Give One Get One – the $200 laptop.

I’ve been loosely following the $100 dollar laptop for a while now. And now there’s a campaign where you buy one for yourself and one for a child in need in the developing world.

During Give One Get One, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

In reality, the $100 laptop is actually $200, but it delivers on most of what was envisioned. The NYTimes has a great review of the laptop.

Here’s where you can find out more about the Give One Get One program, and sign up for your own laptop.

A whole ‘nother level of online community.

I love Open Source software. The self-organizing of people to collaboratively create something they feel is worthwhile is an amazing model.

I’ve written a lot about ChangeEverything.ca here, but I have never written much about Drupal, the platform CE was developed on. This week we launched a small bit of new functionality to the ChangeEverything community called nudge. It’s a fairly simple application:

…you use it to tell the creator of a change or the writer of a blog post that you’re inspired by what they’re doing… and you want to hear more. Click it, and ChangeEverything.ca instantly sends that person an email – including, if you want, a personal message from you.

But the thing I love most about it is that when we wanted to add this feature to the site, there wasn’t a module available that did this. So after custom-developing “nudge” for the CE community, we released it free to the world as a module for any Drupal site.

Now that’s community!

UPDATE: Here’s a post on the subject from Social Signal.

I can be a genius, but not most of the time.

Thanks to Ron Shevlin for this cute little bit of web fun. It’s called The Blog Readability Test, and it ranks your website according to the intellectual level of your writing.

When I input my homepage (www.azaroff.com), I get this:

But when I input my blog page (www.azaroff.com/blog), I get this:

My take is that it merely ranks the basic language I use and assesses it according to certain milestones of education. Simplicity is key, so I’m not offended, I want to be accessible.

A cute little tool. It also advertises something called cashadvance1500, which I removed in the code the tool spits out. This is a payday loan service, and is likely to be evil. So I need to give that caveat as well… Everything comes back to banking, doesn’t it?