Welcome to Kikono
Why is this site named Kikono?Kikono is a Swahili term for the antenna of an ant. I believe that social news sites are like little anthills of information. Every member of the anthill forages for news and brings it back to the anthill and tells all the other ants about their little bit of news. Kikono is the nonprofit news anthill. Go out, make some news and bring it back to Kikono!
Why did you start Kikono?
I've always wanted to use Digg for the nonprofit sector. In fact, the site was originally called npdigg.org. However, due to trademark restrictions and because Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, asked nicely, I decided to give it a new and I think, a much better and more fitting name. Kikono is about using the power of people to provide people with great news about the nonprofit sector. There's a ton of news about our sector produced by nonprofit workers and the mainstream press. However, there's no real place to chat about the news and no real way to filter it. The problem isn't that we're not getting enough news. The problem is that we're getting stuff that isn't really interesting. Kikono is about giving people the chance to decide what news is interesting to them.
What am I supposed to do?
There are primarily two things that you can do at Kikono. You can help us filter out all the chaff of news submissions by ensuring that you're always logged in on the site and voting for submissions you like. In fact, we're hoping that if we have enough people, we can always assure our readers that they're only getting the most interesting and popular news items about the nonprofit sector. Your vote counts more if you vote on unpublished stories.
The second thing you can do is to submit a new story to Kikono, "kik it to Kikono". Make sure you make clear what the story is about. Make sure you add tags about the story to the description. Tags are keywords that will help people search on the news item in the future. Help out the nonprofit sector by giving as much information about why you like the item and why you think other people should like it too.
How do I get on the Top Users list? And who is roborssfeed?
You get on the Top Users list by submitting new stories AND getting them published. They only get published if a news item gets at least 2 votes. You also can get there by voting and helping stories get published. Roborssfeed is the automated news feed that we pull from del.icio.us and other sources.
I'm a del.icio.us user, how can I help Kikono?
Several tags are used there and any tagged story from del.icio.us that pertains to the nonprofit sector will end up at Kikono automatically. For instance, if you make a blog entry and you tag it "nptech" that story will end up in the "for techies" category of Kikono. Stories tagged "npdev" will end up in the "for programmers" category. Stories tagged "npmarketing" will end up in the "for marketers" category. We'll be making up a complete list of tags that you can use to automatically kik stories to Kikono in the coming weeks.
Why aren't the original tagger names properly attributed in Kikono? And why aren't the original tags imported too?
I'm working on getting the tagger names as well as their original tags imported directly into Kikono. However, there are technical details that I have to work out with the Pligg programmers before we can do this right. You can read the technical description of the problem on the Pligg forum, but it ain't pretty!
Who runs Kikono? Kikono is run by Allan Benamer. His blog is at Non-Profit Tech Blog. He can be reached at abenamer['at']nonprofittechblog.org. If you want to know more about Kikono, Allan blogs about it here.
