I recently just read this article in the local newspaper about this initiative “One Day” started by Bethany Needham, a Northboro citizen, and a lot of interesting details in this article struck me. We all use the internet for so many things from Facebook to emailing to research, but it is also an amazing promotion tool, and “One Day” is a great example of this in action. “One Day” encourages people to donate one day of their pay (on July 8th, 2009 to be exact) to a charitable organization.

According to this article, what suddenly made this “explode” was that Needham decided to create a Facebook page for her initiative, and although the page is only about a month old, she has already received 470 pledges to join her cause. Combined with this as well as the word of mouth and her own website, people from across the country are joining in on the cause.

Just think about that for a second, in just over a month, one person with the help and support of a few others were able to get almost 500 people to give up a day’s pay even in these hard times. That is what the internet can help us do, tell that to someone 20 years ago and they would think you are nuts.

Coincidentally, I’ve been working with a group of friends to create a website that helps people do just that: harness the power of the world wide web to promote initiatives in their community. I’ll bring up more on that in the future, but I just would like to commend Needham on her work to make her cause known by using the internet. Also, I’m very fond of the overall design of her website: clean, to the point, and informative.

To learn more about this, go to http://www.onedaygive.com/, see the newspaper article (here), and check out the Facebook page as well (here).

After being picked on a lot by Apple with its “I’m a Mac” ads, Microsoft is now getting back with its “I’m a PC” ads. These are nowhere the same as the Mac ads. They focus on destroying the stereotype that Apple has created and show how easy to use Windows is, rather than pushing down its competitors.

Here are a few of them. You can check them all out at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/watchtheads/

Also, Microsoft did the Mojave Experiment where they told people that Mojave was the new Windows, where in fact it was Vista to show people that what they thought Vista was isn’t actually true.

There are also a few other ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates in them which are funny, but I’m not sure they are very good ads: