Philanthropy
Philanthropy
Fighting poverty one click at a time
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/25/2006 - 08:19(Cross posted on the OAC Blog)
Today, I received an email about GoodSearch. It is a search engine that contributes a penny to a charity of your choice every time you use them for a websearch.
After checking around a little bit, I’ve set my charity of choice to One.Org. (Not to be confused with One America Committee). So, every time I do a search, a penny will go to One.Org, The Campaign to Make Poverty History.
I use Firefox as my web browser, and so I’ve set the little search box in the upper right hand corner, which I use all the time, to default to GoodSearch. I use that search box a lot, so I suspect that my searches are going to add up. I’ve also just set up my wife’s computer to use GoodSearch and contribute to Habitat for Humanity.
Are you using GoodSearch? Which charity are you contributing to?
Friday Five
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/05/2006 - 11:54Cinco de Mayo brings a special meaning to Friday Five. I’m not sure if this will really end up being five unrelated topics or not, but it will have a bunch of different tidbits, much of it follow up to various things I’ve written about recently.
I just got an email from the Media Bloggers Association giving me an update on the Maine Web Report case. It is great to see bloggers across the politics spectrum work together to defend free speech.
Peter Turner, whom I met at the New Organizing Institute training in DC back in February sent me an email about The Katrina Project. They are trying to keep the Gulf Coast tragedy fully in the public eye and promote a serious national conversation about poverty and inequality through helping rebuild the New Orleans Public Library. A very cool project. Please, check out their site and contribute a book or two.
The schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2006 is up. I will be on a panel, The Rising Power of Local Political Blogs. Two of the other people on the panel are Liza Sabater, whom I’ve met at various events around CivicSpace, last year’s Personal Democracy Forum, and probably other events, and Juan Melli, whom I’ve met online several places. It should be a good conference.
I’m also gearing up for the Media Giraffe conference. With that, I’m spending a bit of time looking at various video sharing sites. A few quick comments on this: Apparently blip.tv has cleaned up its interface and is easier to use now. For example, you no longer need to create a separate thumbnail. DailyMotion and ClipShack allow loading videos from cellphones. Kim’s cellphone records videos, so I’ll give that a try. Unfortunately, neither of them have a nice feed into other blogs, although DailyMotion does include RSS feeds and group abilities. Grouper has moved out of the ‘Coming Soon’ category, and I should probably explore that a little.
Also, Kim uploaded this picture of Reilly resting in the sun yesterday. It fits nicely for cat blogging on Friday.
So, that’s a little bit of what’s going on with me.
Opportunity Rocks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/30/2006 - 14:37Those of you who have been reading my posts know that I am a big fan of Opportunity Rocks. It is an effort to get college students to work together to end poverty.
Today, I received an email from Senator Edwards, a key force behind Opportunity Rocks, encouraging students to spend their spring break in New Orleans helping with Opportunity Rocks and New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.
I hope a lot of college students participate, and I hope that many of the blog, photoblog, podcast, and vlog about their experiences.
Read the letter from Senator Edwards below the fold.
Podcasting for positive change
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/03/2005 - 13:23Recently, I’ve been emailing back and forth with a friend who is working on getting Person to Person Aid up and running. We got into a discussion about podcasting, and I’ve decided to take an email that I was starting to write to her and make it a more general discussion.
She wrote, “once our project p2paid.org is up, I’ll encourage our users to load their recordings. I’d love to hear music from the Andes directly from a village out there. It will give me the chills.”
It made me think of Global Voices. They describe themselves as “an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world “ and recently won the 2005 Best of the Blogs for best journalistic blog in English. Thinking about what Paola said, it seems as if it would be great if there could be a few songs added to the conversation that Global Voices is interested in.
How to add del.icio.us feeds to a blogroll
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/06/2005 - 12:00(Note: I initially wrote this as an email to a person asking about how to make a blogroll out of the nonprofit blog exchange del.icio.us tags, see the Non Profit Blog Exchange block on the left hand side. However people have asked me to spread it around, so I'm posting it here as well.)
There are several different ways of making a blogroll of del.icio.us tags depending on the type of blogging software that you use. In my case, I use CivicSpace or Drupal. With these systems, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from del.icio.us and display the results of the subscription in a block on the side of the screen. It is fairly easy with a CivicSpace or Drupal site. If anyone has questions about doing this in CivicSpace, they should contact me.
