If I knew all the words

The ability for our world to integrate technology and philanthropy amazes me. How

Corporate Social Responsibility is at the forefront of development and implementation among large corporations. It’s wonderful to see Pepsi, Starbucks and Trader Joes care about our world and what is happening outside of their state-of-the-art buildings.

Today, I was introduced to CauseWorld, a wonderful phone application modeled slightly after Foursquare. Instead of simple checking in for points to one-up your friends to become the mayer, you earn Karma points to donate to an organization or

cause of your choice.

CauseWorld is sponsored by Kraft Foods and Citi and donate to the organization of your

choice when you gain Karma points and designate them, it is Kraft and Citi that is donating to the organizations you choose.

What a great way to donate while shoping or having dinner with your friends. Open up the free application, check-in and donate within minutes. You can donate to anything from offsetting carbon,

helping students in need, preventing child abuse, help fight cancer, bring art to schools, help at-risk girls, Provide relief to Haiti or Chile, give clean water, treat autism, plant a tree or care for abused animals. So many options of ways to give sponsors money to great causes.

What are you waiting for. Go download the app and start giving Karma points out!

An email can make or break your credibility. If you’re a small business or a large business, without proper email etiquette no one will trust your product or service. With email being the main form of communication many have yet to be educated with the proper way to write emails.

I personally have been victim to reading a long painful email with poor grammar. Many peoples thoughts are in their heads and not in their fingers. This doesn’t mean you must be a good writer to be a good email writer, it means you may need to put some more effort into your daily emailing activity. Try to put the main point of your email in the first few sentences because many people are in a rush when reading and don’t have the time to shuffle through a bunch of 5 paragraph emails. Keep it short and to the point.

Brian Zafron gives some great tips on how to write a quality email. Many people find email an impersonal form of communication, which it may be, but it’s becoming the most common form of communication, so one cannot ignore the etiquette of a well-written email.

One thing to remember when writing an email is that your reader can’t hear you. So be aware of the tone of voice you are using, it may come off differently to your reader than it does to you.  Zafron says, “the quality of email correspondences has influenced the quality of relationships,”and I couldn’t agree more. Your laziness with writing says a lot about how how you could potentially act with a client in a relationship.

If you’re looking to do anything in our techno-world you must pay more attention to your emails, they aren’t just something something you can squeeze into your free 5 minutes. Take your time and draft and quality email.

I was recently reading a blog about how youtube.com is going to take over the world, but in actuality, I believe Google is going to take over the world.

Google has many different widgets to put on your Igoogle site. It’s the number one search engine, and it has created Picasa to edit and store your photos online, so there is no need to take up space on your computer when you can save your photos online. Google has also created gmail, where you never have to delete another email again in your life because it also stores all emails online with unlimited space. Google is soon to come out with the G phone, which will revolutionize the cellular telephone market.
The G-phone is said to look similar-ish to the iPhone, with a big wide screen and few buttons, Google wants to bring their software, search, advertising, IM, VoIP and Web 2.0-style apps to a stylish hand held device that plugs you right into everything Google, bringing Google to those even without a computer.

The only downside some may see is instead of listening to a ring, the person calling you will hear advertisements, making the phone cost $0. Pretty amazing if you ask me. It seems as though Google’s mission statement is to accomplish the impossible. Google’s vision is to bring the Google brand to those who don’t own a computer.
I used to believe that apple was revolutionizing the market when it came to cell phones, I mean instead of carrying around your phone, i pod and camera now its all in one. I think apple still has the upper hand on the ability to have i-tunes on its phones. Google may have free service and most of the same technology but the ability to have you music on your phone…. might whisk college students off their feet.
but when it comes down to the fight over music or free service…. Google will win the ultimate fight.
And that is why I believe google is out to take over the world.

Sustainability and being Green is currently one of the biggest hypes in the world. To help contribute to do my part in keeping the world green and save some trees, I’ve started reading my daily news from the Newsmap.

This is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing world of news. The site is updated every 10 minutes, and shows you the current news across the world.

The more coverage the news piece has received, the larger the lox is within the grid. You can change your country and find the most up-to-date breaking news across the world. The map is split up into categories labeled by colors. Categories such as World, Nation, business, technology, sports, health and entertainment. If more people subscribed to this venue of receiving their news, we sure would keep Oregon Green!

Do your part. I’m doing mine.

NPR.org just released an article on Microsoft offering $44.6 billion to buy out Yahoo! Some may worry that this could be a bad thing, but I believe collaboration is truly a beautiful thing. I am a big Google user. Igoogle is my homepage and it is the main browser I use. Though Google wasn’t around when I was first introduced to the wonderful world of the Internet. Yahoo! was the first browser I ever used. and I guess I’ll always hold a place in my heart for it. I still trust Yahoo!’s maps over MapQuest. Don’t ask why I just do.

Currently, google is the leading competitor in internet browsers and there has yet to be a browser that can compete with it. I think that Microsoft buying Yahoo! brings a multitude of opportunities for Yahoo! to begin to compete with google and give em’ a run for their money!

Yahoo! has been sitting in the back seat of the “brower” car while google is steering the way. It’s time for Yahoo! to strap one on and fight for the wheel and Microsoft is the company that will be giving Yahoo! the directions they need to compete in this road race.

This is a response to an old post, but I found it extremely interesting so I apologize this is not timely.

In response to a commentary Regina Lynn wrote about Ohio teachers being asked to stay away from social networks, I believe they are being well advised to stay away from the mainstream social networks such as Facebook and Myspace . But as Lynn points out, the internet generation is graduation into the workforce. It is unfair to ask these new teachers to give up their communication and ties to college and maybe even their only communication to friends abroad.

I believe there is a healthy medium for which a teacher, who walks such a thin line when it comes to relationships with students. Being careful comes with the territory and these new and exsisting teachers need to understand that they are walking on thin ice when it comes to teacher-student relationships. If a teacher has either one of these accounts, which he or she knows their students also have accounts, their profiles need to be extremely private and they need to take caution in posting inappropriate pictures and content to their web pages.

When it comes to sites such as Match.com I believe a teacher has every right to be a part of the site as long as they are in good taste, while knowing many have a different definition of “good taste”. The internet is an online venue opened up for the entire world. You NEVER know who is going to read your blog, profile, or news article which is posted on such a widely available venue.

My suggestion is that teachers take precaution. If you post something inappropriate either your student will call you out on it, or your employer… and I’m guessing neither one is the more preferable. You never know when a student may call wolf and you’re stuck knee deep in legal battles just because you couldn’t resist to friend a student on facebook.

Find other forms of communication and up the privacy on all your accounts. You should anyways… there are a lot of creepers out there….

Photo is courtesy of Old Shoe woman from Flickr.com