of us will probably remember, however vaguely, Robert Putnam and his famous "bowling alone" thesis about the decline of social capital in the US. Some of us remember thinking that it was more about transformation and reallocation of social capital, but to make that case right now would be kind of pointless and a distraction from the work Putnam is doing now (even if it's right, which it may not be).

Putnam has just published the results of five years of research on the effects of diversity on social capital within communities (which here means neighborhoods or something similar). The conclusion: diversity reduces social capital within the community. Most striking, and most distressing, it turns out too that members of a diverse community not only trust persons of other ethnic groups less, they also mistrust others of the same ethnic background.

There's nothing like receiving a verdict of life or death while doing something embarrassingly trivial to force one out of the mundane.

It was sometime around the sixth inning of a lackluster dog-days game between two dog teams at seemingly vacant RFK Stadium that my old comrade had a text message reporting that a man won't be put to death tomorrow.

Such a tiny little message, and so many mountains moved to get it.

In the aftermath of Monday's horror at Virginia Tech, DemocracyInAction was approached by a few folks who wanted to find some way of helping their own communities grieve and remember outside the typical online parameters of list-building and fundraising.

Small as it is in the face of such enormity, we're humbled to have collaborated together to donate VTVigils, organizing nationwide vigils in commemoration over the days ahead.

Please feel welcome to participate or share it with others. There is absolutely no upsell -- no participant's information will be used in any way for anything except this event -- and it's completely agenda-free in every respect beyond the agenda of being human.