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Ster Kinekor has implemented an easy way for movie goers to donate money to a charity.

When you book your ticket through one of their “self-help” machines using your credit card, just before the end of the transaction they ask you to donate money for a cause. You decide how much, and it gets added to your ticket bill.

Painless, easy and worthwhile. Well done to Ster Kinekor.

BTW, this kind of reminds me of the US tax return form where you are asked (at the end) if you would like to add $1 to your tax bill to directly lower the US deficit. One hand, could be very effective. On the other hand, what going to happen to the OTHER thousands of dollars you are ALREADY sending them?

This question has been making the rounds on the blogospere, so I thought I’d throw it out to you guys.

If the Internet vanished ie no more websites, blogs, email, etc what would you do? To what would you divert your time and efforts? New hobbies? More time with family? New career change? Climb a high mountain? Read/write books?

You think you are saving the earth by reading news online? You might be surprised. Mark Glaser in his Media Shift blog talks about the environmental impact of the media, and notes:

.. the Internet isn’t exactly solar-powered and eats up plenty of energy… the five leading search engines have about 2 million servers for a total of 600 megawatts of power consumption. When you add in hard drive power and air conditioning, the total energy usage for search engines hits 5 gigawatts — enough to power Las Vegas on a hot day, according to the article.
Journalist/blogger Nicholas Carr noted that 4,000 servers power the virtual world Second Life, and that there are an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars living there. He wanted to know if Second Life citizens ended up using up more energy than real-life people and found that the average avatar uses up 1,752 kilowatt hours per year — about the same amount used by the average Brazilian. “Avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem,” he concluded. “They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”

The top earning blogger/webmaster in the world made $3.6 MILLION last year. That’s according to the Paula’s list of Blogger and Webmaster salaries.

Paula is the first to admit that her research might be flawed, and the numbers are worked out by her, not provided by the bloggers/webmasters themselves, so there is plenty of room for error. Still - 3.6 MILLION ….. By the way, that money was mostly made from Adsense, on a dating site. That’s 10 grand a day.

Have a look at the list. it is not limited to bloggers only, but all the money seems to be made from advertising , so it does kind of apply to us :-) There are 60 people on the list. And if you want your name there I don’t think it is too difficult: number 60 only made just under $480 last year. Surely you can beat that ….

The lifecycle of a blog, in black and white. Print and frame for clarity.

Hmmm.

Originally appeared in NYT’s Op-Ed section. I found it on Wrong Advices

I don’t buy it. Bullard is far smarter than he makes himself appear in the latest column, so I wonder what his REAL motivs are. Is he simply having a giggle at the riot he has caused? Did he take a bet with someone that he could top Amatomu’s search field on this Monday? What’s up, Mr Bullard?<br><br>

Whether we like his style or not, it is almost a given that Bullard is a veteran newspaper man. So he well knows and understads the power of a platform. He has expressed support forblogs before:

David Bullard is a good oke. He told me that it was A-OK to go ahead and put his column on SA Rocks. So that’s what I am doing. He also said that he would like to join the supporters list. Well David, welcome to the long and distinguished SA Rocks supporters list.

I am really glad that David has maintained his belief that SA is a rocking place to live. It gives me hope that people can overcome things that happen to them and those around them. Good work David, you make SA proud (if I can speak on behalf of SA!).

(from sarocks.co.za.)

I assume he knows how to use Google, so he could have researched whether blogs are popular, impactful, significant. He could easily realize that opinions have been swayed, policies changed, and voices heard viablogs.

Also, he surely realizes that it is HIS readers who are likely to have blogs, becasue we value opinion, viewpoint,power of expression etc . And we are obviously smart enough to have opinionsof our own. Andeven smarter to know how to share them with people we don’t even know.

So, I thinkMr Bullard knew he was causing havoc,and he did it on purpose. I think he might be surprised at how it backfires, though.

And I pity him when he realises that he would like a blog independent of his Sunday Times job. He willhave to hide behind a pseudonym. How about “tailBetweenTheLegs”?

Lorelle Van Fossen writes in Blogroll that :

A Magical Date Approaches: At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be 02:03:04 05/06/07. You will have to wait until 2107 to experience this moment again.

I was kind of sorry to have missed this, until I realised that the Americans have the strange habit of putting month before day in their dating system. So for us South Africans, that event will actually happen on the 5th of June.

Lorelle also suggests that we write and future post a blog entry for the day this happens next ( in 2107),since we are most likely not going to be here to do it ourselves :-)

Now go ahead, and think of why that entry would never be read. Will the web be outdated? Will the earth be gone?

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