Photo by LarimdaMD.

For nonprofits, these numbers represent an increasingly huge opportunity to get the word out about your cause. If your organization doesn’t already have a Facebook presence, you can’t afford not to. Go and create a Facebook page, which will be your organization’s home on the popular social network. (The Wild Apricot blog has a handy guide that will get you started.)

Once you have a Facebook page, people won’t come knocking on your door without a little work. Here are thirteen tips to promote your page, help you increase your number of “fans”, and use Facebook to get the word out about your work.

1. Invite your posse
   You’ve got your own friends on Facebook, and odds are some of them are interested in the work you do. Send them a personal message inviting them to check out your page. Don’t ask everyone. Just your pals who may truly be interested.
2. Keep your page fresh and tasty
   Once your page is up, don’t make the mistake of neglecting it.  Keep the content fresh. Don’t forget the viral nature of Facebook. When someone interacts on your page it may appear on that person’s Facebook feed, promoting your page to their friends.
3. Suck in content from other social media
   Add Facebook applications that draw your content from sites like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. This will bring new content on your page without needing to add it manually, while promoting your presence on other sites at the same time.
4. Create an incentive to join
   There are a lot of Facebook pages out there, so give people a reason to become a fan of yours. Have a monthly prize draw just for your fans, offer a discount to an upcoming event, or make special announcements on your page before you do elsewhere.
5. Bribe your mailing list
   Email folks on your mailing list and invite them to check out your Facebook page. Again, offering an incentive of some sort can help. Don’t shy away from adding a few words to your newsletter about what is happening on your Facebook page. And if you don’t already have a email newsletter, get one. There are many free or cheap services that make newsletters quick, simple and fun. (I highly recommend Mad Mimi.)
6. Pop a button on your website
   This might seem obvious, but most organizations don’t do it. Grab a button and flaunt it on your website, your blog, or anywhere else you have available pixels.
7. Use Facebook ads
   Facebook’s advertising program allows you to promote your page to a very targeted audience. (21- to 24-year-old hairless cat lovers in Idaho? Check!) And since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, it’s actually quite inexpensive. Create different ads targeting different chunks of your target audience — or several for the same audience — and track them to see which ones are most effective.
8. Play with your fans
   Don’t leave your fans hanging. Respond to comments on your page. Ask them questions in the discussion board.  When someone new becomes a fan of your page, sent them a message to say hello. Do they use Twitter? Follow them, or send a direct message. Remind them that there are flesh and blood people behind the organization’s page, and that you’re interested in them, not just your stats.
9. Rock your own domain name
   URL’s for Facebook pages are long and ugly.  Register a separate domain name for your page and forward it to your Facebook page. If you already have a website for your organization, you can use a subdomain instead (ex. facebook.mynonprofit.com).
10. Pimp out your business card
    Include the shortened address of your Facebook page on your business card. If you don’t have one, get one. If you don’t like the idea of a traditional business card, get a funky personal calling card, like Moo’s MiniCards, to promote your page.
11. Delegate and spread the love
    If you have other staff, volunteers, or trusted community members who are on Facebook, consider adding them as an admin. You’ll spread out the responsibility of keeping the page fresh, and will hopefully create passionate pilgrims who will promote your page, and your organization, to their friends.
12. Send updates (just not boring ones)
    Facebook allows you to send updates to your fans, and by all means you should.  Just make sure they’re interesting to your fans, not just to yourself. You can even target your update to fans in a certain city, region, or age range. But whatever you do…
13. Don’t spam
    Sure, this is actually one way not to promote your Facebook page, but just don’t do it.  No one likes to receive Facebook updates every other day from anyone, so don’t abuse the privilege. I’ve ditched many pages and groups because they sent out too many updates, so unless you want your numbers to shrink, treat your updates like you drink your scotch — in moderation.

I’ve fallen prey to the non-English keyboard several times, including a long standing feud between me and a bilingual Russian/Armenian PC keyboard while living in Armenia. And although the occasional encounter during a short trip might be a minor inconvenience, regular exposure to an unfamiliar keyboard can be enough to send your head through a monitor.

Fortunately for those at risk of keyboard-induced head trauma, keybr.com offers typing lessons in a several different languages and keyboard configurations.

