As most of you probably know by now, Haiti was struck a terrible blow by the hands of mother nature on January 12, 2010 and again on January 20, 2010. These earthquakes devastated the land, leaving thousands upon thousands in the wake of unimagined agony. Charity efforts have moved at the speed of light, as the American Red Cross spearheaded text messaging donation initiatives- that continue to aid their relief efforts.

Finding the right place to donate some of your hard earned cash can sometimes be a daunting task. As tragedies present the opportunity for us all to donate to a good cause – so do they with unscrupulous parties that want nothing more than to steal from you.

The following list consists of some of the most effective places you can donate to, to ensure your efforts are going to help the people of Haiti – and not in some scammers bank account.

DRI’s site states “If you’d like to make a $10 donation to support our Haiti earthquake relief work via your mobile phone, text the message Give10 to the number 20222. Answer Yes when asked to confirm your donation. You will then receive a text message confirming your donation.”

Update 10:01 pm | Fixed Typos

January 12, 2010 marked the largest earthquake recorded in an impoverished Caribbean community near Port Au Prince. This 7.0 earthquake devastated the landscape, killing thousands and leaving several family members in shambles. While politicians around the world scrambled to figure out a viable plan to help the devastated community. mGive launched a mobile campaign with Red Cross- late Tuesday evening and has since raised over 2 million dollars in relief donations, according to the NYtimes.

Tracy Reines, the Director of the International Response Operations Center at the American Red Cross released this video on youTube yesterday to further describe the incident.

mGive has made it exceptionally easy to donate ten dollars to the cause. All users with a cell phone and major service provider have to do is text the word “HAITI” to “90999″ , wait for a reply, then type “YES” and ten dollars will be added to your next cell phone bill.

Users that prefer other methods to donate can call 1-800-REDCROSS or visit redcross.org to contribute directly from the website.

It should also be noted that the Haitian born musician Wyclef has created an effort where you can text “YELE” to “501501″ to make a five dollar donation.

Additional Sources:

• To find out about the latest news and information on White House Efforts
• To get the latest American Red Cross efforts
• To get the mGive FAQs about donations
• To learn more about Wyclef’s donation Campaign.
• To follow the latest twitter happenings “Help Haiti” OR #Haiti

GIVE TODAY!

Update | 10:48 a.m. Corrected mistake about Wyclef’s relation with the Black Eyed Pea’s

The Ohio Department of Transportation decided to take another precaution this winter in hopes of dwindling down the 44,000 plus accidents it suffered last year – as a result of serve winter weather conditions.

The DOT will now offer winter advisory, Twitter updates for the highways in Cincinnati, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Dayton.

The updates will be provided from the following twitter profiles:

“Safety is always our top priority… [And] social networking websites such as Twitter are increasingly becoming a very useful tool in sharing information, especially among our younger populations.”

It should also be noted that this is a test project and more areas will be added as the project progresses forward.

As always, I would advise that users check their twitter feeds before leaving the house and not while driving.

For more information please visit: www.BuckeyeTraffic.org/twitter

The U.S. Geological Survey have come up with a new way to track earthquakes via tweets. Normally Scientists have the tedious task of sorting through large quantities of data through recording stations, prior to finding out where exactly an earthquake has struck. Now Scientists can use filtering software to sort through tweets to help them get a rough idea, as to where the earth quake happened and how large it was.

Typically people begin to tweet there experience a few seconds after an earthquake to tell others what they experienced. Scientist realize this and have created a project based on this information.

Scientists have dubbed the effort TED for Twitter Earthquake Detection, which scans tweets in several different languages for the word earthquake. The software is said to filter out all variations of the word that may be misleading. Such examples word include words that refer to the Quake video game.

According to reports from the BBC News Dr. Paul Earle from the USGS explained that this is in no way hard scientific data but rather “It is a speed versus accuracy issue”.

“Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle.

(source: BBC)

TweekDeck, the popular Twitter desktop application announced yesterday that it will be adding a new feature to bring in your LinkedIn Network.

With this new feature users will be able to view LinkedIn updates by Status, Q&A, Applications, Groups, Connections, Profile and Recommendations.

In addition users will be able to send updates, make comments and view others’ profiles.

Over the life time of the product, TweetDeck has slowly transformed from a free Twitter manager into a social media cornucopia of sorts. Allowing its users to now manage Facebook and MySpace accounts with only a few clicks.

Additional Twitter features allow the user to record and view video, manage multiple twitter accounts, shorten URLs, block spammers, create groups, follow twitter trends, search twitter, and much more.

So if you have had enough of trying to manage multiple accounts through traditional means, I would highly recommend trying this product – it’s free , platform independent and simple to use.

