The $5 philanthropist

I just Twittered this idea but here's the expansion to this thought. First the thought again: That Twitter should add the tinyURL function into Twitter. By doing this, it would be able to track which URL's are being Twittered and build the conversation around the URL's. Add my tagging idea I've discussed before and we're really cooking with gas.

And since we have more vested interest in our Followers than an anonymous commenter on Digg, the conversation stream around the story should be better quality.

Calling all programmers, the Twitter folk or someone already working on a really awesome Twitter-based social network, let me give you my brain on this. I just want Twitter to live up to its potential.

Labels: feedback, internet, mobile, technology, twitter, web

With all of this talk about Twitter and it's potential to become a billion dollar business and what business model it should take, I'm thinking a couple features need to be added before Twitter can hit and more importantly maintain 100m users.

As a preamble, let me say to my most tweety friends who might have their feathers ruffled that I of course LOVE all of your tweets but consider the following:

At present time, when following someone, I have to take everything they're going to Twitter. This includes kids puking, drunken bar posts and conversations between two people that should be Direct totally lacking any context but for some reason are posted publicly.

Feature #1: Start tagging posts. They could even be one letter tags (#t = tech, #p = politics, #r = random stuff etc etc.) I could then choose when following someone, which of these types of tags, I want to listen to.

Feature #2: Allow Twitter users to rate others' posts. Reply to each post with a 1, 2, 3 or do it binary style "hot" or "not". This would build a Twitter Hot list that would be something to shoot for. Currently we have quantity over quality, and that poses a problem long-term. After all, how many of us respect people for how often they talk?

Feature #3: Build a Blackberry App! I Twittered this a little while ago to no reply but there is such a DOS/Linux command-line thing going on that so isn't retro-cool. Give me a slick interface that makes it such that I don't have to remember all of the command-lines. Command-line interfaces relegate the service to a more techie-oriented crowd, not the masses.

Feature #4: Last but certainly not least, get to the root of your service outages, missing tweets etc because if you're going to start charging or even adding advertising, QoS is going to be increasingly expected of you.

Of course, should you choose to implement these features, I'm available for consulting for a few stock options ;)

Labels: business, mobile, twitter, web

I'm trying to spend less time on the computer on weekends so I've got to make this quick. Last night, we launched several new features to GiveMeaning including the ability to subscribe to RSS Feeds for any cause, location or combination of cause and locations. So you can subscribe to a feed for everything at GiveMeaning addressing "poverty" in "Vancouver" as an example.

It's a great way to find out what's going on about an issue or community you care about.

Check it out.

Labels: feeds, givemeaning, nptech, online, rss, web

After just a night in Montreal, I'm back on the train now headed to Toronto. I'm listening to Lucinda Williams on my iPod and as I opened a new window to start this blog entry, the song started. Appropriately titled: Everything has changed.

The song (in Lucinda style) is horribly depressing but beautiful:

Now I don't know where my faith has gone
Faces look familiar but they dont have names
Towns I used to live in have been rearranged
Highways I once traveled on dont look the same
Everything has changed. Everything has changed

Reading the Globe & Mail this morning, this song was the perfect soundtrack for an article on the front page that reported that the Liberals raised $531,141 from 4,365 contributors versus the $5.1 million from 45,192 contributors that the Conservatives reported during the same period.

The fundraising landscape has changed and what worked before doesn't work as effectively today.

My advice (perhaps self-serving) is that the Liberals need to license the GiveMeaning platform to create personalized fundraising pages for each candidate. Here's how it would work: E

ach candidate creates a page (within their own website) where their supporters are encouraged to sign-up as "virtual campaigners."

They send an email to their own social networks with an introductory note about why they support the candidate and encouraging them to donate. The link brings them to a fundraising page not unlike this one except branded in the look and feel of the rest of that candidate's page.

People can leave messages of support, and the candidate's blog entries, photos, video entries whatever are automatically imported with a notification being sent out to each donor when updates are made (like Facebook).

In targeting small donations, the two big issues are conversion rate and cost of acquisition. There is no cheaper, more effective program than GiveMeaning's fundraising pages. What do you say candidates and campaign managers?

