The Haiti Foundation

Justin Hart's Raise Digital team took a short break as a team yesterday to help put together some online capabilities for a legit Haiti non-profit charity struggling to get information out about the Haiti disaster.

Here's the website:
http://haitifoundation.com/

They are looking to raise $225,000 to get a hospital unit built in Haiti in the next two weeks. Can you help push them over the top?

Healing Haiti

International relief efforts are underway in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, after yesterday's devastating magnitude 7 earthquake. The atmosphere at Twitter HQ is heavy today and based on the Trending Topics an overwhelming number of Twitter users feel the same.

Easy Ways To Help:
Many of us are wondering how we can contribute to the healing process. A few simple but effective ways to help have emerged.

The Capitol Hill Twitterverse

It may have been sort of a counterintuitive thought at one time, but it’s become pretty well-established that Republicans on Capitol Hill have embraced Twitter more than Democrats.

But just how much congressional Republicans are out-Tweeting the Democrats may be a bit of a surprise. According to a new study from the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, House Republicans have pecked away on Twitter more than five times more frequently than their Democratic counterparts — sending out 29,162 tweets all told through Jan. 3, compared to 5,503 for Democrats.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Texting: It's Not Just For Children Anymore

MediaOnline reports: The stereotypes of the teenager whose thumbs are surgically attached to his or her mobile device and the older parent who sees the same as a phone without wires are, like most stereotypes, not entirely inaccurate -- but also not very reliable either.

According to new research by mobile messaging company Tekelec, 60% of those over 45 were found to be just as likely to use SMS as they were to make voice calls from their mobile device. The survey of 500 people in North America and Europe also found that text messaging is gaining on email as the preferred means of daily international communication, with 32% of responses across all ages preferring SMS, compared to 33% for email. And nearly a third of respondents said their use of SMS would increase in 2010.

11 Mindblowing Reasons your Business Needs Facebook

Everyone seems to be using Facebook to connect with old friends, but do you realize what this huge network could mean for your business? In the past 3 years, Facebook has surged past MySpace to become our preferred online hangout.  And businesses are beginning to catch on.

Interesting research shows just how influential Facebook has become in our daily lives. Combined with several critical adjustments to how Facebook publishes “news” and intersects with other sites, the state of Facebook is mind-blowing. And that’s a big deal for your business.

Here are 11 vital reasons your business needs to be involved with Facebook...

According to today's CQ (subscription req.):

Slaughter to Dreier: No Web Page...and No Whining
By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

Republicans say the House Rules Committee has found a new way to suppress debate - by denying them a Web site.

Ranking member David Dreier of California complained that Democrats are blocking money to create a separate committee Web page for the minority even though the right to one is stipulated in the House administration handbook.

"The minority and subcommittees shall be entitled to a separate page that is linked to and accessible only from the committee's Web page," the handbook reads.

Frustrated by a lack of cooperation from Rules Chairwoman Louise M. Slaughter, D-N.Y., Dreier wrote a letter Thursday informing her that he intends to take it up with the Administration Committee.

"While I regret having to take such a drastic action, your intransigence on this matter leaves me no other choice," Dreier wrote.

"Oh God, does he ever stop whining?" Slaughter replied when informed of the letter.

Rules Committee spokesman John Santore said the GOP request is still under review because "this would be the first instance of a minority Rules Web site being set up, and so we can't base decisions concerning technological and budgetary requirements on precedent."

But a related precedent already may have been set. Back in February, Dreier supported Slaughter's Rules Committee budget request in part because it included "funding for a Minority Web site."

Rep. Slaughter's attempt to silence the minority on the web is a great example of why Members of Congress should not have the power to restrict the other when it comes to the Internet.

In the end, the real losers in their game of petty politics are citizens who end up getting Committee and Member websites which are online, glossy fliers and have no universal standards for what information will be "filtered" out to citizens.

The only way to ensure that Committee's are doing their diligence to get fair, honest and accurate information out to the public is to allow both the Chairman and Ranking Member to have an equal and ample budget for their individual site.

As one of the key contributors to the bipartisan Open House Project report which has been endorsed by Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Hoyer, and Republican Leader Boehner, it troubles me deeply to learn that Rep. Louise Slaughter thinks that "allowing" citizen-access to both perspectives of a Committee's work is a laughing matter.

In John Wonderlich's op-ed which ran in the Hill newspaper in May detailing the important work of House Committee's and how they could use technology to increase citizen access, he wrote:

The work of congressional committees, the vital organs of Congress, remains difficult for citizens to access, despite their central public role in developing policies that guide this nation. Their centrality to the legislative process may be generally underappreciated because of a lack of meaningful public access.

The work our Rules Committee is doing is too important for Chairman Slaughter to prevent citizens from seeing both perspectives. And I'm hopeful that before this Congress is over, the budgets for information technology will no longer rest in the hands of those who know nothing about it.

For further reading, read the Open House Project's full chapter on House Committee's.