We've had a good response to the photos on our home page. If you have a photo depicting life in East Tennessee (it may be scenery, an organization's event, wildlife, or other photo), we'd like to show it in our gallery and on the home page. You will find more information about submitting photos here:  Photo Guidelines

DiscoverET.org is now developing a mobile web page to provide friendlier access to our services from a mobile phone or other mobile device. We currently have the East Tennessee Calendar and Directory, as well as access to our East Tennessee Photo Gallery available from the page. On your mobile device, go to: http://www.DiscoverET.org/mobile

The Federal Communications Commission today released their Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan , calling for major enhancement of broadband connections in the next ten years. The plan may be viewed at www.broadband.gov. The plan cites robust and affordable internet as the communications network of the future. From their release: 

"Nearly 100 million Americans lack broadband at home today, and 14 million Americans do not have access to broadband even if they want it. Only 42 percent of people with disabilities use broadband at home, while as few as 5 percent of people living on Tribal lands have access. Meanwhile, the cost of digital exclusion for the student unable to access the Internet to complete a homework assignment, or for the unemployed worker who can’t search for a job online, continues to grow."

 The document is available as a"pdf" file for download here . 

It recently came to our attention that organizations with DiscoverET.org web accounts have been contacted by a person or persons with the intent of moving the accounts to other web hosting services, out of the East Tennessee region. If you are unsure who is contacting your organization, please give us a call. We will verify the identity of anyone working on behalf of DiscoverET.org! Our phone number and email are prominently displayed throughout our website: (865) 456-7969. You can contact us through email at contact@discoveret.org.

We do not ask organizations to move their established web accounts to DiscoverET.org, and we don't think its appropriate for others to treat our nonprofit organization that way either. We are a small, local nonprofit simply providing this service for nonprofit organizations wishing to take advantage of it. We also work to build the community in the East Tennessee region. We hope if you are unsure about your account status or need help or account information you would contact us first. We're here to help you.

We sometimes lose contact information for an organization when people move, or leave the organization, though we request our members keep us up-to-date with accurate contact info. Thats why we try to make it easy for you to contact us.

Resolve to more fully utilize opportunities available through DiscoverET.org in 2010!

Did you know DiscoverET.org's online Calendar tops Google searches consistently when searching with the keywords "East Tennessee calendar"? Add your upcoming events to our calendar now, and take advantage of this free community service. Submit Event.

If your business or organization is not listed in the Directory, take the time to build your web presence now by submitting your website to the Directory. Submit Link.

We encourage all nonprofits to develop a strong web presence. Let us help you. Webhosting services.

And have a Happy New Year!

Here's a brief article about a nonprofit that moved almost all its computers and software to open source.

We've long felt nonprofit organizations willing to use open source software were making more dollars available to their core mission. The article appeared in a recent issue of Information Week. Here's the link: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220400020

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) has been introduced in Congress.

According to FreePress.net, "More than 850 organizations have signed on to the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, including every major consumer group, progressive and conservative leaders, small businesses and unions, bloggers and librarians."

According to WashingtonWatch.com, the bill would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to establish a national broadband policy, safeguard consumer rights, and more.

Once the full content of the bill is submitted to the Library of Congress, it can be viewed in its entirety  here .

This is a heads-up on meeting venue availability in the Oak Ridge area:

I was contacted today by Sharon Hmielewski about Centennial Bluff --left side of Edgemoor Road just one mile from the Edgemoor Rd./TN 170 exit off Pellissippi Parkway/TN 62.

They are opening their community center to non-profit groups--no strings attached-- for a limited time (until the residential part of the development opens).

For more information about the development, go to http://www.centennialbluff.com

If you have a need for a meeting space, you may want to consider this venue. It will accomodate 100. Call her for an appointment to view, and further information.
Her contact info is:

Sharon Hmielewski
sharonh@centennialbluff.com
865 257-4390 cell

We always enjoy hearing from our members and friends, and are especially happy to help out whenever we can. So keep the emails coming...

We also get lots of spam. Spam is down about 100,000 email messages to our servers from what it was a year or so ago, at its peak. Our Spam FAQ has lots of great info on how to reduce spam, and our multi-level email filtering system stops a lot of it, for which we are thankful.

We also receive forwarded emails, some of them with jokes, political "facts", or silly pictures. A lot of these circulate through email for years, whether factual or not and become "urban legends". A good way to verify the content of such an email is through the www.scopes.com

website: http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.

The new Bing.com (here) online search from Microsoft went live this morning; a quick check found results for DiscoverET.org showing up approximately the same as on Google. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for websites may be roughly comparable, but its likely too soon to tell. However (for what its worth), we discovered that Google had "crawled" DiscoverET.org a day more recently than Bing.

Bing.com is replacing the search formerly known as Live.com's search engine. Its a pretty interface--but we found it loads in the browser slower than Google . What impact will this have on Google? We'll wait and see.