Changes For Good

Wouldn’t it be a beautiful thing if the Charter for Compassion spread like wildfire. TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong did an amazing thing, bringing together religious leaders from across the globe. Input for the Charter came from thousands of people in more than 100 countries, then the Council of Conscience (which includes Tariq Ramadan, Rabbi David Saperstein, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Sheikh Ali Gomaa) assembled the ideas and drafted the Charter. Now it’s your turn to help. Spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Post a badge or widget on your blog. Talk to your local religious leaders and your congregation about the Charter. And add your name to the list of those who affirm the Charter (on the right side of the home page).

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Electric cars don’t have to be boxy, ugly little tin cans. They can be sporty. And responsive. Like 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds. Without the hassle of having to wait until the battery is depleted before charging it further. And with the ability to charge it anywhere there’s a regular electrical outlet.

The future is here now, thanks in part to Google founders Larry and Sergey who invested a sizable sum in the electric car startup. It’s the 2008 Tesla Roadster. Jay Leno took it for a test drive and loved it (watch the video). But I have to warn you though, the price tag is a little steep: like around $100,000. And there’s this pesky little problem of a waitlist that’s over 1100 people long (Source: TechCrunch).

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Many people are concerned with the plight of the Tibetan people, particularly now that Tibet’s level of protest has risen dramatically during the Beijing Olympic games. The problem is the Chinese government’s manufactured illusion of freedom and acceptable level of human rights, and is compounded by its relentless anti-Tibet PR campaign.

So what can concerned search engine optimizers do to help the Tibetans and raise awareness of their plight?

In years past, SEO professionals have competed in playful contests to see who could rank a site the highest for a nonsense term like “nigritude ultramarine,” or some other similar goal. To my knowledge, we’ve never collectively used our powers for something big that could help others.

I think the situation in Tibet represents an unprecedented opportunity for SEOs to do just that. But instead of running an ego-driven contest (and instead of “Google bombing” some unsuspecting site, which is no longer really feasible since Google defused this with their algorithm), let’s all see how high we can rank a Tibet-related site for the keyword “olympics.” The site would need to have the word “olympics” on their home page in order for it to really work. Ideally, the site would cooperate with us and take our SEO advice in terms of on-page factors that they would need to change to help with the “olympics” ranking. I think a good candidate site to send our “link love” to would be FreeTibet.org, a non-profit, non-governmental campaign to help the Tibetan people achieve the right to determine their own future. The organization has been in operation for more than 20 years, and has nearly 20,000 members. Alternative sites to consider: Save Tibet, the official Tibet-in-exile site, and the Dalai Lama’s site.

If we could get the site to hit, say, number 8 in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) for “olympics,” that would be a great statement of support from SEOs for the Tibetan people.

(7 votes, average: 2.71 out of 5)

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Have you heard of the new trend in conferences called unconferences? An unconference has a loose agenda, no set speakers, no canned Powerpoint presentations – just a bunch of attendees who really want to get the most out of the conference as they can, so they participate in the planning of the unconference in terms of what topics to cover and the content of the sessions. It starts off with a wiki before the unconference. The wiki is used to flesh out the agenda, the topics and so forth and then at the unconference will break into groups, side rooms and start sharing information, collaborating, discussing, case studies, etc.

I have heard it said that the best part of a conference is the discussions that go on out in the corridors between sessions. An unconference turns those corridor discussions into the conference itself. So far, there have been only a small number of unconferences — the most famous of which being BarCamp — but none that I know of on any Changing the World type subjects like environmental issues or social issues etc.

I would love to see organizations such as Greenpeace and United Way etc. organizing unconferences, or even just individuals on topics focused on making the world a better place.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Why can’t every company offer to “plant a tree for me” along with each purchase like Dell is doing? (Way to go, Dell!) At a minimum, it would make for a great gift to give to clients at Christmastime.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I would love to see an “Instruction Book for Saving the Planet” wiki where visitors could share ideas, tips, concerns, etc. on the wiki in a structured sort of way.

