What do a surprised chipmunk, “I like Turtles” and Harry Potter have in common? They are all memes—bits of culture that are shared within societies. The internet has exponentially boosted the appearance and spread of memes. While it may be bewildering at first, the popularity of some internet memes can be tapped to help spread the messages of social-benefit organizations.

We all know charities are finding it harder to raise funds in the current economic downturn and traditional methods aren't working. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chuggers-shunned-as-brito...

ActionAid has come up with a viral in an attempt to find a new way to raise funds and engage with a new audience. They have tried to create a virtualisation of the warm fuzzy feeling donating to charity should give. Donate £2 to ActionAid and get a personalised video thank you complete with cute kids, Barack Obama and your own town. 

Browsing the web for news, I came across this story about charities in the UK:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/108014/charities-told-to-use-web-better.html

It comes from a conference sponsored by British non-profiteers. Notable quotes include:

"We are entering an age of participative media where anybody with access to a computer has the potential to contribute in a unique and valuable way," Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission. "The challenge for charities is to harness this potential and channel it into genuine social change and community action on the ground."

Hello Net2 blog readers!

I'm back from my 2-week trip to Peru which was awesome.

Before I left, I did an interview for my Big Vision Podcast with Jonah Sachs, the Principal of Free Range Studios, an advertising and marketing firm with offices in Washington DC and Berkeley, California that specializes in non-profits and socially responsible businesses. They created the award-winning film, The Meatrix, about factory farming, and the hilarious film, Store Wars, about the importance of organic farming.

The video sharing service YouTube is everywhere. After showing almost a million people the Colbert Bush roast before C-Span demanded they remove the video from their site, this week the company announced they would be accepting video uploads from cell phones and other mobile devices. Bloglines announced today that they would be adding flash-support so you can watch things like YouTube videos directly in your feed reader. I know there are critiques of YouTube and alternatives to it - but it's got a whole lot of momentum right now.

But this is the coolest YouTube news I've seen so far today. A video like this can be spread by clicking on the YouTube logo on the bottom right, then copying the embed code from the site onto your web page of choice. This has a lot of potential.

This via Jason Calacanis of AOL.