Neil Berkman isn’t much into photography. But, he is into creating shared online experiences. So, the 38-year-old founder of Oortle Inc. rolled up his sleeves and turned the photo-sharing site flickr into a global, real-time picture party. Along with designer Bryan Partington, Berkman created PhotoPhlow, a real time social community built on the infrastructure, images and membership of flickr.

On the photophlow website you can log into a variety of rooms and, along with others in the online spaces, browse, display and comment on flickr photos (an earlier version of the experience – flickr Live – had been tried and abandoned by flickr). Photophlow isn’t Berkman’s first foray into shared web experiences. Back in 1999 he started Echo Networks, which allowed music lovers to create listening groups online. For Berkman, the web isn’t something you use, it’s something you bend to your will.

Meanwhile, over at ning.com groups like Give It To Me Raw and fans of the vidcast “Ask a Ninja” are using the make-your-own social network tool to create an online space to share passions, advice and content.

And at Word Press thousands of bloggers are pimping out their sites using dozens of widgets and plug-ins that make building multimedia sites like playing with multi-coloured Lego.

Welcome to the do-it-yourself (DIY) web.

This is an Internet where pros like Berkman and average netizens can treat their online presence and experience like a burger at Harvey’s. It’s a natural evolution of online life. Content mashups, data swapping and plug ‘n’ play widgets are hardwired into the DNA of social media. The tools are now catching up with the genetic imperative. And, in the last few weeks I’m also sensing a growing dissatisfaction with large, do-everything-including-horde-my-data sites like facebook. Leading edge netizens are now really catching on to the idea that they can build powerful, flexible and robust social networks for themselves by snapping together existing smaller social networks and multimedia tools. As my Twitter pal, Merlene Paynter, reminded me when I discussed this idea on that social network, the mainstream of social media folks are still fully engaged in their AOLish and facebookish ways. But there is a buzz in the air worth cocking an ear to. Listen in.

It’s easy to create a ready-in-five-minutes microblog on tumblr. You can use it to post quick URLs, thoughts, videos you’ve found on You Tube or pictures you keep on flickr or on your own hard drive. You can then let folks know about your tumblr page via your email signature or by mentions of it on twitter. If you don’t want to post videos to You Tube you can use other, smaller services like blip.tv or vimeo (both of which, by the way, present your videos in much higher quality than You Tube can on its best days). And, both blip.tv and vimeo produce RSS feeds of your videos, which you can also mention in your email signature or embed on your Word Press blog.

You can even use snap-on web tools to help you manage your plug-in-play social media empire. For example, on heyspread you can upload your video once and then the site automatically resends it to dozens of video sharing sites you’ve signed up for. And, trust me, you want to get your videos on as many sites as you can to spread your message.

And, over at 8hands Windows users will find a tool that lets them consolidate all their social media content and communities into one tabbed application. It’s sort of like a stand-alone version of the social media toolbar in the Firefox-based browser Flock.

So, not only can you use off-the-shelf tools to build a personal, interconnected web of online presence, you can use other tools to manage, populate and track it.

That might all sound like way too much futzing around, but the DIY web has its advantages for non-profits. First, it gives you the flexibility to create the sort of presence you want when and where you want. You can also use today’s tools and move to other, smarter or faster tools later. And, you can use the discrete tools as a virtual breadboarding or prototyping platform for your social presence. Later, if you have the resources or your community grows sufficiently, you can bring the tools in-house and aggregate them on your own site or social community using, Ruby on Rails, drupal or other open source tools.

As more and more sites like facebook start showing their true colours as demographic vacuum cleaners with ad exhausts, it’s smart for non-profits to roll their own.

Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...