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Exploring Social Media: Learning About Social at the Goodwill OutletToday

“It was an experience. It was a real experience!”

That was the proclamation my mother-in-law, Linda Kay VanFossen, used to describe her first visit to the popular Goodwill Outlet store near Portland, Oregon. Known to locals as the “Bins,” this is where local Goodwill thrift store items come for a last ditch sale to the masses, delivered up for sale not in orderly rows grouped by styles and types like pants, skirts, shirts, blouses, and jackets, but dumped willy nilly into large bins for shoppers to dig through like the holiday sale tables of old.

Much later, as I understood her “experience” with the Bins much better, I realized I had experienced the magic of social media in action. It began in the first few seconds of our arrival.

The Essence of Social Lessons Learned at the Goodwill Outlet

The store is really a giant warehouse with lines of bins running parallel from wall to wall, all stuffed with similar goods. Soft goods like sheets, clothing, pillows, curtains, rugs, and such are all grouped together in

Free Blog Platform for Beginners: KontainYesterday

Blogging platforms Wordpress and Blogger still rule the roost (though this blogger digs SquareSpace), but there is a newcomer on the scene. Meet Kontain.

If you are not technically inclined, and willing to sacrifice fashion over form, this could be the platform for you. In other words, this could be your daddy’s platform.

To get started you simply need to input your e-mail address (and verify it within 15 days).

Your blog URL with be Kontain/BlogNameHere.

Media upload limits:

50 items per entry
100MB maximum size per file
250MB total monthly upload

The folks at Kontain plan to introduce social networking options such as friend following some time next year. Read more here.

2009 is right around the corner. If one of your resolutions is to start blogging, Kontain gives you one less excuse. If you’re an experienced blogger, move on!

Possibly Related Posts

Bloggers Observe World AIDS Day 2008 En MasseYesterday

In case you haven’t visited the Google homepage today (as if that were how you got all your news), it’s World AIDS Day today.

According to Google Blog Search, over 13,000 blogs have talked about World AIDS Day in the last 24 hours. That’s more than participated in Blog Action Day 2008, which focused on poverty.

Some indications of mass blog participation and the impact of social media on this event:

BlogPulse is showing a major spike in mentions of “aids” or “World AIDS Day.”
AIDS.gov has a blog at the official website for the US government’s AIDS prevention and information resource.
Bloggers Unite, a service of BlogCatalog, has recruited the BlogCatalog user

Pownce Closes, Team Joins Six ApartYesterday

Microblogging service Pownce is closing its doors on December 15th, and the team is joining Six Apart, along with the Pownce technology. This from a blog post:

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

Pro users will get information on what will happen with the money they spent. Maybe they’ll get TypePad accounts or something.

The Pownce team is making an effort so that its users can export their profiles and content, and import it into Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. Vox seems to be Leah Culver’s and Mike Malone’s new home, by the way.

I can’t say that this comes as a surprise. Pownce started out well enough, with a dedicated community and quite some buzz, but it lost momentum, like so many social web sites do. Competing

Flickr Alternatives for Copyright-Conscious PhotographersYesterday

Flickr has been in the spotlight a good deal recently, but a lot of it has not been good news. It has been revealed that Flickr, like Facebook, strips out copyright metadata from uploaded images. Combined with a confusing API, licensing scandals, companies selling photos as cell phone backgrounds and more, it is easy to see why some are skittish about keeping their images on the site.

This has some photographers, bloggers and artists uneasy about using Flickr or at least using the site exclusively. Many have begun seeking alternatives to Flickr but alternatives seem to be thin. Though image hosts such as Photobucket exist and are great for embedding images into other sites, they lack the sense of community that Flickr provides and, in the case of Photobucket, can raise copyright issues of their own.

So what other sites are there for photographers and artists that might fulfill some or all of Flickr’s function