The on-screen keyboard shows you where the various keys would be on, say, a Brazilian Portuguese keyboard so that you can practice before you ever leave home. You can even choose to type content from any RSS feed, killing two birds with one Rosetta Stone.

Now if you’re sticking around home for a while and have decided it’s time to evolve from a hunt-and-peck typist, Mashable has profiled 8 great sites that will help you learn to type faster properly. (Whatever you do, don’t miss out on QWERTY Warriors.)

A while back I worked with Tadamon, a Montreal-based collective working to build solidarity between activists in Montreal and Beirut, to develop a poster for their campaign to boycott the Israeli apartheid of Palestine. Having spent six weeks in the West Bank a few years ago, and having seen the economic and humanitarian impact of this apartheid first hand, helping them out with this was a no-brainer.

In designing the poster we tried to strike a balance between the amount of information presented and aesthetic appeal. Personally I would’ve cut down on the copy even more than we did, but we did condense the info considerably, and kept clutter under control. We ended up with a poster that got the point of Tadamon’s campaign across quickly, while including more nuanced details for anyone who decided to stick around and read it.

The finished design was silk-screened and hung around Montreal, and is now available for sale at Just Seeds, a “visual resistance artists’ cooperative’, with the proceeds going to Tadamon.

Here are a few photos I shot from “Lady J”, a show that first played at the Montreal Fringe Festival this past summer. Billed as “a satirical look at the breakdown between municipal authorities and the communities they represent”, the play presents the rape and murder of “Lady Justice” by a cop, a priest and a policeman. The photos had been collecting dust on my hard drive for quite some time, but my friend Koby, who wrote the script and plays Joe the cop, was looking to spice up a grant proposal for her company, Mischief Theatre, so I finally dug the files out and got editing. It was a pretty fun shoot, set in the graffiti adorned alley behind Foufounes Electriques and lit by the three halogen flood lamps they were using for stage lighting.

This was was also a good excuse to give Adobe Lightroom 1.3 for a whirl, as I had put off upgrading for a ridiculous amount of time. I’ve been using the software since early in the public beta stage, and although I’ve been happy with it since day one, the most recent upgrades have made it far more usable. The clarity feature introduced in 1.1 is definitely one of my favourites, just don’t go overboard with it.

“Some people just don’t value privacy.”
“They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.”
“Whatever.”

I wonder if Twitter has found its way into any real life forensic investigations yet, and if so, whether the real life CSIs were as condescending as their fictional counterparts. I am of the mind that those of us who value such openness are far less likely to have problems with privacy issues than those who falsely assume they can keep the minutiae of their lives secret.

Given that every goon in Las Vegas seems to know the intimate details of the CSI characters’ personal lives, I would venture to say their quest for privacy has been a colossal failure. Perhaps they should give up and start blogging.

Interesting note: The Twitter account name in CSI was kiraEDGE, a profile which currently exists, although it’s not clear whether it’s actually affiliated with the tv show or someone cleverly locked it down afterwards.

Via Laughing Squid.

Tim O’Reilly’s delivers the keynote on Monday afternoon.

Day two has wrapped up at the sprawling Messe Berlin, with the notable exception of tonight’s “Berlin Night” party. So before I head out to geek out on pils, it’s time for today’s GB&U.

The Good: The Web2Open unconference opened today, with several delegate-created workshops and discussions providing the intimate learning and networking environment that the standard conference sessions cannot. Kathy Sierra’s talk today was once again spot on, if somewhat repetitive. Jeremy Keith recited seemingly meaningless yet surprisingly hilarious prose about wrapping a comatose Roy Orbison in cling film.

The Bad: Having a wtf moment while using the conference’s feedback application. Kathy would not approve. Also, wifi was still spotty in the morning, although they solved the food shortage.

The Ugly: Neil Holloway of Microsoft trying to convince Tim O’Reilly that people actually enjoy advertising. (Tim then asks for a show of hands of who enjoys television advertising. Few arms budged in the massive crowd, so it looks like Microsoft still has some kinks to work out in their strategy.)

Berlin’s incarnation of the Web 2.0 Expo is up and running at Messe Berlin, and I feel as if I learned more yesterday than I did during my entire undergrad. Here’s a quick roundup of the good, bad and ugly for day one.

