Andy Carvin has proposed that today be International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day.
Here’s what he has to say:
If you have a blog, here’s what you can do…take a break from whatever it is you usually blog about, and post something constructive related to disaster relief. You can keep it topical to your blog; or, you can just dedicate blog space to listing websites where people can donate money (maybe even challenge people to match your donation). Or, share a story of a hurricane survivor. This goes for photo bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers as well – there’s no reason why this should be text-only.
Though this is inspired by Hurricane Katrina, the goal is to deal with disaster relief efforts worldwide, posting about a disaster relevant to your community. Post lists of supplies needed for victims of yesterday’s stampede in Baghdad. Post an update on how your family is recovering from the tsunami. Post multi-lingual resources for African families in Paris displaced by the recent apartment fires. Blog about whatever you choose, as long as it supports some kind of disaster assistance in a constructive way.
When you’ve posted to your blog, be sure to include a link to this Technorati tag: International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. That way, when people follow that link, they’ll be able to find a collection of all relevant postings published throughout the blogosphere. There will also be an RSS feed on that page, which can be used to aggregate all of the postings and display them on a single webpage. I plan to aggregate them on my Katrina Aftermath blog; you can do the same. (Later, I’ll post a javascript on my Katrina blog to make it easy for anyone to do this – more soon.) One collection of disaster relief resources, countless bloggers. That’s the power of the blogosphere.
So please join me…and participate in International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. Take a break from whatever it is you normally blog about – even if it’s just for one post – and give back to the Net.
I posted information here yesterday about what you can do to support the relief effort. Cash donations are urgently needed.
If you’re an American citizen and believe that there’s a great deal more that our federal government and elected officials could be doing, let them know. Here are links for e-mail contact information for:
House of Representatives
U.S. Senate
And if you’d like to add a Red Cross button to your blog or web site, you can get obtain the HTML code by visiting the Katrina Aftermath blog. (Psst. Pass it on.)
