Comment by Jon

Jon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:52:28 +0000

Hey, if you buy some Girl Scout cookies from us, I can uneqivocally tell you that the proceeds will go to paying for the fees for the Girl Scout camp my daughter wants to attend!

Charity in the Blogosphere

Ken — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:22:28 +0000

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest charity contributor in the world. I shun mega-charities like the United Way, I don't tithe, and I just hate those guys who come door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions for "a good cause". The little girl from next door who came selling Girl Scout cookies? It pained me to buy my requisite two boxes, knowing that my money would be swallowed up in the giant coffers of the Girl Scouts organization, and I would never know who benefited from it.

What I do like is when I can help a specific person with a specific need, especially when that person didn't ask me for anything... and I especially like it if I can do it in a manner that demonstrates the power of the internet community.

So I present to you a series of posts on The Anchored Nomad (links here, here, and here, where the esteemed Portuguesa Nova describes the plight of a classmate trying to raise funds to take a nursing exam. I only know this blogger because I followed some link somewhere years ago. I read the blog now because (a) she lives in Ann Arbor and (b) she has this maddening way of blurring out her own face whenever she posts pictures, and I hope that one day before I die I finally get to know what she looks like.

Anyway, she put a "donate" link up on her blog, and I threw a few bucks her way, and hey look! Free publicity for my own little blog here.

It's this sort of thing that makes the Internet great, more so than Google or Yahoo or all the porn sites. It's the fact that we can build communities even when we're worlds apart, when our only connections are through a tenuous series of hyperlinks on an ephemeral set of web pages.