The Good: Kathy Sierra. Chock full of useful info and spunk, Kathy is one helluva engaging speaker, a kept the audience fully engaged for the course of her three hour workshop, “Creating Passionate Users”. I’ll definitely be popping into her keynote this afternoon. Bonus: The post-keynote kegs of beer.

The Bad: Lunch. Not that it was bad, because I wouldn’t know. They ran out before the workshop I was attending even finished.

The Ugly: Spotty Wifi. They apparently ran out of IP addresses. Botching lunch is unfortunate; fumbling wifi is a cardinal sin.

Would you steal this image? Didn’t think so.

On the drive down to Vermont Thursday I was leafing through the pages of The Mirror, one of Montreal’s weekly newspapers. I was surprised to see one of my photographs—a shot of spoken word artist Alessandra Naccarato performing at our Art Threat launch party—peering out at me from the newsprint. Surprised, because I had no idea my photo was going to be published. The Mirror simply used this image without my permission. Not cool, or legal for that matter.

So I sent a courteous email off to The Mirror’s art director notifying him of the issue, requesting that the publication print a correction and send fair payment for use of the image. Standard stuff. Today I received a response that apologized for the “inconvenience”, but did not entertain the notion of properly licensing the photo. They laid the blame on the artist depicted in the image, who presumably told The Mirror where to find the photo sent The Mirror a jpg of the photo (as is available on Flickr). Unfortunately for them that doesn’t relieve them of their obligations to ensure they have the permission of the copyright holder before publishing an image.

Now, while I seriously doubt they acted in bad faith and intentionally “stole” my image, running a publication requires significant diligence to ensure your butt is covered when it comes to copyright. This is particularly true in print, where unlike their online equivalents, one can’t “unpublish” content.

Now, if I accidentally walked out of a store with a bowl of candy beans from the corner store and got caught, and the owner offered to drop the matter if I just paid for the damn beans, I would consider myself lucky. Not that I would even take a bowl of candy beans—come to think of it I actually hate candy beans, especially the black ones—but you get the idea.

Maybe I should just start reprinting The Mirror’s articles in full on this website and see if their relatively lax attitude towards copyright is consistent. Hopefully they make this easy and send over a reasonable (which in editorial photography means piddly) licensing fee. Just in case they don’t, however, I better remember to renew my membership with the NPPA before it expires later this month.

As a related note, this incident has me thinking about whether Flickr is a photo theft enabler. While the photo sharing site has generated stock sales for me in the past, I wonder how often my images are stolen (or abused through negligence) by commercial operations simply because Flickr makes it so easy to search, find, and, well, steal your images.

On the flip side of all this, The Progressive printed a photo of mine from this summer’s protest in Montebello, Quebec in their most recent issue. The staff of this non-profit magazine was a pleasure to deal with, and their payment generous by industry standards. They’re a great publication, and deserving of your eyeballs—and your support—so do yourself a favour and subscribe.

Downtown Burlington might not allow unattended dogs, but they sure know how to talk to them. This morning I packed my bags and headed to Vermont’s tiny international airport, from which I will eventually take off across the Atlantic to Berlin, site of the Web 2.0 Expo next week. I say eventually because my flight has been delayed for at least two hours due to “weather”, despite the beautiful conditions here amongst the Green Mountains.

In any case, while roaming downtown with my dear friends Aisling, Colleen, and Matt the comics genius, we came across this sign, which is good as any other image to get this latest stint of blogging rolling. As I head to Europe’s biggest geekout (or, in light of these thrashers, the second largest) I’ll be blogging more than usual on all things related to technology, politics, and crisp yet tender pils. Those intent on stalking me even closer may do so through Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook.

The intricacies of intellectual property law baffle me, in their often convoluted and retrograde manner of dealing with digital information. I can’t even imagine how a young child might begin to understand the legal “rights” and “wrongs” of file sharing, and the possible repercussions of downloading the latest Shayne Ward album.

Fortunately there is no longer a need to guess, as TorrentFreak has posted an illuminating interview with “Hannah”, a nine-year-old girl, in which they talk about downloading music, lawsuits, and what pirates are (answer: “they have parrots”).

Here’s a choice excerpt:

TF: Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

Hannah: Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF: Why is it illegal?

Hannah: Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

Via Kottke.org.