Somebody should (The Google Foundation perhaps?) commission some of the smartest minds to seed the wiki with some initial content, because it is very hard to build a vibrant wiki when nobody has posted anything yet. You need that critical mass. Nobody likes being first at a party.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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You have probably seen fundraising campaigns like “Race for the Cure” or similar, and the cure is for a cure to cancer or AIDS or any number of diseases.

I think bloggers would be a great group of people for a charity to target. And there’s no marathon to run, just fingers to move on the keyboard! Bloggers get readers to “sponsor” them, then the sponsors donate based on how many posts the blogger made over a certain period of time (like a particular month). Likely sponsors would be blog readers who already enjoy their blog and would love to see the blogger post more often to their blog. In a way, it’s sorta similar to World Vision’s 30-hour famine, where kids would walk around the neighborhood, get sponsors and, if they did the famine where they went without food for 30 hours, they could collect that sponsorship money from their sponsors and turn it in to World Vision to help the poor.

Blogcritics organized what they called a “blog for a cure” to diabetes, which was just an call for bloggers to post about diabetes during the month of November to raise general awareness about the disease. That’s a start, but I’m wanting something that directly raises money that can be used to fund disease research. That’s a lot more practical result than just a thousand more posts about a disease floating around in cyberspace that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Thoughts?

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Not long ago I read the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It really got me thinking about the future of profound changes we are going to see in our lifetime through impending advances in nanotechnology.

The virtual world of Second Life is hugely popular with gamers. It would be interesting to create a virtual world where nanotechnology were already prevalent. So, if you hadn’t read The Diamond Age, you would still get a sense for what a different world we are going to live in in 20 years. It could get people thinking about the impact of nanotechnology, “grey goo” and ethical issues and regulatory issues and so forth, before the problems really rear their ugly heads. Most people aren’t aware of these issues. Maybe a Second Life virtual world where you are immersed in the nanotech world 20 years in the future could get people thinking about this?
 

(1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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It would be fascinating to get a conversation going between President Jimmy Carter and the head of the Google Foundation, Larry Brilliant. President Carter has some amazing ideas for making the world a better place and Google Foundation has the means to achieve it with the funding from Google Inc.

I would love for them to get on the phone together and have a chat. Even better, if we could record the call and make it available as a podcast afterwards. I imagine it would be a stimulating and thought-provoking conversation. Maybe they could make it into a movie, kind of like My Dinner with Andre.

Larry, if you’re reading this, the Carter Center is a client of ours and I’d be happy to make an introduction.
 

(2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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There are some do-gooder websites out there that have signed up for a number of affiliate programs and when you go to their website first then click through on one of their affiliate links to make your purchase, they give the lion’s share of the affiliate commission to charity. iGive is an example of such a site.

However, I think there is a whole other approach that could be taken if someone was willing to take it on as a champion. The idea is this…

If we were to have a competing affiliate program to LinkShare, BeFree, Commission Junction, etc. where all the proceeds except for operating expenses go to charity, that would be pretty cool.

An affiliate network like that would probably entice a lot of webmasters to participate. Assuming you can still have access to the same types of merchants that you would through another competing affiliate network, and access to similar commission percentages, this could be a workable solution. Maybe some of the merchants on other affiliate networks would be willing to switch to this affiliate network because it contributes to the common good?

Or perhaps one of the existing affiliate networks would be willing to branch out into this area and carve out a sub-set of their network for such a worthy purpose, where not just the proceeds go to charity, but also the commissions that the affiliate earned.

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Children of this world are our future. There are some wonderful kids out there; smart innovative children who are just looking for the opportunity to show off their ingenuity and creativity.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a contest for child inventors to submit their inventions to, in the hopes of a substantial prize like a computer system, or scholarship, or something? It would be great if Apple Computer donated prizes to such a contest, or even organized and ran the contest and opened it up to children of the world, not just kids in America? Does such a contest already exist?

 

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The Indigo Evolution documentary, which I found really interesting and well done, is now available on DVD. Included in the special features on the DVD over 3 hours of additional footage and interviews that didn’t make it into the final movie. There is some great content in those interviews. It occurred to me that a good way to open up that content and make it available to a larger audience would be to start a blog and to synopsize various parts of the interviews and turn them into blog posts.

