We've developed a new social portal that allows blood recipients to say thanks to their unknown donors.  Thank Your Donor gives a chance for people to hear all the positive effects that their blood donations are having. 

We're hoping this will encourage more people to donate! 

Check out one of the videos that a recipient made to say thanks: 

Youtube Channel

Join us at NewsTools2008, April 30-May 3, at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, a three-day conceptual mashup where journalists will work with technologists to create new tools for journalism that matters. The U.S. news media is changing fast. Strip away the legacy platforms, and what remains of journalism that is needed to support participatory democracy and community? At NewsTools2008, we'll ground you on the way news has been manufacturered until now, we'll overview how technology is disrupting the old ways; then we'll ask you to work for up to two days with journalists to build new systems that engage with all the best tools avaiable. The result we seek: The launch of at least a half-dozen new machine-based systems that move journalism outside of the traditional boxes and into our participatory, crowdsource culture.

See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv
or: http://www.newstools2008.org

Registration discounts and stipends availble for day-trippers . . . email for details: Bill Densmore, the media giraffe project at umass amherst
413-458-8001 / densmore@mediagiraffe.org

International Development Design Summit IDDS is dedicated to using technology to design simple yet efficient solutions for problems in the developing world. The application for IDDS 2008 is now available. Deadline Feb 10

Low Technologies, High Aims -- Andrew C. Revkin. 11 September 2007, NYTimes

Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.

Regards, 

Google:
1,310,000 for little +fish +big +pond
Ok, I make websites for a living. Well, I do a lot of other stuff too, but one of the things I do is make websites. I make these sites 90% of the time for small to medium sized companies, and of course these days everyone knows (well just about everyone, I do occasionally still run into a person who thinks just cause they have a website for their TOTALLY off the wall widget they are going to instantly sell a million of the dang things and retire on an island they buy with the money, anyway…) almost everyone knows if you build it, it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Enter SEO, Search Engine Optimization that is: SEO, SEM, META-Tags, Pay-Per-Click, etc.

Has anyone ever sent you a link to The Meatrix, Store Wars, Sam Suds or the DaVersity Code with the note, "You have to watch this"?  All four online movies were created by Free Range Studios, an advertising and marketing firm that specializes in nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. 

If you have a campaign at your organization that you think could benefit from their services, they are accepting proposals for their 2007 Gratitude Grant.

You can read an interview with Free Range's Principal, Jonah Sachs, on the NetSquared blog. 

Dan Saffer is the Senior Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path, a widely respected San Francisco web design firm. The company's portfolio includes design work for Creative Commons, the United Nations ReliefWeb and Blogger.com.

I caught up with Dan in the halls of the SXSW conference and asked about the changing landscape of web design and community interaction.

When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.

And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.