Of Terapads and Windmills (Part 9 in a series)

["Community Service 2.0" Series: Preface: The Seed--an Idea; Part 1: The Bud--a Concept; Part 2: The Blossom--a Project; Part 3: The Pollen--a Call; Part 4: The Honey--a Pedagogy; Part 5: The Bees--a Community; Part 6: The Queen Bee--a Real-World Model; Part 7: The Honey Collector--a Podcast; Part 8: New Poppies--a Webquarters; ]

Don Quixote 2.0 tilts at smokestacks (and tries to bring back windmills) at the new “Concerts for Global Chilling / Year of Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0″ site at Terapad. Check it out and tell me how it’s shaping up. Better still, take 30 seconds to forward it to students you know before we put them back inside the “school 1.0″ box come summer’s end. Now’s the time for them to get involved, not later, if this is going to come off for Earth Day ’08.

I’ve beefed up the new site with more fun with Voki (Bush lovers be warned), added a poll from PollDaddy, widgets from Widgetbox, made a widget there of the website itself–see top right of sidebar or, if you’re reading on an aggregator, here’s a picture–

–and done other fun things as well. I like this widget because students worldwide can embed it in their MySpaces, Facebooks, etc, to spread the word independent of schools.

If you’ve never checked out Terapad, it’s amazing. From an Intowit review, with things I’m liking in bold:

What features set you apart from other blogging softwares? ie.
WordPress, MovableType

Where other platforms stop is where Terapad starts.

With Terapad you could blog collaboratively of course, since we support everything you already use today: multiple editors, RSS, tagging, blog pings, comment tracking. We also throw in a couple of nice features such as scheduling, and our spam filter uses advanced automated technology so you’ll never have to worry about comment spam again. No need for plugins such as Akismet, etc. In fact, no need for plugins, period.

It’s Guy Kawasaki who said that after the 10th post, blog content starts to ‘disappear’. Not with Terapad. We give you a versatile content management system that comes complete with search engine optimization, audit trail, and versionning. You can create as many pages and organize them in as many categories as you want.

But that’s just for starters. After your blog is established, you might want to start creating revenue by selling the things you blog about, such as gadgets or what lies around your attic. You could also opt to sell art, software you wrote, subscriptions to content, or even general merchandise to promote your site such as TShirts, etc. It only takes a Paypal email address to set up shop, and we don’t take any cuts on the sales, so unlike EBay or CafePress all the revenue stay yours.

Terapad also comes with an image gallery and a multimedia asset manager with 2Gb of space for your videos, mp3s, etc. All this content can then be placed in any other of the other sites modules via a WYSIWYG editor that requires no technical knowledge to use.

Then, we have the forums, you could use them as a platform to offer support, or simply a way to make your site ’stickier’ and build a community around it. It’s there if you need it.

We also have a very versatile event calendar tool, some people use it to advertise events such as concerts and parties, others as a multimedia archive of past events such as corporate meetings or videos from their kids’ birthday. [Can you see the worldwide student rock performances there? I can.]

If you’re an small business, or simply a very popular site, you could even start hiring via the careers tools, which come complete with resume indexing and a built-in search engine. As you can see, Terapad scales with what you do. You can start small with ‘just a blog’ and grow all the way to an established business presence. [I'm using it to "hire" student volunteers from each city for promotion, corporate relations, PR and media relations, band recruitment, digital production, etc.]

I’m going to stop here because we have too many features to list in just one blog post. Let’s just say that every module in Terapad was originally built as a stand alone application, so naturally if you wanted to just operate a blog, a shop, a job board or whatever else you have in mind, you could, and did I mention it was free?

Some of you might be thinking it sounds a lot like Ning. But after using the Classroom 2.0 Ning a bit, I think Terapad is much better, much more muscular. (I think it missed America’s radar because it seems to be a British creation.) I’m not sure, though, if it is capable of user-only access that would lend it to the classroom use the ever-brilliant Kim Cofino recently wrote about. I’ll have to look into that.

And don’t even get me started with comparisons to WordPress MU. I’ve wasted so many hours lately trying to figure out how to get around WPMU’s “flash paranoia,” I’ve decided to opt for simplicity with Terapad for this one. It’s fully widgetizable, and allows hacking of its markup and CSS.

It’s a fun project for the summer, anyway. A cool way to fight the heat.

* * *
Painting: “Visions of Don Quixote” by Octavio Ocampo from The Little Gallery Online (used, I hope, with permission, since I found it on a Creative Commons search engine?).

1. Teen Live Earth Website Launch (Part 8 in a series)
2. Daily Diigo: WordPress MU plugins, NeoOffice (OpenOffice for Macs!)
3. No BS: I Only Now Discovered "Live Earth" (Part 6 in a series)
4. Passing the Torch: A Letter to the Next "Greatest Generation" (Part 3 in a series)

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.