Amusingly, none of the people in the “word of mouth chain” had actually seen the site, so I thought I’d better investigate. Sure enough, GoodSearch does actually pay a penny per search to charities. When I looked at what they are doing, that number didn’t seem so outrageous: they’re using Yahoo’s search API to provide genuine Yahoo! results (at no cost to GoodSearch), tacking on some ads, and basically splitting the ad revenue with charities.

All fine and good, but what if they didn’t have the charity I wanted to get “my” money (in my case, The Experience)? Well, that was easy enough! I submitted an “Add a charity” request, and a few days later, I was good to go.

If you’re serious about earning money by searching, you’ll appreciate that they have a search toolbar for Internet Explorer, and a Firefox Search Bar tool. That way, once you install the tool, you don’t have to remember (or go out of your way) to go to a certain website for searching.

Like I said, it’s been less than a month, and I’ve earned $3.43 for my church. That’s not going to make or break anything, but I’m planning (as the church webmaster) to create a page with information and step-by-step instructions, and put a teaser in the bulletin. Hopefully, with more than one person contributing, we could grow it up to a sizable annual contribution.

My only gripe is that I’d rather have Google search results (because I prefer the format), but that’s a small gripe and one I’ve obviously managed to get over. Rumor has it that Yahoo! is actually faster at picking up new results, so I might even see better searching as a result.

Whatever your charity of choice, I really do recommend this tool!

A little more about what I love about it:

• It’s all about making prayer intentional and trackable.  This is very much like a traditional prayer journal, but ideal for those of us who lose those under the bed but look at our homepage(s) every day.
• Aside from the prayer-journal-like-benefits (perspective, consistancy, etc.), the tech aspect of it adds extra features: sharing, communities, connection with others, and most importantly, a means for prayers to rise all over the globe, no matter where you are.
• They’ve really thought through the public/private aspect.  You can make a request private, public, or share with just a specific community or person.  This is very important to me, as I make most of my requests public, but there are some that need to be private for the protection of others.
• This may be just the kind of collaborative tool that our church needs.  We’re currently using a Yahoo! Group, but I’d love to migrate to People2Pray—and I think it will help most of our prayer warriors personally, too.

Is anyone interested in creating a community for shared requests?

I liked his “How to Keep Track of Overdue Responses” post (reminded me a little of some pieces of Getting Things Done), and found “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” especially noteworthy as it discusses a very disturbing tendency that we witnessed first hand last summer—and Itzy manages to tie it in to email and general productivity principles.

Anyway, Itzy’s got a good and useful blog… and I’ll be reading it, assuming I can climb out from under this stack of email long enough…

This new site is essentially a directory of projects around the world that enable Christians to live out their convictions. They have a range of categories including agriculture, education, children, urban and housing projects. Each project has a little blurb about it and many of the projects are very affordable; most are less than $100—one on my list is under $17. Which brings me to the best part of the site, in my opinion: you can make a “wish list”. This has the potential to make the site truly useful because it will encourage people to give gifts that actually matter and are heartily approved by the wish list-maker. I know that I have felt a little unsure about giving to charities as a gift for an individual, but if that person actually selected the project, I would be glad to give that way. Basically, what Amazon wish lists have done for “traditional” gift giving, I think Living Generously could do for charitable gift giving.

This is huge. Capital expenses can be the deal breaker when you are unable to feed your family. I read a while ago about a solid, foot-operated irrigation pump being sold in Africa for very low cost (around $52 at this writing). That $52 pump can permanantly lift a family out of poverty, which is fantastic—if they have $52 to invest. But if you can’t feed your family, where do you come up the capital investment that will allow you to feed them and send them to school?

That’s where the microloans come in. With small loans, the capital investment can be made, making it more than possible to pay back the loan and give the family a chance at sustainable income. Kiva works on different projects than KickStart (the pump folks) but they’re both doing some great things to encourage financial freedom (it would be very cool if they were able to work together on some projects in the future!).

Microloans aren’t a new idea. Several aid agencies have been using microloans to help villages for some time now. Kiva, however, is the first time I’ve seen a person-to-person microloan made available. That’s amazing. For instance, right now, I could loan Mathayo Bayo $25 to buy stock for his village store. Using the website, I can see how the store is doing and what Mathayo Bayo is buying. This is so much more personal than giving money to a relief agency (as worthy as that is) and—get this—Kiva’s administrative expenses are entirely covered through other donations and a small amount (<10%) of interest on loans. That means that all money loaned to an African entrepreneur goes to that person.

Kiva had a windfall not too long ago when they got featured on some huge blogs, and every loan request got funded. I’ve been waiting impatiently for them to have new loan applications, and when I checked back this morning, they do! So go loan someone money already. One other really cool thing is that since it’s a loan, the same $25 (or whatever amount) can be loaned over and over to help family after family with no additional out of pocket cost to the lender. That’s a renewable resource.

