This month I’ve seen two videos of political leaders go viral in my Facebook newsfeed. One from Australia, and one from the USA.
The content of each gives you a feel of the split between the cultures:
Barry Obama (POTUS 2008 – ) sings in Harlem:
Bob Hawke (Prime Minister of Australia 1983-1991) skulls a beer at the cricket:
This morning just before I headed to work this tweet from Clay Shirky pointed me to an incredibly interesting podcast from This American Life:
Mike Daisey’s extraordinary look at the people who made your iPhone, now as a ‘This American Life’ episode: bit.ly/xmoLhB
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) January 9, 2012
Like many of us, I spend most of my waking hours touching an Apple product. First thing in the morning I fire up my iPhone to check overnight notifactions. For my full workday I bang on my MacBook Pro. When I get home I’m liable to unwind with some Fifa 12 on my iPad. Apple products and electronics surround my life, but I rarely stop to think about where they come from.
After listening to this podcast, no longer.
Like Mr Daisey the narrator, I always assumed a high tech factory used robots to construct my products with some human oversight. I didn’t think about an army of workers assembling my products painstakingly by hand while they barely made a living.
Thought provoking. Especially the analysis afterwards – are sweatshops like this a fact of life in developing countries that lead to growth despite our western sensibilities? Or do we as consumers, and more importantly Apple, Dell and their ilk who make massive profits from the labor, have a responsibility here?
Humblebrag (urban dictionary): Subtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or “woe is me” gloss.
Somehow winded up in the Wall St Journal twice today.
First was for work, quoted in an article on the new trends in online philanthropy. 18 words made the quote, 2 of them “Justin” and “Bieber”.
Read the whole article here, here is the section on charity: water
Like some other nonprofits, charity: water, a New York-based organization dedicated to providing clean drinking water to people in developing nations, uses traditional and nontraditional fund-raising methods for separate purposes. Big gifts from private and corporate donors fund the charity’s operations, from staff salaries to ink for the printers. That allows 100% of donations from alternative channels, such as social media and the organization’s various websites, to directly fund water projects—an assurance meant to appeal to potential small donors concerned about where their money will go.
Seventy percent of donations to charity:water come from digital channels, mainly from individuals donating on its main website, by pressing the “donate” button, or going to mycharitywater.org, where anyone can set up a fund-raising campaign and ask friends to donate.
Mycharitywater.org has raised $11.5 million since August 2009. Individual fund-raisers have done everything from running marathons to setting up lemonade stands. The average campaign has raised $1,000, says Paull Young, director of digital engagement at charity: water. “Justin Bieber had people donate for his birthday,” he says. “Little girls have friends donate $7 for their seventh birthday.”
charity: water is experimenting with a new site, waterforward.org, that also relies on people’s social connections to expand the charity’s reach, but in a different way. The site maintains what it calls a “book”—a compilation of photos of people who have had a $10 donation to the site made in their name by someone they know. Once a person is in the book, he or she can bring in any number of other people by making a $10 contribution for each of them. Those people can then do the same, and so on. In effect, every donor becomes a fund-raiser.
The site is designed to make donating fun and engaging, and to allow donors to see that their contribution goes beyond the amount they can give, since each donation can lead to so many more donations, says Michael Birch, a major fund-raiser and contributor to charity: water who has helped the organization build its websites.
The second was more amusing. For 4th of July this year I embarked on a Texas trip with a bunch of rugby mates. For the occasion, I was in search of a stars’n'stripes Speedo… a surprisingly difficult item to acquire.
I turned to Zaarly, an awesome iPhone app turning commerce on its head, and a few hours and $50 was delivered a US flag speedo by a very confused personal shopper.
That same confused personal shopper appeared in a WSJ video today talking about his experience with Zaarly… his most awkward moment (you guessed it), my speedo.
Friday night was a really cool moment for charity: water as our story was told on ABC 20/20 – check it out here (RSS readers click through for video):
A great way to close out 2010!
In personal news, tomorrow I’m flying home to Australia for Christmas. I’ll be in Sydney December 23 to January 9, if you’d like to catch up comment, email me or send me a tweet!
This Friday at 10pm ET ABC 20/20 will feature charity: water and the 2010 September campaign as part of a special global healthcare series.
The ABC team visited our charity: water offices in NYC and spent a bunch of time with our founder Scott Harrison, and then headed to Central African Republic to film Jim Hocking and our partner ICDI drilling one of the 200 water projects funded by this year’s September campaign.