Labels: canada, fundraising, online, politics, web

So I think I can summarize why Web 2.0 is coming to an end and we're ready for Web 3.0

Web 2.0 was about opening up User-Generated Content ("UGC"). The barriers to create and propagate content (including entire websites) have dropped so low, that we're awash in UGC. We have a handful of sites that have become dominant aggregators of UGC and their focus must now be connecting their customers to the content they want in the most painless way possible. The role of aggregator and mashups have created a new relationship for all media. There was VERY LITTLE actual technology built in the Web 2.0 world.

Web 3.0 will be technology-driven and about creating reputation and order for UGC. eBay's purchase of StumbleUpon, our creation and subsequent licensing discussions of our new UGC reputation management system all speak to the beginning of Web 3.0.

Web 2.0 will continue to propagate content. But there will be very few new winners though the Web 2.0 establishment will crown many new "micro-winners:" Winners who rise to the top within specific sites.

But the new play is in Web 3.0. And it should be exciting and refreshing that the discussion is returning to real technology. At least for some of us.

Labels: media, online, ugc, web, web2.0, web3.0

Well, I've finally gotten my first podcast uploaded to iTunes. For those iTunes users, you can download it from them here here
or if you don't use iTunes, you can get it here

The interview was recorded with Gavin Hollett, one of the founders of Opportunity Aequa, a Victoria-based non-profit that has raised nearly $15,000 through GiveMeaning to build soccer fields and bring soccer equipment to kids in Ecuador.

I blogged about Gavin just before he left for Ecuador but had no idea that he and the team would do such a good job of blogging while in Ecuador.

Their project is the best example of delivering their donors a "Return On Generosity." Go to their page and click on the "Blog" tab and read through their almost daily posts.

The Podcast is the first of what hopefully will be a regular series of interviews of project founders on GiveMeaning. Please let me know what you think of the Podcast.

Massive thanks to Ryland Haggis of RedPilot for creating the Podcast!

Labels: charity, media, nptech, philanthropy, podcast, web

At 6am this morning, we launched a brand-new version of the GiveMeaning website.

As most of you know, we here at GiveMeaning have been hard at work on a new version of the site since last September. We have codenamed this new site "SaveAnything" because one of the most significant new features of this site is that you can submit any news story that addresses something that needs "saving" to the site, tag the story based on what causes it's addressing and geotag the story (i.e. pinpoint the exact location of the story).

The original inspiration for GiveMeaning was from a news article that I read written by Christie Blatchford about a boy named Randall Dooney who was murdered by his father and step-mother. I was so shocked and horrified that this kind of abuse was known but not prevented in time that I wanted to DO SOMETHING about what I was reading. I went online but there was nothing I could easily find. While I spent hours looking (I wasn't working at the time), most people would spend a few minutes and if there was no gas to ignite that spark into action, it would just be a spark.

So now, there is a place where any news story in the world, no matter how local or global in context, not only can you raise awareness about that issue but by submitting a proposal, you can actually DO something about it, rate other proposals, see active projects that might match-up with the story and talk amongst a community of people that care about this news story. Later, we'll add other contextual relevance.

For the first time in many years, I've been able to apply my brain for new technology to my passion for philanthropy. When GiveMeaning first came onto the scene, it was an innovative use of existing technology for the philanthropic sector but it wasn't from a tech-execution perspective anything new. Here we have with this launch a number of new innovations that contribute to the general web world as well as the philanthrosphere.

A more thoughtful rating system
Most of the social bookmarking sites are strictly binary: You either agree or disagree on that story. On most social bookmarking sites, I find myself mindlessly clicking on stories based on a headline. Mindlessness will actually degrade a user's reputation on the site.

What we've done is created a real demand on the user to actually think about the story before rating it, knowing that it's not how many people have rated the story but how the community agrees with your rating of the story that influence your rating. In other words, we want people to submit a story that says "look, I feel that this a very important issue but the quality is rather week however it does detail the crisis in Darfur in a way that hasn't been covered before." You may rate the story's importance as a 5, its quality as a 2 and the informativeness as a 4.

