Blog Action Day 2008 – Poverty

Today marks Blog Action Day 2008, focusing on Poverty. A great list of what one person can do to help is on their site, and you can read it here.

In light of this subject and the current economy crisis, I thought I’d post about some things you can do to help every day, even if they’re small. Of course, everyone knows donating to the Goodwill and such helps, but there’s so much more you can do. Lately I’ve been helping a site called LifeNets.net make a campaign page for raising awareness about the situation in Darfur. All I had to do was some CSS coding and make a few images in Photoshop. I figure, if I like what I do and I can help out a good cause, why not? This should apply to everyone!

Here is a list I gathered from SkellieWag.org that lists 30 simple ways to battle poverty with technology:

30 easy ways…

1. Give social media votes to articles and news dealing with poverty.
2. Lend $1 to an entrepreneur in poverty for every new person who subscribes to your blog in a given time period. You can adjust this number to more or less, depending on how much you want to give and how many subscribers you already have.
3. Lend $5 to an entrepreneur in poverty for every one person who links to your blog in a given time period.
4. Invest 5% of online eBook or service sales from your blog into a Kiva.org loan.
5. Donate your blog or website’s October 15th earnings to a poverty-fighting charity.
6. Donate spare or old technology to a family living in poverty (an old computer, for example).
7. Donate $1 for every 1,000 page views or visitors to your blog or website in a given time period (i.e. one month).
8. Join or create a Facebook group dedicated to reducing poverty.
9. Use Twitter to share a good article on poverty (and reducing it).
10. Use Twitter to share one important fact about poverty.
11. Invite 5 friends to join Kiva.org and create a lending group.
12. Share Blog Action Day posts in Google Reader.
13. Send your favorite poverty-related website some SEO juice by linking with good anchor text.
14. Create and share a desktop wallpaper to remind people about the battle to solve poverty.
15. Donate your freelance skills (i.e. web development) to a poverty-fighting organization.
16. Create a Flickr photoset of images that tell a story about poverty.
17. Sell unneeded items on eBay or Craigslist and donate the proceeds to battle poverty.
18. Create a video to raise awareness about poverty and share it on YouTube.
19. Review a product on your blog or website and use an affiliate link. Lend your earnings to another entrepreneur somewhere else in the world.
20. Donate unused hosting space to a poverty-battling organization.
21. Email your local representative about your ideas on battling poverty in the area.
22. Use your blog or website to tell the story of someone who overcame poverty. If your site is about online business, for example, you might tell the story of an entrepreneur who lived in poverty during a period of their life.
23. Encourage your blog’s reader-base to donate or lend to battle poverty today.
24. Lend 50 cents through Kiva.org for every person who comments on your next blog post. Make sure to tell your readers that’s what you’re doing, as you’re bound to get more comments that way. If your readership is small, you might raise the amount to $1.
25. Give a poverty-battling organization some free advertising on your blog or website.
26. On October 15th, submit 15 articles on poverty to your favorite social media service.
27. Send a fantastic article on poverty to all your StumbleUpon friends.
28. Shout an excellent article on poverty to your fans and friends on Digg.
29. Have you heard about 1% for the Planet? This year, try 1% for Poverty with your blog or website’s earnings.
30. Participate in Blog Action Day! (if it’s still October the 15th, it’s not too late).

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