Dotherightthing.com was featured in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in a great story by Jessica Guynn about the growing trend of leveraging the web to create social value.

Responsibility is in their sites, Web entrepreneurs have an eye on social need — not personal greed

The article reveals the more personal stories and motivations of these new breed of web entrepreneurs, mentioning several other web entrepreneurs aiming to do well by doing good, including Zaadz, SustainLane, FreePledge, Villagethegame, Fivelimes, RealityCharity, as well as thoughts from Paul Frankel, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business professor and brilliant social entrepreneur.

The dotherightthing team would like to thank Jessica for sharing our story in her article and welcome Chronicle readers to the site, where the dotherightthing community (that is you) is building the most comprehensive and objective resource for information about companies’ impacts on society.

We hope that you find our story and the article inspiring. We, and our fellow social entrepreneurs of the web, are just getting started.

[SF Chronicle photo by Mike Kane]

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to Origo and Jeff Hamaoui for graciously offering us a desk to use temporarily.

Actually, they’re perfect, just the way they are (just like, and because of, you). Please, let us explain.

What makes dotherightthing different is that you, the world’s consumers, get to contribute to ranking companies based on the impacts of everything they do. We renounced tradition - gathering variables and data, and fine-tuning until we were satisfied with results - to provide you, the community of users, complete control of your rankings of the world’s companies. Therefore, as you add additional stories and rate existing stories about a company, you are fine-tuning the methodology by which companies are ranked on the site.

Just as is written on our about page, on dotherightthing, the community rules. You determine:

• Which companies get the focus
• What is relevant
• Which companies are recognized for doing the right thing

Let the fun begin! Enjoy!

[flickr link]

Last week, dotherightthing was featured on the Technology Chronicles, a great blog written by the talented writers of the San Francisco Chronicle, the most-read newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ryan had the pleasure of speaking with the post’s author, Jessica Guynn, in February. Guynn is planning on following up this post with a feature article in the Chronicle, which the dotherightthing team is really looking forward to reading, shortly.

In the meantime, you can read Guynn’s blog post here.

Thanks to your feedback, we know how important it is to you that you are able to stay up to date on the impacts of companies on people and the environment. We also know that not all of us use RSS, so we decided to take a far more thoughtful approach to keeping us all up to date on activity on the site that is relevant to us. Most of all, we’d love to hear your thoughts along the way, to ensure that we’re able to build something that you’ll really find useful to maximize the impact of your participation on the site.

It’s not built yet, so there’s still a chance to share your impressions to shape this and other upcoming features to maximize the value you’ll get from them.

The goal of Smart Alerts is to help all of us stay informed on activity on the site that we’ll find relevant, without filling a single one of our inboxes with unnecessary emails. It should be smart, not have countless controls and options. It should maximize relevance and minimize annoyance… is that so much to ask?

How we envision Smart Alerts working:

1. You post a story, leave a comment, or rate the impact of a story, so there is a good chance that you’d like to know if someone starts a good discussion related to that story
2. Someone else comments on the story that you wrote, commented on, or rated
3. A notification is immediately sent to you via email
4. Another comment is left on a story that you wrote, commented on, or rated
5. Smart Alerts determines whether or not you are ready for another notification email
6. If you visited the site since the notification email was sent, you are likely more actively engaged in the discussions on the site, you are ready for another notification, so one is sent to you to update you on the recent activity (this returns you to step 3)
7. If you didn’t visit the site since you received the notification email, you probably have lots of emails to get to (we all know the feeling), Smart Alerts simply starts building a digest of activities that are relevant to you that will be sent to you in a couple days
8. Until you sign into the site, the digests you receive arrive less and less frequently, and you can always unsubscribe from Smart Alerts altogether, but we’re trying to make them useful enough that all of us will find them useful

In addition to Smart Alerts emails that you receive, you’ll also be able to follow activity on stories that you posted, commented on, or found important and rated the impact of from your profile page. This way, you won’t miss out on any activities that occur in between the time that the most recent Smart Alert you was sent to you and the time that you logged into the site.

Other ideas for Smart Alerts triggers include:

• New stories posted about a company in which you have shown interest
• New companies begin/end evaluation period (perhaps just companies in which you’ve show interest)
• List of popular stories sent on regular basis
• Stories posted that you will likely important, based on what you have shown interest in

We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and impressions of this exciting new feature. Have other brilliant feature ideas? Please share them with us!

Net Impact, a fantastic professional and student association that unites thousands of thought leaders, in the world of responsible business, at their annual Net Impact Conference, kindly included news of the launch of dotherightthing.com in their February Leading Business e-newsletter.

The dotherightthing team would like to warmly welcome fellow Net Impact members to the site, where they are now able to put their passion and innovation to work in collaborating to maximize the positive social impacts of companies.

