Source: SEO Chat Forum

If you’re looking to pitch in to the relief effort for Chile after this morning’s massive earthquake, we’ve gathered some of the web’s best channels for humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts.

While the death toll is not expected to grow anywhere near the numbers of the Haiti quake, Chile will still require support for the many who are now homeless, and funds for the rebuilding of infrastructure.

If you have the means, we encourage you to donate through one of the channels below.

Text Your Support

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As with the Haitian relief efforts, the Mobile Giving Foundation has launched a text messaging campaign for micro donations, and the four major U.S. mobile carriers, Verizon, At&T, Sprint, and T-mobile, have waived text messaging fees for donations.

To text your support:

1. Text the word “CHILE” to 25383 to donate $10 on behalf of the Habitat for Humanity

2. Text the word “CHILE” to 20222 to donate $10 on behalf of World Vision

3. Text the word “CHILE” to 52000 to donate $10 on behalf of the Salvation Army

4. Text the word “CHILE” to 90999 to donate $10 on behalf of the American Red Cross

Direct Donations Online

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If you want to donate a larger amount directly to a non-profit of choice, consider these organizations that have active relief efforts underway.

1. American Red Cross – the American Red Cross International Response Fund helps victims of crises such as the Chile and Haiti earthquakes. If you wish to designate your funds to a specific crisis, you’ll need to mail in your donation.

2. Americares – funds go exclusively to the Chilean earthquake (and tsunami relief, should further tragedies occur)

3. Google Crisis Response, with channels benefiting UNICEF and DirectRelief International
– use your Google Checkout account to donate instantly to these charities

4. World Vision Disaster Response Fund - your money goes towards relief efforts for global disasters worldwide (not Chile specifically)

Do you know of other non-profits mobilizing aid for Chile that we missed? Add them with donation information in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tipografico

Tags: chile, chile earthquake, donation, donations, social good, texting

Source: Mashable!

Source: SEO Chat Forum

The Nielsen Company measured online buzz around Olympic athletes and found that skiers Lindsey Vonn (U.S.) and Alexandre Bilodeau (Canada) are the most buzzed-about gold medal athletes for their respective countries.

The analytics company compared online buzz surrounding gold medal winners in both Canada and the United States. The data comes from the company’s database, which continually looks at consumer-created online content in the form of blog posts, blog comments, board/forum discussions and threads, group activity, selected Twitter feeds, citations/links to YouTube videos and news stories.

For those following the Olympic Winter Games this year, it might come as a bit of a surprise that Lindsey Vonn — who has commanded 36.22% of total U.S. Olympian gold medal buzz — dominates another fan favorite (snowboarder Shaun White) by more than a 10% margin, especially given the buzz about his Double McTwist trick.

As for Canada, the Olympics homebase this year, ice dancing gold medalists Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are receiving nearly equal amounts of online buzz with 16.88% and 16.21% of total gold medal winner buzz respectively. The dominate athlete, however, is skier Alexandre Bilodeau how accounts for 23.33%, or nearly a quarter, of all buzz among Canadian gold medalists.

[img credit: tkellyphoto]

Tags: celebrities, olympics, social media, sports, winter olympics

Source: Mashable!

Source: SEO Chat Forum

Source: SEO Chat Forum

Source: SEO Chat Forum

Source: SEO Chat Forum

Whether this is due towards Blogger’s powerful free features or “keep it simple” user interface is subject to debate, but regardless of the reason the fact remains that Blogger is King.

While WordPress’s odds of over taking Blogger on the PC may be as great as Frosty the snowman’s chances of conquering hades by himself, WordPress may be able to surpass Blogger globally thanks in part to the popularity of cell phones worldwide.

(Spacemart) The ranks of cell phone subscribers will swell to five billion people this year thanks to the growth of smartphones in developed nations and mobile services in poor nations, a UN agency said Monday. [...]

“Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services,” ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure said in a statement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the industry’s biggest trade show.

This probably explain’s why WordPress has heavily embraced smartphones (at least for Android, Blackberry and the mighty iPhone), as well as feature phones like Nokia (the latter which should be easier to purchase in third world nations).

Even though Google has embraced the world of mobile via the Android OS, they have yet to build their own apps, choosing instead to delegate the responsibilities to third parties like BlogPress, Blogaway and Bloglive (for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry, respectively).

Although these third party blogger apps are powerful when it comes to multimedia blogging, they fail to give users a “total blog experience,” especially when it comes to comment moderation and page editing (features built within all of the WP apps, but sadly lacking within Blogger apps).

While only time will tell whether or not WordPress will over take Blogger in the next few years, the fact that users can update as well as edit their blog while on the go may help thrust WordPress ahead of Blogger in the next few years as the world moves slowly away from PC’s to smart phones due to the global recession.

Source: BloggingPro

Alice in Wonderland isn’t as popular as a Tiger Woods confession, it seems. MySpace hosted a live stream for the movie last night, with streaming video partner Ustream counting almost 400,000 views over the evening.

Those are strong numbers … if it weren’t for the easy comparable of Tiger Wood’s live stream, which earlier that day attracted 638,000 views over its 15 minute run.

The “ultimate fan event” is the latest in a series of star-studded broadcasts hosted by MySpace — previous live streams included Avatar and New Moon events, plus a live stream from the GRAMMYs red carpet. It’s also the latest to be organized via RSVPs submitted to Social Plan, an events app within MySpace.

The strategy is clear: MySpace is trying to carve out a niche as a hub for music and entertainment, as its rival Facebook has long since stolen the social networking crown.

Alice in Wonderland Trailer

Reviews: Facebook, MySpace

Tags: Alice in Wonderland, myspace, streaming, ustream

Source: Mashable!