All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

It's the first day of Kindergarten and that got me thinking about the similarities between Elementary School and the wonderful new Web.

I don't know about you, but one of the best things I learned in Kindergarten was to cut and paste. "What has that got to do with the Web," you ask? EVERYTHING - if you believe Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion. Here is what he has to say.

Imagine for a moment that you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want. Once clipped, you can drop the content on your desktop, an online start page like Windows Live or Pageflakes, “the deck" of your mobile device or even “a crawl” on your Internet-connected television.

This isn’t some far off vision. It’s the near-term future. It’s the coming era of the Cut and Paste Web.

According to Rubel, the new Web is about individuality and the ability to create your own collage. So rather than paint a static picture of your nonprofit, give your supporters the organizational colors, words, sounds and images they need to create their own unique montage.

For a great example of the Cut and Paste Web, check out the Give Love widget at right by Global Giving, new NPower ON! customer. They are SO SMART to incorporate these portable items into their marketing mix. By giving their supporters this slice of code - packaged up in this cute graphic - they are increasing the potential that their mission and message will spread.

To learn more about how to create a widget for your organization, visit SixDegrees.org and read Let's Go Widget Shopping on Beth's blog.