Downtown Cartel, in partnership with Always Creative and Matt Fruge, will be launching DesiredHearts.com in the near future. Part of the unique value Desired Hearts is bringing to the online t-shirt business model is the idea of building a donation to charity into the price of the product. With every shirt purchased, a portion of the revenues will go towards a charity of the t-shirt designers choosing.

I have not seen this done in many cases online, but I do feel that it’s a socially responsible thing to do. If more businesses followed this model, where your dollars go directly to charities for things that affect us all, such as the American Cancer Society or Oxfam International, even a fractional percent of sales would add up really fast considering the $14 trillion economy we have in the US alone. The question, and risk of this model, is would you choose to shop at places where you knew that a fixed amount (5-10%) would be going to a charity - or would you shop around to save a few bucks?

An added value that can emerge from this model is the free marketing your products receive if you work in conjunction with the charities you are raising money for. For instance, if you donate $600/mo from your sales to a charity with a large distribution network, like Oxfam International or similar, there is a distinct possibility of having your products marketed throughout their extensive distribution network on a continual basis because of the benefit they receive from your increased sales.

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Over the past 8 years I’ve managed around a half dozen enterprise level CMS’s for various companies and universities. I’ve come to a couple of conclusions - none of them are perfect and cost is not a measure of quality.

I worked for the better part of a year and a half with a system that managed upwards of 75,000 documents and the process for choosing the CMS took over a year just to evaluate and push through. We had around 6 or so “admin” users who took care of the editors, managers, etc. and upwards of 200 or so that made edits on a semi-regular basis. This was serious enterprise content management.

I don’t want to mention products specifically; I’d rather keep this generic. The process of choosing a CMS can be extremely difficult and time consuming. The marketplace is extremely crowded and it’s very hard to find unbiased information about them. CMSMatrix is a great way to learn about some, but it doesn’t really tell you where the cream of the crop is.

You must decide what features are most important to you, such as workflow, migration, platform, language or scalability. Cost can also be an important piece of the puzzle, but let’s save that for the latter half of this write-up. Once you have prioritized your features, it’s time to go out and hunt down a list of 20 or so products that you think could be a candidate.

Now, our CMS that runs downtowncartel.com is Wordpress. It can sometimes be referred to as a “blogging platform”, but in reality it is a system that manages our content in blog-form. Wordpress is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum as the system I mentioned previously.

The larger system cost nearly the salary of two employees while Wordpress was absolutely free. They are both quality products and cost should not be looked at when deciding which CMS is right for your organization.

If you would like for me to talk about some of the things that I’ve learned over the past few years leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to cover it in the next part of this series.

Note: Hashtags is back up and running thanks to Twitter re-enabling XMPP messages.

It feels as though watching the twitter uptime graph is like watching GOOG’s stock graph. In short, we rely on twitter for tracking hashtags. We use their XMPP service to get real time updates from the 7000+ users that have opted in.

As you can tell, on May 29th, we received our last hashtag updates. It was at that precise time that twitter shut off their IM functionality and essentially killed hashtags.org. Bummer. At this point, we’re at their mercy. Once they restore IM services, we’ll be good to go… our bots are eagerly waiting for that XMPP stream.

Downtown Cartel is pleased to announce the launch of hashtags.org. The brainchild of Cody Marx Bailey and excellent code crafting by Aaron Farnham over a four week period resulted in a system for tracking #hashtags on the twitter network. It has the potential to track real-time events on the web. We think it will be interesting to watch over the next few months as we find new and interesting ways to utilize the service.