Because we ask that when a new story is submitted, that the person submitting the story credit the actual writer of the story, the forth rating box is the "Source" rating which is scored by the credibility (based on past ratings) of BOTH the writer of the article and the person who submitted the story at GiveMeaning. Soon we will be able to show the actual ratings of individual writers and bloggers on an issue by issue basis (as determined by the GiveMeaning community).

Individual members of the community are not rewarded based on the number of stories they submit but rather based on their ability to be respected for their contributions and the accuracy of those contributions by the community at large.

This rating system is now applied across everything at the site. The reason I am excited about the rating system for new "proposals" and active projects is that it creates a feedback loop amongst the community to the "founder" of the proposal or project. Previously, if the community thought that the proposal addressed an important need but lacked detail and quality of the proposal, the proposal would likely just "die on the vine." Now, the feedback loop is there which will hopefully inspire project founders to think through how and what they present to the community in a new way.

The map feature is "just a mashup" of projects but is nevertheless very compelling visually. The ability to zoom-in on a tiny town in Malawi gives a whole new context to the project.

A new approach to tagging

We've developed a new collaborative tagging method for all media on the site that I really like. My big problem with leaving tagging something up to the person submitting the story is that this invites tag-spam and inaccuracies. I am guilty of bad tagging of my posts because I'm trying to tag based on what I think will get the most search-engine hits not what is actually most accurate for the story.

So what we've done is that as a logged-in user of the site, you have the ability to vote for the top 5 most accurate tags for that item. You can also "flag" tags that are either inappropriate or poorly submitted. As more people take time to tag the content on the site, the "related projects and proposals" will get a lot more accurate too.

Speaking of tags

The new search system on the site uses a combination of "Location" and "Cause" to help find things that interest you. So for example, by typing in Toronto, I see all the places near Toronto in the location cloud and in the "Cause" cloud, I see all the tags that have been submitted on content located in Toronto. Or, I can type in a tag like "womensrights" and see all the locations in the world where content has been tagged with that description.

We have a bunch of improvements and a new Q&A and About Us section that will launch in the next couple of days. Minor and major improvements will be made in the coming weeks. But I'm thrilled with this new release. We move away from being a site focused purely on "give money to this cause" and more of a place where you can come to find out about what's going on in your own backyard or about a community or cause that matters a lot to you.

Start submitting stories and let me know what you think!

Labels: charity, npotech, online, philanthropy, web, web2

Friends and family, colleagues and strangers!!!! I am over the moon to tell you that tomorrow morning we're going into labor! Alas, not the birth of my first child but the birth of a brand new version of the GiveMeaning site. It is radical both in its technical execution and its contribution to the "online social network" and "philanthrosphere" worlds.

The entire GiveMeaning site will be brought down for 24-36 hours as we migrate to both the new source code and a whole new set of servers.

Look for the new site Saturday afternoon or evening.

To everyone who has contributed to its development, I am so proud of us! To all of our families and friends who have suffered through our stress and long hours, thank you!

To the community of GiveMeaning members whose feedback over the past two years have contributed to the genetic code of this new site, we are grateful.

To those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, go to our new site anytime Saturday. We'll likely "soft launch" this for a week or so to figure out the response and then announce it to the world.

It's time to SaveAnything.

Labels: charity, innovation, npotech, philanthropy, saveanything, web, worldchanging

(Wickaninnish Gallery in Granville Island was the store who raised the most money)

We have picked-up all of our Christmas REAL CHANGE FROM SPARE CHANGE retail campaign experiment here in Vancouver and we're all totally blown away by the success!



By way of background, we built these beautiful red little boxes that we call "Pig-e-Banks" and gave them out to retailers throughout Vancouver. We asked them to pick any charity in Canada or any project on our site that they wanted to fundraise for and then ask their customers to donate their spare change.

After seeing how much money was raised by kids in our Halloween campaign pilot, we thought we would extend the experiment to retail stores.

Conventional wisdom warned that Point-of-Purchase retail real estate was far too valuable to give over to the Pig-e-Bank boxes, never-mind the business of the season would prevent employees from talking about the Pig-e-Bank or anything else during their busiest time of the year.


In less than three weeks, a total of $2082.05 was raised from participating retailers!!!

