If philanthropy books are a bubble …

The downturn notwithstanding, another area that seems to be getting a huge amount of attention is using foundations’ data to serve other donors. New and old organizations in the US alone said to be knocking on doors in the foundation world seeking to set standards, extract expertise and information in some form, and identify ‘good’ non-profits include Newdea, Compass, Social Solutions, NKN, Root Cause, Grantsfire, Foundation Center, Folio, Great Nonprofits, GiveWell, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Center for What Works, Foundation Strategy Group, Acumen, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, and Google.org, to name just a few. Hopefully they’re not all asking the same questions of the same people.