Shave For A Cure. No, I’m not doing it. I’ve already shaved my head before, and I don’t think any of us would be surprised if I did it again. Someone far braver and awesome is doing it instead.

If you’re a friend of mine, chances are you already know of this creature. She has been dealing with a problem called Trichotillomania, which is the compulsion to pull one’s hair out. It’s triggers include factors like stress.
It’s been a major problem for her, and she’s decided to take the plunge and shave her entire head of hair in the name of therapy. Since she’s already going to do it, it makes sense to do it for charity, and participate in Shave For A Cure.

So, this is where you fine upstanding gentlemen (and Monnie) come in. If you can spare just five dollars for Britt’s cause, you’ll put her one step closer to her goal of $500. The lady has already made $150 for charity, and anything more to help her reach the big five double-o would be appreciated.

HERE IS HER PAGE WHERE SHE EXPLAINS THIS BETTER THAN ME, AND WITHOUT A SENTENCE FULL OF MAJUSCULES.

I love my SocialVibe. I write about it a fair bit, and there is always a SocialVibe badge on the sidebar (which I ask now, if you could do the activity on it, thank you; it gets points which transfer to benefits for charity).

Today, SocialVibe have unveiled new profiles as the next step in their upgrade of the website. When they made the new dashboard and changed how to earn points, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the site followed suit.

This is what the new profile looks like (click it to enlarge it), and as a comparison, you have the screenshot of the old style here. The obvious idea here is to have the person’s activity for the charity and the ability to earn points for the person the focal points, and everything else secondary.

Everything is clearer and easier to read, and the unnecessary clutter has been removed from the old profiles to make the appeal better.

There’s not much to really say apart from that. You can check out my pimped profile at http://www.socialvibe.com/zombie_plan (and maybe possibly do an activity?), and see the changes for yourself. There’ll probably still be a bug or two since this is still new, but it looks nice, and I personally haven’t encountered any bugs as of yet (I normally get overwhelmed by them)

It’s a little late in writing this, but I’ve been too damned tired to do otherwise.

So October is over, and through spamming Twitter, Facebook, and some forums, the 10 Cent Charity post got over 100 comments. Sure, it would of been way cooler to say OVER 9000, but unfortunately getting that many people to take thirty seconds out of their lives to effortlessly help a cause is beyond me.

First, a thank you to everyone who commented or helped spread the word. It meant a lot to me. An extra thank you to Britt for designing the banner, and a thank you to PeedroPaula for being extra enthusiastic.

So now the tally. Most people stayed under the limit of 10 comments per person, except for one over enthusiastic person who made two extra comments. That makes the end total 126 comments. Which to me is amazing. So that makes a total donation of $12.60 to Blood:Water Mission. That translates to $11.75 US dollars currently, which is enough to supply enough water for over a year for eleven African people. Thank you again, everyone.

Making the donation proved a little difficult; I forgot to check to see if Blood:Water Mission had a PayPal for donations; my bad. A quick email fixed that though, and I got given the link to donate directly to their paypal, which for anyone who wants to make their own (unlikely but) is https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9373832.

So, I’ve made the donation, and because proof is needed I guess, here’s the email I got from PayPal following the donation:

Click to enlarge, dude.

So, that’s that :) It was a fun project. It’s really hot here too. To end this:

Bleep bloop.

ChartJackers is a project being run by four popular YouTubers, in which their goal is to get a song written, recorded and on the UK Charts using nothing but “the goodwill” of people on the internet. Everything in the song and connected to it is done by members of the YouTube and internet communities, and all money made by the project goes to Children In Need. It’s been worked on for a while, and now the song is finished, has a music video on YouTube, and is available for download on iTunes. Listening to it, it’s a good song, and though fairly poppy, the money goes to charity anyway, so it’s a win win by any means.

The music video was posted on CharlieIsSoCoolLike’s channel for our viewing pleasure:

Some more information about the project, from the sidebar of said video:

The lyrics of the song are made up of YouTube comments, compiled into a song by another YouTuber. The lyrics were released and then YouTubers wrote a melody for the lyrics, and we picked our favourite. We held YouTube auditions via video response to pick the band, found the producer of the song through YouTube, and the music video is made up of literal interpretations of the lyrics, clapping and singing along, by YouTubers! It’s a bit YouTubey.
All of the money from the song goes directly to Children In Need, so I hope you’ll consider helping us by buying the song, and telling all your friends and family to buy it too! Thanks :)

It’s a good song, and it’s great to see what people can create when joined by the power of the internet.

For those that found the previous post too long to read; SocialVibe have overhauled several aspects of their site including the badges (and the main site, which still has a few problems).
Now the badges are html instead of flash, so points earned from them are made by “engagements” rather than views. Luckily, the engagements earn plenty more points than the impressions earned on the previous badge. If just a couple of people complete the activity a day, then the amount of points earned for charity by my site isn’t actually changed. Just a few people doing a 30 second activity as opposed to 50-100 people needing to view the badges is quite a change.
So, to raise points and therefore money for To Write Love On Her Arms, I ask of you the simple favour of taking a minute out of your time to complete the task attached to the SocialVibe badge located in the sidebar.

SocialVibe has finally unveiled their new site to the public after much teasing and hype for the community.

The old and new SocialVibe dashboards. Click to enlarge.

As you can see, the display looks much brighter and more pleasant as a result. The new website features a much simpler display of points earned for your cause, and even an explanation of how your points translate to help. In the case of my cause To Write Love On Her Arms,  “100 points = 9 minutes of online crisis and suicide prevention” (which I hate to brag, means I’ve earned over 34 hours. Just saying).
Now to earn points you can do activities similar to the ones on the Facebook application; you do something like watch a video or answer a question to earn points, then you link it on another social network and if someone else clicks the link and does the activity you earn even more points. As a negative, there seems to be a problem doing activities in Firefox.