Description of Net Impact:

Net Impact’s mission is to improve the world by growing and strengthening a network of new leaders who are using the power of business to make a positive net social, environmental, and economic impact. With more than 125 student and professional chapters on 4 continents in 75 cities and 80 graduate schools, a central office in San Francisco, and partnerships with leading for and nonprofit organizations, Net Impact enables members to use business for social good in their graduate education, careers, and communities.

For more information, please visit the Net Impact website.

The subject for our three week tuneup at dotherightthing.com are RSS feeds. Or Atom feeds, to be precise, since we wanted to go the real standards route.

What feeds?

Feeds (often known as RSS feeds or syndication feeds) are XML-based documents that you read by a so-called feed reader. The feed reader can be built in your web browser (which is the case with e.g. Firefox 2), online (such as Newsgator), or a specific reader application (such as NetNewsWire for Mac or Mozilla Thunderbird). In any case, the idea behind feeds is that you don’t have to keep track of the new content on a site yourself, you let the feed reader do it for you. For this purpose, we just published a wide menu of different feeds to whet the appetite of our users.

The main feed

Our main feed can be accessed through http://feeds.dotherightthing.com/dtrt . The feed will show a bunch of popular recent stories, just like the front page does. This feed is probably the best fit for normal users interested in keeping track of what’s happening at dotherightthing.com.

Recent feed

The best choice for the brave souls who want to explore all the new exciting stuff going on on the site is the Recent Stories feed. The feed can be found at http://feeds.dotherightthing.com/dtrt_recent and will include each and every new story posted on dotherightthing.com. But don’t blink, since the feed will update on a fast pace.

Personalized feed

The feeds we’re maybe the most proud of are the personalized feeds. Personalized feeds show all the comments made on your entries or entries that you commented on yourself. This is a great way to follow all the discussions in which you’re participating. You can subscribe to your personalized feed by browsing to your own profile page (click “Your Profile” in the upper right corner of a dotherightthing.com page when you’re logged in) and clicking the feed link. The address of a personalized feed is the url of the profile page plus /personalized_feed.atom (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/users/ryan/personalized_feed.atom ).

Company feeds

Whether you’re a company representative or just interested in a particular company, we have a feed for you! Just add .atom to the url of a company (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/companies/starbucks.atom ), and you will get the feed for the latest entries for that company. There is also a link to the company feed on each individual company page.

User feeds

Found a person that is unable to submit other than perfectly rounded stories and comments? Why not subscribe to her submissions. Browse to her profile page and click the feed link, or just add .atom to the user profile page url (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/users/ryan.atom ).

We just updated dotherightthing.com with a revised algorithm for sorting stories by popularity. The new method puts a lot more weight to the recency of the story, thus making the front page more dynamic. For this reason, we also changed the label from “Most Popular” to just “Popular”.

We hope the change will make it easier to follow all the interesting discussions going on on the site.

Dotherighthing was featured in “What’s Online” in the New York Times’ Technology section this weekend, in an article called “Sites for the Socially Conscious.” If you didn’t get a chance to read it, we’d like to invite you check it out (you may also be reminded of a previous blog post).

The team would like to offer our warmest welcome to all of the NY Times readers who found their way to the site. Thanks for joining us and enjoy doing the right thing.

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer (NY Times)

In only it’s first week since launch, dotherightthing.com was featured in some very well-read blogs, including Techcrunch and kottke.org.

We’d like to offer our warmest welcome to the thousands of visitors that heard about dotherightthing from our recent press in these and a handful of other blogs.

Unfortunately, we never could have anticipated such an overwhelmingly response from our users and the blogging community, and our servers are working overtime to accomodate everyone. We’d like to let you know that we’re working hard to ensure that dotherightthing will be available to all of our loyal community members and are increasing our capacity to handle the additional traffic right now.

Thanks for being part of the dotherightthing community. We are very excited to have you participating with us in recognizing companies for doing the right thing.

UPDATE: With a little bit of cranking we have increased our capacity and look forward to growing the site with you in the weeks to come.

It’s unbelievable to think that just 10 months ago, dotherightthing (originally known as The Buttonwood Project), was just an audacious series of ideas taken from paper scribbles and whiteboard sessions. Audacious, not because of its non-traditional vision but because of the way it captivated those who came into contact with it. From the first day, Ryan and I struggled to keep up, as dotherightthing took a life of its own, bringing alongside a contagious energy that I know will continue to live on within the community. To this very moment it continues to attract talented and dedicated supporters that will without a doubt make a real, positive social impact. 

Come change the world with us @ dotherightthing.

The following companies are now officially under evaluation:

• Wal-Mart
• Starbucks
• Whole Foods

Time left for the world to contribute to initial evaluation of companies above: 60 days 

On behalf of the entire dotherightthing team, we would like to thank you for your interest in being part of the dotherightthing community, changing how the world of business looks at its impacts on people and the world forever. We sincerely value your suggestions and feedback and encourage you to place both with us on the site, using the feedback link. We’ll be reading everything you send us intently.