The top 5 stores (who raised the most money were):

1. Wickaninnish Gallery
2. Gloss Salon
3. Chic
4. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
5. Heaven's Playground

The program validated everything I instinctively believed. It's perfectly fitting that the Chinese New Year is the "Year of the Pig." We're going to expand this coin collection program nation-wide.

GiveMeaning takes care of all of the logistics (picking-up, sorting, getting the participants the boxes etc). It's perfect for any store, any office, any desk at work. And our "Junior" version is ideal for kids groups and schools to raise money.

If you're interested in participating, click here



Dear, a store in South Granville got creative with their box and made a little sign to wave to customers asking them to donate in support of the BC SPCA.


Of course, the program couldn't have happened without Hannah & Anna, our dynamic duo who went store-to-store, spreading our Piggies throughout the city



Thanks to everyone who participated. In such a short amount of time, we raised a lot of money (given the denominations collected) and have proven the concept. Now it's time to roll-out these little Piggies across the Country!

Labels: charity, coin, community, fundraising, innovative, nptech, philanthropy, pig-e-bank, web

This morning, Lucy Bernholz over at Philanthropy 2173 asked "What foundations are blogging" and "Which foundations or donors are doing anything in virtual worlds or social networks?"

I had just finished reading Phil Cubeta's blog this morning in which he writes "Philanthropy blogging is becoming an awful lot like reading way too many professional journals: The official story told by the officials in official upper middle brow language that will upset no one and change nothing, often accompanied by advertising, or a business model that ties the words back to an influx of cash and a nice soft life. "

So in response to Lucy's question and to Phil's point, I ask "What foundations's representatives or donors are saying anything interesting or world changing on their blogs?" The list then becomes small if not almost entirely non-existent.

What I take from Phil's post is that bloggers who represent foundations, donors, charities, whatever, they must actually ENGAGE. And this starts ultimately by being able to talk about what's wrong with the sector and/or specific programs and interventions... It means throwing out ideas fearlessly that break the status quo and it means one of us philanthropshere bloggers actually being the ones to break the Gates Foundation story not just commenting on the story.

And you know, by being "out-there" it may mean you're less popular at the next schmoozefest, but guess what? You'll be headlining the event, because people crave the real deal.

On the Social Networks & Virtual World's Question

I have blogged previously about canceling my MySpace account. As someone who consults to many charities about IT and media strategies, I can tell you that if any charity or foundation representative boasted that they were spending time on MySpace or Friendster, let alone Second Life or any virtual world, I would tell them they are wasting their time.

Organizations are far-better served investing resources in making their own sites more interesting, including having content and activities that encourage that organization's supporters to be the ones creating a new audience. Kiva and DonorsChoose have introduced blog badges to some success but even the big sites have a long way to go to leveraging their content to turn their supporters into their spokespeople.

Labels: blog, charity, innovative, media, philanthropy, web, web2

Austin Hill, a guy I've never met but feel like he's a kindred spirit, posted an interview on GiveMeaning that I did via email.

Just on my way to a meeting. More later.

Labels: gifter, interview, media, online, web, web2

en·vi·ron·ment /ɛnˈvaɪrənmənt, -ˈvaɪərn-/ Pronunciation[en-vahy-ruhn-muhnt, -vahy-ern-] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun

1. the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences; surroundings; milieu.

It might come as a shock to some of my close friends when I say that I really haven't given much thought to the environment. It's true. For the kid who used to write letters to McDonald's asking them "to stop using stirofoame [sic]in their cups because it hurts the environment," it's been years since I have cared or engaged myself on environmental issues.

Before yesterday, the last time I got concerned about the environment was when I found out that Polar Bears have been declining in numbers because of the rate that ice is melting, causing massive disruptions in the feeding, hibernation and reproduction of the species. I remember the week where the news story was circulating and I did some searching but I couldn't find any organization to donate to, so I gave up.

I'm the kind of guy that last summer, as we enjoyed an especially warm summer, I glibly thanked global warming for the longer summer when making obligatory weather chit-chat in the elevator of my apartment building.

I never saw Inconvenient Truth, and despite attempts to get motivated to see it, just couldn't and still can't bring myself to do it.

