I’ve admitted I’m an affiliate marketer in the past, and other than the money this fact doesn’t give me warm fuzzies because of a few unscrupulous folks who give it a bad name. But, every now and then I run across a decent soul who I thank for inspiration. Jonathan Volk is one of those guys, and it seems Chad Frederiksen is becoming another. I don’t know a ton about Chad yet, but he inspired me today, and that counts for something.
Chad wrote an article challenging other affiliate marketers to give away a portion of their ad space on their blogs to promo the charity of their choice.
Admittedly, it’s not a huge act, and it certainly doesn’t amount to much compared with the kind of money some of these guys make, but it’s a step in a good direction.
Considering I don’t make a ton of money off of my blog advertisements anyway, it doesn’t cost me much to do either. But, I should have done this a long time ago anyway. I love what Giving Anonymously does and stands for, thus I’ve created this button and added it to my sidebar:

If you feel so inclined, I would like to extend the challenge to you as well. You don’t have to be an affiliate marketer either. If you have a blog at all, I challenge you to advertise your favorite charity and link directly to them. It can’t hurt, it can help, and it’s not hard. Enough said.
The image to the left was created using Google Maps on Sunday, May 4th 2008. Although this map is static, it’s a replica of the map shown on the right sidebar of our Traveling Europe blog. This post will explain how I use my iPhone, a new service called BrightKite, and a [...]
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Apr
30
Posted by nate within Business, Community, Ideas
My previous article titled Signal to Noise: Twitter, Blogging, and Your Other Crap sparked a few really great comments from folks. It seems many more people are now wrestling with the information overload. There’s now official terms even: “Email Bankruptcy“, “RSS Bankruptcy“, and “Twitter Bankruptcy” (not to mention actual financial bankruptcy because we [...]
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One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, recently touched upon the subject of signal to noise in social media and the web in general. It’s interesting to me that his perspective comes at such a fortuitous time as this. Literally, the day a few of us will be getting together to discuss the [...]
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As some of you know (if you follow me on Twitter) my wife and I have been on vacation for the past week. “Vacation” is a somewhat deprecated term these days because who, really, goes on vacation? Do you really not check your business email? I check mine daily, even while I’m [...]
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Feb
22
Posted by nate within Community, Ideas, Projects, Techie
Some days are just weird. Today was one of those. I was a little tired today, and when I get tired, I get apathetic and a little down. I really should make sure I get enough sleep at night (hence the wine in my hand and the pillow awaiting me right [...]
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Reprinted with permission from Net Squared
Do you have an idea for how a mashup could be a tool for social change?
Do you look at all of the data available online, and imagine ways to combine and connect it to increase awareness about an issue?
Do you see projects like MAPLight.org or chicagocrime.org and think, I’ve got [...]
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A few months ago I had an idea at 2:30am. I talked about the “50 photos” project before, but this time, it’s grown up a little bit.
This time, there’s a real voting application behind it.
Photographers
As a photographer who licenses your work under Creative Commons, you can submit your Flickr URLs to any [...]
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