There was some confusion among the staff, so one of them went to investigate. He came back a few minutes later and confirmed that there would be t-shirts. Most of the people in line cheered. It cracks me up how prone large, crazy groups are to cheering. A few minutes later, a guy in a suit (presumably a manager?) showed up with a box of t-shirts. Everyone got excited about that and the fact that he announced they’d be letting us go into the theater to wait (this is a brand new theater, maybe a month or two open, with great seating). The only caveat about the t-shirts… they were all extra-large. Many people felt compelled to change into them right then and there, and it was very amusing to see the tiny teenage girls surrounded by this hilarious sea of jersey fabric.

Then we waited for a long time. The antics of the crazy people around us made it less tedious, plus I’d brought some cross stitch to work on. When the movie actually did start, I didn’t quite realize it, until I finally noticed the characters. The movie starts with kind of a preface to what’s in the book, where we see the Pevensies in London during an air raid. I thought this was a great addition, because, while Lewis’s original audience had lived through the war, most of us now don’t necessarily even notice this context, and it kind of changes how we see the characters. They did a good job of foreshadowing Edmund’s behavior, and helping us understand how the relationships between the children shape the events later in the movie.

I did have some gripes with the movie, though. Probably a lot of this was just going in with really high expectations. There were two main things: first, the movie deviated from the book a fair amount, and while it didn’t change the tone of the story (or the outcome), I objected to it just because it seemed unnecessary. In retrospect, I think maybe the writers thought there wasn’t enough action in the book, which might be true for a movie. Lewis did tend to spend a lot of time with the introspectives, while he gave the “great battle” all of a page and a half, if I remember correctly. I’m not doing spoilers here (because you should definitely see the movie, whether or not you’ve read the book), but the movie had several changes which added more action but didn’t really add to the story.

They also took out my very favorite bit of dialogue (talking about Aslan, the lion-King):

“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

There was a bit of gratuitious political correctness in one change… Father Christmas gives Lucy a dagger as one of her Christmas gifts, but tells her that he does not intend her to fight in the battle. In the book, his explanation is “…battles are ugly when women fight.” In the movie, this is reduced to “Battles are ugly.” I understand that they’re probably just trying to keep from offending female soldiers and those who love them, but this change actually causes the scene to stop making sense. Without the distinction of “when women fight,” it doesn’t make sense for him to tell one child to fight and two to stay out of it.

The second thing that disappointed me was that the animal animation wasn’t quite what I expected. There were points, particularly with the wolves, that it just looked animated. Now, I know perfection is a lot to ask and that as good as the technology is, it’s not there yet. But I was just (unrealistically) hoping for more realistic movement. However, the one other review I’ve seen this morning said “the special effects set a new standard for Hollywood”—apparently not everyone felt like I did about this, so take it with a grain of salt.

Those are my primary complaints, but that said, I think the movie was excellent. It conveyed very well the sacrifice that is the message of Christianity, and the pacing worked nicely to emphasize the important parts. They took on the huge challenge of talking animals and mostly pulled it off. But of course, the real strength of the movie is the story. It’s worth seeing just to hear (and see) the story again. I have high hopes that this movie will help Christ’s sacrifice hit home for lots of people.

Final rating: 9/10

Missed Church? Download It to Your IPod.

I thought this was a cool use of technology (though not, as the headline implies, as a replacement for church… my church is about a whole lot more than just the sermon). We’re almost set up to do this, actually, since Kaleb’s been recording and compressing the sermons.

It’s BlogDay and that means you get to hear about some great blogs.

Somewhere on the masthead is my favorite blog to read when I just want to laugh and be glad it’s not happening to me. Fair warning, there’s language from time to time but it’s hard to care when you’re laughing hard enough to make the family gather ’round.

MetaEfficient is fluffy and kind. It probably also makes me want things I really don’t need (the Eglu, for one, to which I am still devoted), but it’s really interesting to see the innovations that are being created all the time.

Katy of Fallible.com is a master at telling stories. Household conversations, overheard-at-coffeeshop type things, memories, they are all candidates to be told with grace and heart at her blog. I like it a lot.

We come from somewhat different backgrounds and are involved in different groups, too, but Desert Pastor of Paradoxology is always insightful and provides a thoughtfulness in his posts that I don’t come across very often.

Scott of HELLO, my name is BLOG “has worn a nametag all day, every day since November 2, 2000 to encourage people to become more approachable”. He has great ideas on innovative ways to connect with people.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this random stroll through my blog favorites! How about you post your own?

[ Technorati tag: BlogDay2005 ]

mobiBLU 1 GB Cube Digital Audio Player

Yeah. You can buy me one.