Check out this awesome video of Jim at work in CAR
And this clip with Scott filmed in our office in NYC
If you can watch the show live at 10pm on Friday join us on Twitter with the hashtag #2020 – the whole charity: water team, Scott and Jim will be watching it live and live-tweeting during the show. If you can’t catch it live set your DVR or check out the full episode online later on (I’m not sure if you’ll be able to watch it outside the US though).
I’m excited for Friday – I hope you’ll help us spread the word!
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event where thousands of bloggers around the world lend their voice to one topic – and this year that topic is water.
Why Water? This is a question I frequently answer working with charity: water.
The stats are compelling:
But it’s hard to grasp these numbers. When people ask me why they should care, I try to show them something like this instead.
Please take a minute to watch this video my team filmed in Central African Republic last month with a Bayaka woman given the gift of clean water after previously losing a child in its absence.
charity: water was born in September – and every year in September we ask our community to fundraise together with us to make a huge impact.
This year, we will be raising $1.7 million for Central African Republic to provide clean and safe drinking water to 85,000 people – including ALL of the Bayaka people.
The campaign launches August 16. If you’re birthday is between August 16 and September 30 please get in touch! I’d love you to donate your birthday alongside us. If you’re not in that window you can still spread the word. For starters, like us on Facebook for exclusive access to info and content, and right now check out a sneak peak of this year’s September story:
september campaign teaser from charity: water on Vimeo.
Why Central African Republic? Check this snippet from a recent Foreign Policy report:
Over the last year, we led a research team that conducted perhaps the most extensive survey on the impact of violence on the Central African Republic’s population. The results, which will be published in the Aug. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, reveal a country besieged by violence and extreme poverty. We asked 1,879 adults in five administrative areas of the country about their lives, their security, and their experience with conflict. More than three-quarters said they had either witnessed or personally experienced traumatic events during the wave of violence that began in 2001, and more than half met criteria for depression or anxiety. The monthly death rate was five per 1,000 individuals (in the United States it is 0.7; the average for sub-Saharan Africa is 1.3). Put another way, 6 percent of the country’s population is dying every year.
More to come next week.
You can help. The people of Central African Republic need you. If your birthday falls between August 16 and September 30 then I want you!
For more background on September, check out last year’s trailer:
The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.
Choose to partner your brand with another and you’re buying into their corporate reputation… and this might not always be what you expect:
I’m heading to an interesting event put on by the Aussie consulate in NYC tomorrow night, Social Media and Democracy: The New Era of the Citizen Elect (who knew the editor of the WSJ is an Aussie?)
Let me know if you’re in NYC and want to tag along – and yes, I’ll be sure to live-tweet it and post some follow up thoughts here.
From the Advance site:
Victorians Abroad and Advance invite you to Social Media & Democracy: The New Era of the Citizen Elect at 6pm on Wednesday 21 April.
Join leading Victorian, Robert Thomson (Editor-in-Chief, Wall Street Journal) and a thought-provoking panel moderated by Evan Ratliff (Wired) for an eye-opening look at our digital future.
*What can the Government of Victoria learn about citizen engagement as it heads into an election year?
Keynote speaker:
Editor-in-Chief, Wall Street Journal
Panelists:
Founder, Personal Democracy Forum
Vice President of Communications, NARAL Pro-Choice New York / National Institute for Reproductive Health
With questions moderated by:
Evan Ratliff, contributing editor, Wired magazine and writer for The New Yorker, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, Men’s Journal.
Wednesday 21 April, 2010
6.00pm to 9.00pm
Bowne
Level 50, 55 Water Street
New York, NY 10041
This post is spurred by the spontaneous explosion of Glee related excitement stemming from the women I follow on Twitter right at this moment.
Here’s a quick look at the #Glee related enthusiasm appearing in my Twitter stream right now:
But this phenomenon does seem to be isolated to women (well, a few of my gay mates are also pretty darn excited), and the male/female divide has never been more evident than the current Google Hot Trends rankings:
#3: ‘what time is Glee on Tonight?’
#5: ‘Ashley Dupre Playboy pictures’
So essentially, while every woman in America is pining for Glee to start, every male is trying to find pictures of a former call girl in the nud.
NB: If you’re not familiar with Google Hot Trends Wikipedia has a good explanation. I keep track of it via RSS – it’s interesting keeping a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist via its hourly updates!
Google Hot Trends is an addition to Google Trends which displays the top 20 hot searches (search-terms) of the past hour in the United States. For each of the search-terms, it provides a 24-hour search-volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results. Hot Trends has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches.
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