This all seems like horrible admissions for a person in my job, and for a person who is known amongst his friends and colleagues as an incredibly passionate guy, a guy who quite literally aspires for nothing more than to change the world.

I suppose (if you'll indulge the metaphor) the clouds began to part for me round about Tuesday night when without warming and whilst still relatively warm out, snow began falling but then, within two hours had almost completely disappeared.

The next morning, we picked up Mr Brown as we do every morning. (We run a car-pool but it's economical not consciously environmental) He starts talking about this article, how 10 blocks of Austin's downtown core had been closed because of birds mysteriously dropping dead from the sky. This, I remember, is how that movie The Core started and then we found out that the earth had stopped spinning, dooming us all until Hillary Swank and that guy from Thank You For Smoking saved the world.

Apparently, birds dropping dead isn't limited to Austin. It's been reported in Australia as well.

I remember being in Toronto just before Christmas (it was warmer in Toronto than in Vancouver) and reading a great article in the Globe & Mail. I wish I could quote it exactly but it went something like "December - 23: In Ottawa where snowblowers are being sold at fire-sale prices and with flowers starting to bloom on Parliament Hill, it comes as no surprise that Prime Minister Harper is starting to take Global Warming seriously."

Throughout the day yesterday, various members of the upstairs team started emailing each other links to various environmental calamities, oddities or outright disasters.

By the end of the day yesterday, as snow began coming down again, we talked of little else other than just how f*cked we might be as a result of environmental damage.

And to be clear, this wasn't just end of the day kibitzing. This was neither dispassionate nor disconnected. This was genuinely a collective moment of several of us finally connecting our hearts and minds to the importance of the environment on our life here on earth. I mean, I don't know how many times I've heard pithy little statements like "we have only one earth" and variations on the theme but hey, we really have one f*cking planet and there is increasingly convincing proof connecting cause (our collective behavior and choices) to devastating effect.

I might be revealing too much of myself by referencing yet another schlocky near-apocolyptic Hollywood movie but in The Day After Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climate scientist who tries to warn the Vice-President of the US about a potential storm that would essentially create a new Ice Age. The Veep dismisses it, the World freezes over, the President dies, he ascends to the Presidency, and then at the end of the movie, from America's new base in Mexico, he addresses what remains of the World by saying something like "well, we've got to start taking care of the environment."

While back in the real world, there haven't been any Dennis Quaid types warning of an Ice Age coming in the next months or years, I reference this only as a reminder to myself of what might happen if we continue to push this off.



I found the above graph pretty compelling from an intellectual perspective. I found this in a report on Natural Disasters prepared by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. According to their report:

• The costs of disaster damage is now 15 times higher than they were in 1950s - According to the IMF, disaster damage caused $654 billion in material losses in 1990s.


• The number of disasters has grown: fewer than 100 in 1975 to more than 400 in 2005


• Approximately 2.6 billion people were affected by natural disasters over the past ten years, compared to 1.6 billion the previous decade

Despite all of this, I'm not compelled to act because of the Polar Bears or because I fear suddenly being frozen to death on my way into work. I look at this in surprisingly (for me) pragmatic terms: $$$Money$$$.

The need to do whatever we can to reverse and address the damage that's already been done, and to collectively do all we can to prevent more damage is best expressed in economic terms:

As the figures above address, not only are we vulnerable to more "big shocks" that devastate entire communities, regions or countries but everything from rising health costs, decreased agricultural outputs, wasted government and private donor disaster relief donations in the billions, there's no area of the economy that isn't touched by the environment. It's why it's called the environment.

I wonder if anyone has studied the environmental attitudes of Katrina victims? Do they correlate the devastation they experienced in any way to their own and their country's attitudes and actions towards the environment? Has even a significant minority of the affected population changed their daily actions to be more environmentally conscious?

Maybe it's already too late to reverse course and it's now all just an eventuality. But I ain't no quitter. Shouldn't we all be saying "But I'm gonna die trying?" Seriously, what on this earth, must happen for us to seriously give a damn?

The phone just rang. It was a good friend of mine. I told him I was in the middle of writing a blog about the environment. His reply? "Don't you have anything better to talk about than the weather?"

