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B.L. Ochman says the Red Cross is the best organization to give money to in order to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.
BuzzMachine has a great collection of links to various sites that will help you sort out the best charities to give to.
I’ve only had limited experience, but I would have to agree with BL. When my next-door neighbors house burned, the Red Cross was there with the fire trucks and set the family up with a place to stay that night.
Everything I’ve seen tells me that the Red Cross delivers real help really fast.
Please, please, please don’t fall for one of those email scams soliciting help for Hurricane Katrina victims. I’ve already received one today. Sick, really sick.
The Red Cross donation page is a little slow. Be patient, the victims need our help now, and for many months to come.
Also, Wired magazine has and interesting article, “Reclaiming the Big Easy Means Hard Choices,” and Craigsblogs shows how people are using craigslist in the emergency.
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There is a lot of excitement about the fact that a small number of bloggers are getting paid by corporations to act as company evangelists and Public Relations representatives in the blogsphere. It is an intriguing idea that someday you might get picked up by a corporation and paid to write what you think. However, this tantalizing notion of a freewheeling blogger getting paid big bucks to blog is definitely ill founded.
For starters, as soon as any blogger receives their first paycheck, and especially if it is a big paycheck, they can immediately remove freewheeling and fun from their vocabulary. Take Microsoft’s Robert Scoble as an example. He recently got himself into one hell of a PR mess when he had to deal with complaints that the IE7 beta blocked Google and Yahoo search bars from functioning correctly.
The incident reminded me very quickly why all bloggers should have serious reservations about becoming corporate bloggers. Being a corporate blogger means that you are a business’s Public Relations representative in the blogsphere and on the internet. As such, you will have to respond to every shit storm that come wafting in your company’s direction. Even worse, you will have to respond appropriately, with the right messages said the right way, or else you are going to face an even greater shit storm.
Mr. Scoble definitely made a PR mistake raised hell when he denied that there were incompatibilities with the IE7 browser. He shcould have just said, “Look guys, this is a beta and we are working as with Yahoo, Google, etc. to make sure that all plugins work correctly.”
The problem comes from the fact that Mr. Scoble isn’t a Public Relations Maven, he’s a great blogger, and I think that being a great blogger has very little to do with Public Relations. Being a great blogger is much more like being a great journalist. You get the facts, you report the story, and you add critical analysis that that helps and interests your readers.
However, Mr. Scoble isn’t a professional journalist either. In a follow-up post to the IE7 issue he says:
“It’s interesting that many bloggers (both pro and amateur) have been giving me crud the past week or two for “being fast to publish” and “not calling sources to check on my reporting” but that the Register, a professional journalism outlet (they get paid for journalism, I do not) apparently didn’t call our development teams to check into this report and get their side of the story.”
I picked up on this quote from BL Ochman, who chides Mr. Scoble for suggesting that he is not a “professional journalist,” and therefore not held to the same standards of accountability that “professional journalists” are.
In the end, Mr. Scoble is not Microsoft’s PR guy and he is not a journalist, he is a blogger, and the place of a blogger in society has not yet been worked out. I think and I hope that more bloggers will flock towards the model of journalism where sponsors pay for advertising and other promotions, but have little influence over the actual content -at least theoretically. To me that just makes sense, but I’m interested to see how the chips fall.