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Google Inc. has quite a number of corporate blogs focused around particular products and services they offer and a number of Googlers (that is what Google employees call themselves) have personal blogs with tips, recommendations, ruminations and so forth around Google, but I have yet to see Googlers start a blog about how their employer could help save the planet. Why not? And if this is a good idea, who is going to start it?

Or perhaps it shouldn’t be manned by Googlers at all; instead people who are customers of and evangelists for Google — people like Philipp Lenssen and Nancy Blachman?

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Government and university websites are not very keen to post Google ads, for obvious reasons. They are not looking to make a few bucks off advertising to help cover their operating costs. That’s what taxpayers are for! Plus it would erode their credibility to do so. However, a number of these organizations I bet would be interested in posting public service announcements, so why couldn’t Google evolve AdSense into something that allowed .gov’s and .edu’s to post contextually-relevant public service ads without any risk of a commercial message sneaking in there?

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There are services out there like the really cool Hipcast service (previously named Audioblog.com) where you can call a phone number and record a voice message which then gets converted into an MP3 audio podcast. Perhaps as a way to make it easier for non-bloggers who want to share ideas about making the world a better place, I should sign up with such a service and publish an 800 number on this blog. Then you, dear readers, can call the number and create a podcast that I could publish on this blog. What do you think? Anyone game for that?

 

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The Dalai Lama says that “Generosity creates wealth”. I believe that. And here’s an idea that you can apply to prove it to yourself. Give generously to a charity that you believe in. Then place a seal or sticker stating that you support that charity on your website. For example, you can see from this company’s website that they support Heifer International. Measure your online sales, inquiries, and conversion rate before and after placing the seal on your website. I bet they go up!

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Social networks like Friendster and Orkut, if they are popular enough and have a large enough base of users, could be a mechanism for the President and law-makers to gauge public opinion on a particular issue.

How much more of a democracy would we live in if the people we have elected actually have their finger on the pulse of their constituents’ opinions and wishes. This increased transparency would undoubtedly help these officials make better, more informed decisions.

I am not quite sure how this would work but perhaps there could be questionnaires for users to fill out, or hot topic issues could be highlighted, somehow inviting people to lodge their opinion for a position on that issue. 

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In addition to Google’s AdSense network there are a number of other competing networks, including Yahoo Publisher Network, Kanoodle BrightAds, etc. It would be great to see a competitor to AdSense where all of the proceeds went to charity. I’m imagining a network called AdsForGood or something like that. The company that operated the network could just take enough of the ad revenue to cover their operating costs and all of the rest would go to charity (including the site publisher’s portion).

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Some years ago my wife submitted an editorial to our local newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal. It spoke out against the plan for a company headquarters building to be erected in our neighborhood right along the lake which would have necessitated the demolition of the neighborhood of houses, including the one we were renting.

Her editorial was published in its entirety (it was quite a long article). In the end, the corporation gave in and decided to build their building elsewhere. I’m sure my wife’s article was at least partially responsible. Unfortunately the neighborhood still got bulldozed. But at least there isn’t some monstrous building right on the lakefront.

The point of this is that editorials in the newspaper, also known as op-ed (opinion-editorial) pieces, can make a difference. If you care about something and you don’t feel the issue has the visibility it deserves, then write to your newspaper. Craft a well thought-out op-ed piece. In fact, I think we should all be doing this sort of thing once a year, not just as a one-off.

One thing that really bothers me about New Zealand (which is where we live now) is that catalytic converters are not required by law. So, in the name of the Almighty Dollar, every imported used car gets their catalytic converter snipped off and resold overseas. Consequently when you drive on the motorway you choke on disgusting polluted air from the cars ahead of you. I find this appalling; a law should be passed to prevent this from continuing.

That is just the sort of thing one can write an editorial about. And if not you, then who?

So I guess I had better get started on that article.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I would like to see all the contextual advertising networks like Google AdSense, YPN (Yahoo Publishing Network), Chitika, etc. have an option where, instead of getting a check or electronic payment to your bank account, you could donate your revenue earnings directly to a charity of your choice.

Does anybody know if an ad network is offering that already? Do you know any bloggers who donate their AdSense revenue to charity? I am thinking of putting AdSense ads on my blogs, this one included, and donating the ad proceeds to charity.

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