With the recent news that more e-books were brought than paperbacks in February, its no surprise that Amazon is allowing the Kindle to borrow e-books from more than 11,000 libraries across the U.S. in working with OverDrive, a huge supplier of e-books for public schools and libraries. Students and non-profits will now have greater access to e-books, but the limit on checking out books is a concern with HaperCollins announcing a new policy that requires e-books to expire after being check out only 26 times.

In getting ready to fully utilize social media and online tools for his upcoming campaign, Obama is holding a town hall meeting at Silicon Valley. Facebook users have been sending in their questions for the President and more than 36,000 users have said they will virtually attend the meeting held today that will include Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg. Obama will surely utilize social media tools alike Facebook and twitter to get his message out there for next years campaign. This is a great example of participatory government in the context of online social media.

The Coachella music festival was broadcasted live through youtube last weekend, representing a momentous change in the collaboration of music and online tools. With few glitches and little advertising, the concert was broadcasted over three days through youtube where people got the chance to pick between the three stages to watch their favorite artists. Free and easy to access is becoming more and more prevalent everyday with online tools. The streaming video was viewed over four million times. Nonprofits that are concentrated on promoting and advocating the arts and music can look at this as an innovative way to connect to an audience.

Even though I knew e-books were emerging on the market during the last few years to compete with paperbacks, I was shocked to read this news that e-books sold more than paperbacks last February. This shift from paperbacks to e-books marks a monumental shift in literacy and education in our society. This could also be a huge shift for education non-profits and public schools, especially well-off universities that have the money to use kindles and alike products. The next two years will see the biggest surge according to Barnes and Noble exec Marc Parrish. No doubt, this will change the way people and organizations read and get their information.

A non-profit out of California has created software for human rights workers that is designed to secretly store data about human rights violation abuses in the country where they are located. There is talk about it already being used in the Middle-East recently. The software includes a 'panic button' that a human rights worker could use that would instantly delete all the files on the computer about government violations. The data is then stored in the cloud and accessable only with a password and secret 'key.' This is a great example of nonprofits working together to fight enormous challenges, with human rights being one of the most dangerous and exhaustive areas of work in the non-profit sector.

A new report out from the Nonprofit Technology Network and M+R Strategic Services concludes that NP's have a lot of work to do when it comes to making a presence on social media sites. The 2011 'eNonprofit Benchmarks Study" found that NP's had only around 110 Facebook fans and 19 Twitter followers for every e-mail subscriber. Small organizations will need to be apart of social networking in the near future and there looks to be great potential for growth. Working with a small-consulting firm, I found that utilizing social media is a quick and easy way to inform clients on up-to-date news and activities.