And this is the challenge.

Labels: activism, charity, climate, disaster, earth, environment, hurricanekatrina, katrina, politics, web, world

Happy New Year, everyone. I was telling Jessie that I remember being in 5th grade, talking about the 21st century as this far-away time, imagining what life and the world be like. I must admit my disappointment that personal Jettsons-like vehicles aren't the norm, and that life on a daily basis isn't much different from when I attended Campus View Elementary.

That said, if I have to compare 2007 to a more recent time when I dreamed of the future, say when I started GiveMeaning, a lot has changed.

When I started GiveMeaning in the summer of 2005 wise, intelligent, experienced people told me there was both no need to change anything about the charitable sector. Worse yet, trying to form some kind of business that could eventually profit from charity was not only bad business but just bad form.

Two years later, Philanthropy, social consciousness, charity, altruism, the desire to do good, to change the world is THE topic. Magazines launched, new web ventures launched, thinking changing, evolving.

I'm happy to see a more vocal voicing of a desire to find meaning in our lives. There is of course, danger that by turning up the volume on the conversation around doing good, that we overdose and overwhelm. Or that with all the recipes to do good, that we end up buying a bunch of ingredients, and then settling on take-out.

As for me personally, here are my New Year's resolutions (in no particular order):

Blog more: I want to do more with this blog. I want to get out of the office a lot more, not just in Africa but everywhere where we have projects going on (which is pretty much everywhere in the world). There are so many people that start projects on GiveMeaning that I am totally amazed and inspired by. I want to help tell their stories.

Women's Rights Now: I have registered the domain womensrightsnow.org I'm going to create a simple petition site that I want to use to advocate for what is the simplest, smartest one thing we can do to change the world: Ensure women's rights and gender equality the world over. I hope to launch the site before the end of January.

Get out there: The greatest joy and most inspiration I get is talking to young people. I want to get out to more schools this year.

And now on to my first day back in the office. Enjoy!

Labels: charity, givemeaning, media, npo, philanthropy, resolutions, web

I am exhausted. I have been traveling since last Sunday and I'm quite sure I have slept only a total of about 25 hours in the past six days. But it's been a good week and I'm always happy to be spreading the word about GiveMeaning.

Toronto earlier in the week was particularly special for me because I got to meet with Karyn Kennedy, the Executive Director of The Toronto Child Abuse Center ("TCAC")

TCAC was introduced to me by Christie Blatchford of the Globe & Mail (a journalist for whom I have immense respect). It was Christie's courtroom coverage of the story of Randal Dooney, a young boy who was brutally tortured and ultimately murdered by his Father and Step-mother that inspired be to start GiveMeaning. I was so angered and saddened by the total break-down in the "safety net" that was supposed to protect children in Canada from this abuse, that I wanted to do something, anything.

Here I was having just read Christie's coverage and motivated to act, and I couldn't find anything at my fingertips that I could do to react positively to this story. I spent the next couple of weeks trying in vain to reach-out to local organizations that were tasked to provide counsellings to children who have been abused but I either couldn't find the organizations or couldn't get my email or phone call returned when I did find a number or an email address to ping.

The reason? Because most of the small organizations, the ones looking after kids like Randal and his brother Tego (who survived and is now living back in his native Jamaica), these organizations operate on such shoe-string budgets that they don't have enough staff to both provide their services and respond to interested donors like me.

GiveMeaning's service is designed for ALL charities but it's the small organizations, the ones whose names we don't know, the ones whose organizations are constantly struggling for funding which really sums up more than 80% of the 80,000 charities in this country, and a similar percentage of the more than 1,000,000 charities in the US, say nothing of the rest of the world.

I had a great meeting with Karyn and though she doesn't have any projects on the site yet, we discussed several exciting initiatives that we can work on together. I've long asserted that if we want to truly want to make change in our country, we have to focus on the root causes of the problems that manifest many years later as a result of those problems.

