Changes For Good

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.
 

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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.

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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!

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