Above is an example of the new badges SocialVibe uses, which links to an activity. Unfortunately, unlike the old badges I used to feature in my sidebar, these earn points through engagements rather than impressions. For those who don’t understand what I mean, basically the old badges just had to be seen for me to earn points. Whenever you came to my blog to read a post and the flash badges loaded, you helped me earn points for the charity in question. Now, the badges are html, and need someone to complete the activity on it before points are distributed. On the plus side, the new badges give more points for doing activities than views used to, making up for the disabling of earning from views.
In addition, the site displays an influence graph and shows how many points are made from each site you have a widget or SV application on.

Unfortunately other areas of the site such as the forums and profiles aren’t yet updated and still use the old theme, but hopefully the crew behind the site will improve everything and bring a sort of consistency to the site. I’m loving the new style though.

If you read this far and aren’t a member of SocialVibe already, considering joining by following this amazing link of amazingness, and feel it’s amazing power. Also, please consider doing the activity in the above badge; it will help charity, much like commenting here will ;)

I wanted to make a video, so guess what I did? Just whoring out my 10 Cent Charity thing, and my friend’s music. Badly.

I haven’t been blogging lately, focussing more on trying to get attention on my 150th post, 10 Cent Charity. I’ve been tweeting about it roughly once daily, and posting about it on forums and the like to try and get more people to see it and comment it.

Today the post hit 50 comments, which works out to a five dollar donation so far. This is excellent, but I’m really eager to hit as high as possible so if you’re reading this and haven’t commented that post yet, or even if you have, think about spending a whole five to thirty seconds commenting for charity.

Also, a thank you is in order for Brittany, who whipped up the above banner (and coincidently the coolest dA stamp ever). Girl’s got talent.
Thank you to everyone who has commented so far, and a massive thank you to those who retweeted 10 Cent Charity. You’re all absolute legends.

Well, this is post number one hundred and fifty. I know I don’t often write anything truly in-depth or useful, and when I do it’s unfortunately usually about me. For this “milestone” though, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something that could be seen as useful to some degree.

Back a month or two ago on Piggy Bank, I wrote about how I bought a tin to collect all my shrapnel and spare money. And well, there’s a lot of it. That lead me to this idea, which i have to admit is influenced a little by killert00thbrush’s video for Twestival, and my addiction to SocialVibe.

Basically, for every comment made on this post (up to 10 per person. Have to set a limit.) by midnight on the 31st of October this year, I will donate twenty cents to charity. In broader terms, if I could get 50 people posting just one comment each, that becomes five dollars towards a good cause.
All that I ask from you is to make a comment, and link more people to this post. I’m not some famous internet star, and I don’t have lots of friends, so the only way to do this is by word of mouth; the more attention brought to this post, and the more people that comment as a result, the better.
At the end of these (nearly) two months, I’ll donate however much money the comments add up to. While I have the limit on number of comments (to prevent one person spamming it up hundreds of times), I do not on the amount to donate. If 100 ($10) comments are made, or 1000 ($100!!), I’ll still donate the money.

Oh, I should say what charity the money will go to. It took awhile to choose, because I didn’t want to donate to To Write Love On Her Arms as I’m already passively earning them money via SocialVibe. So after some thought, Blood:Water Mission seemed like a worthy cause for this money to go to.
Blood:Water Mission works to make the world more aware of both the HIV/AIDS and water crises in Africa, and provide funding for clean blood and water for Africans.
According to the organization’s website, just one dollar provides clean water for a whole year for an African. That’s so much for so little a cost. In turn with the project here, that means just ten comments will do the same.

So please make a comment here, and mention it to someone, so they in turn come here, see it and the cycle repeats. We’ll revisit this in a little under two months and see how much we can raise through this method. And now, to finish the post, a cliché of a phrase; Lets make a difference. I laugh as I type that but really, that’s the point of charity, and of this post, to try and make some sort of difference, to leave a positive mark on the world.

So, as I wrote just over a month ago, I joined the social networking charity site, SocialVibe. The premise is that you create a profile, pick a charity (I chose One Laptop Per Child), and some sponsors. You earn points through participating on the website, and the posting of badges on your websites and other social networking profiles (such as Facebook). Those points translate into donations which the sponsors pay to the charity you’ve chosen.

As you can see, I have two of those badges in the sidebar of this blog, and on my MySpace profile as well. All of these have given me near 6000 points for my charity, which I’m quite proud of.

To add incentive for participating individuals, particular sponsors hold competitions for prizes, where you earn entries depending on how long your badges are visible. Prizes range from DVDs, USB flash drives, and so forth. Sponsors use the badges to promote THEMSELVES, while donating to charity.
If someone reaches the 2000 points mark, they qualify for a pink ball. The pink ball is the mascot of SocialVibe as you can see in their logo on the site, and serves as a physical reward for helping your charity. You apply for the ball, and within a month it comes in the mail. Along with it, a small card congratulating you on your effort towards helping people, a SocialVibe wristband, and a sticker, and of course, the pink stress ball you can see in the photo above. The whole concept is excellent, and if you want to help charity, and get a squishy pink spherical object for your efforts, I implore you to join. Raising money for your cause is practically effortless, and it feels good to help someone less fortunate than yourself.

If you are curious, here is a link to my profile. If you’re a member of the site, add me as a friend so I can check out how you’re helping.