Source : TweetDeck

100 Million to the Twitter Corp

According to various sources on the net – this past week – Twitter received 100 million in funding to bring the Corporation to a whooping 1 billion dollar value. Investors Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley initially wished to remain private about the deal until Friday Sep 25, 2009.

Which begs the question, why? Why would anyone invest this type of capital into a business for only 10% stake in a corporation that has yet to implement a solid revenue generating plan? Is there an Initial Public Offer waiting around the corner? Does twitter have an ace up its sleeve? …

Related Story

According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter has no intentions of pushing ads on this site this year. Instead their main focus will be on creating business accounts that will offer a subset of additional features such as improved search capabilities…

Related Story

13 Percent of all medical students taking part in a recent survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a breach in doctor patient confidentiality by posting confidential information publicly online.
The survey conducted consisted of 60% of all US medical schools – in which – 60% percent of all respondents reported posting “unprofessional content” online.
Since no official policies have been created – schools have not been able to take official action against students…

Related Story

In an effort to better optimize Facebook ads Nielson plans to implement a new advertising measuring tool, dubbed BrandLift. BrandLift will basically work by eliciting users with annoying survey questions on a purely volunteer basis. This comes after – what many have determined to be a failure on the part of Facebook to successfully manage client advertising campaigns…

Related Story

While ATT&T stands fast with the notion that they had no part in rejecting Google Voice App from the iPhone, they are complaining to the FCC about how Google Voice should operate.
ATT&T claims that Google Voice should operate exactly as ATT&T does, even though the Google Voice uses a the internet to run its service…

Related Story

Intel introduced its new Light Peak technology earlier this past week. What is light peak you ask? Light peak is a new form of blazing fast optical data transfer that is said to be 10x as fast as your current gigabit ethernet cable (the one for your internet connection ). The rate at which data can travel over this optical cable is somewhere around 10 Gbps.
It is have been unveiled by Engadget that Apple plans to replace all computer ports with this new technology and has been the driving force behind this new innovation since 2007.

Related Story

Mixed Messages about Texting and Driving

While many states will fine you for even messing around with your smartphone- some are more than happy to send you tweets regarding current traffic conditions. This is very disconcerting for safety experts who claim this sends a mixed message to driving smartphone users…

A Related Story

Twitter- having recently changed some design elements on their site -switched the default avatars from a bland “meh” character face to a new more appealing bird icon. In this process they also blew away many users’ hand picked avatars – replacing them with the new bird. This created a bit of an uproar in the community because many veterans view this new avatar as a newbie branding of sorts – while others just view it as a sign of instability in the twittershpere…

A Related Story

Facebook gained a whopping 50 million plus users since July 2009, when they proudly announced their following had reached 250 million users. This marks a major milestone for any business considering this small timeframe…

A Related Story

Facebook agreed to shut down the invasive beacon service, that tracks users actions through out the net via facebook. This occurs after a settlement was reached from a class action suit filed in August of 2008…

A Related Story

Jonathan G. Parker, 19 of Fort Loudoun, Pa., decided to logon to his facebook account while robbing a house in Martinsburg, WV. In the robbery Parker stole some jewelry valued at $3,500 and Googled “best escape routes” in the process. When leaving the premises Parker left his facebook account logged in…

A Related Story

The saga continues as more evidence points out that Apple may have lied to the FCC and did in fact reject the Google Voice App for the iPhone. While Apples stands firm stating they did not reject the app and they are still studying it. Google fired back releasing the previously secret document to the FCC- accounting for all interactions between Google and Apple (pdf here)…

A Related Story

Google’s Massive Book Scanning project was handed another setback on Friday Sept 18, 2009, when the Department of Justice pressured a district court to reassess Google’s class action settlement in fear on a Monopoly …

A Related Story

Popular on Digg today was the news video of 17 year old Adrainne Ledesma, who was hung up on repeatedly by a Lincoln County police officer. Apparently during the disquietude of her father seizing on the floor, she cursed while talking to the police officer. Instead of the officer contacting emergency medical services, he decided it was in her best interest to receive a lecture and hung up on the teen.

Once again she attempted to call the police station to get an ambulance for her father, and once again, Sgt. Robert McFarland hung up on the teen. This time calling her a stupid as* and adding that she was not going to get an ambulance.

Shaken by the series of events that unfolded, Ledesma walked to the police station to get help and began to curse at the police workers. All the while, asking for the officer’s name so she could file a complaint. She was then arrested and restrained, for the what the officer called misusing the 911 system.

I have to wonder what exactly was going through the officer’s mind, as he denied her father the medical service he desperately needed.