Child Abuse is irrefutably one of the most obvious root causes of homelessness, violent crime, and sex crimes. Anyone who wants to actually reduce the instances of any of these social problems who proposes anything other than tackling child abuse is bound to fail. Blunt, yes. Controversial, maybe. Room to debate my point? Only by massaging the words. My assertion isn't a difficult argument to agree with, is it? And yet, in provinces like Ontario where too many sensational cases of children like Randall Dooney and Jeffery Baldwin were failed by the Province, leading to their deaths but across the Country, we have provincially funded organizations that are stymied in their abilities to intervene.

Child Abuse is one of those "hard topics" in charity to sell. But increasingly, I want GiveMeaning to find a way to address these "hard topics" by marrying our innovative marketing ideas with the wonderful, hard-working, and life-changing organizations like Toronto Child Abuse Center.

If we can empower organizations like TCAC by providing them new ways to communicate their message, new ways to engage, the children in Canada who right now, as we celebrate our holidays, are suffering horrible, unspeakable, unthinkable acts of violence and depravity will be saved. Let us not wait until they are another of Christie's stories.

As it seems to be the case with each of these blog entries, I start by meaning to keep it light, talk about a million different things that happened this week, I found a topic I needed to talk about, if for no other reason than for me to commit my own thoughts to the page.

Two last things. I have started my own project at GiveMeaning. In the two years of running GiveMeaning, I have never started my own project. I will enter a separate blog entry over the holidays about it, but you can visit it at yves.givemeaning.com

I'm on my way to do my last interview of a week that has been - gratefully - full of interviews. I have never met the host of Get Connected, but judging his bio, it should make for a good, interactive interview.

Merry Christmas (it's a sentiment, not a religious assertion).

Stay Safe and Warm.

Labels: abuse, aid, canada, charity, childabuse, givemeaning, philanthropy, politics, web

All throughout Vancouver stores, you will see our beautiful bright-red boxes inviting you to make "Real change from spare change." This is the next extension of what we launched at Halloween with our kids Pig-e-Banks. Over $100,000,00 in spare change is given to charity every year in Canada alone. GiveMeaning wants to show the world (starting in Canada) how much change this change can make.

With a Pig-e-Bank box, retailers collect money for a charity they choose. They collect the money in-store and attached to the box are a set of cards that each person is encouraged to take which directs them to a special web page on our site that explains what charity has been chosen by that retailer and why. Click here for an example. Click here for an example of what a retailer's page looks like.

You too can order your Pig-e-Bank to sit on your desk at work, at a dinner party or even if it's just in your bedroom, get your Pig-e-Bank today.

Labels: charity, coincollecting, coins, community, fundraising, innovation, pig-e-bank, retail, web

I did it! After months of trimming my MySpace "friends" from 300 down to 60, I was able to finally let go of MySpace and permanently delete my account.

Reasons for leaving MySpace:

1) The only "friends" I communicated with on MySpace weren't my real friends. I would occasionally exchange the inside joke comment with a real friend but the reality is, I prefer to converse in person with my real friends. The majority of my "friends" were people I had never met, nor likely to meet. I don't have enough time to see my real friends as it is, so any free time I do have is better spent with them in person.

2) MySpace has become overrun with "spam bots" automatically sending semi-personalized messages from bands, consumer products and sex-trade workers, none of whom are exactly friends I want to bring over to the house for a home-cooked meal.

3) There is really nothing to do on MySpace. I don't use groups, I use YouTube for video or Yahoo's video search. Craigslist is still the classifieds king and I gave up stumbling through MySpace profiles long ago.

4) I grew up. A similar transition occurred for me in the print media world: I canceled my Maxim subscription and started a subscription to Esquire magazine. It's a rather sad social commentary that I can trace my slow evolution into full-fledged adult man through magazines and websites, but these are the tools of our time.

MySpace apparently just served more page views than Yahoo during the month of November (though the measurement methodology is in question) so I'm not likely to be creating a mass revolt.

I'm not in anyway linking my account cancellation to the end of social networks but let's face it: If socializing now passes as what occurs on MySpace or any other social network, our society is truly done for.

Prediction: The next social network will be almost entirely mobile and will use geo-locating to deliver what is really socializing using a network.

If anyone needs motivation to end their social networking account, you can find it here.

Labels: media, myspace, online, socialnetwork, socialweb, web