Bridging the Innovation Divide: An Agenda for Disseminating Technology Innovations within the Nonprofit Sector has just been published by PolicyLink, the prominent national nonprofit research center focusing on economic and social equity issues. This 65-page report articulates and addresses the significant gaps that exist between the needs and benefits of new technologies in advancing the nonprofit sector and the shortage of actual innovation in adopting those technologies. The full report is available as a PDF download. (Full disclosure: I was one of the interviewees for the section on “Neighborhood Information Systems.”)

Gabrielle Hammond’s post a few days ago to the LStech list is but one of the more recent encounters with a link that has been all but impossible to not run into since January 31, 2007, when Michael Wesch’s truly brilliant speed-vision Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us debuted at YouTube. What a lot of folks may not know is that the creator of what is now arguably the most successful viral video ever—tracking at 1.2+ million page views in a scant few weeks at YouTube—is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. His current work includes a Digital Ethnography project featuring Professor Wesch’s postings of student responses to and translations of his Web 2.0 video. As a certified anthropology major in college, I must say I found the project fascinating but maybe more about video performance than serious academics. You know, sort of the digital equivalent of a college-level basket weaving course. Hey, but who’s asking.

Less heralded, more traditional with a nominally linear narrative, with less emphasis on video performance, more (wildly) predictive and less (sanely) observational than Wesch’s video—and admittedly less exciting to watch—Epic 2015 is a flash film from the Museum of Media History that touches on related future-think themes to different effect. As the site description puts it, EPIC 2015 “charts the history of the Internet, the evolving mediascape and the way news and newspapers were affected by the growth in online news,” conjures up a “Googlezon” technological leviathan emerging “from a future merger of Google and Amazon to form the Google grid,” and speaks of news wars with the New York Times devolving into a “print only paper” for the elite, culminating in the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC).

Whew! My future? I’m just gettin’ up tomorrow morning and goin’ outside to wash my car. It’s low tech and not performance art, but it’s got a beginning and an end and will make me feel good about myself.