via
The Washington Post.
Faced with searing images of suffering and grief in South Asia, Americans are finding an instantaneous way to reach out to tsunami victims: on their home computers.
As never before, people are turning to the Internet to donate money, the latest step in a revolution that has altered everything from shopping to presidential campaigns.
"This is like 1951, when television really took off,'' Paul Saffo, director of the Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future, said yesterday. "We are in the middle of a fundamental shift from mass media to the personal media of computers and the Internet, and charitable giving is a logical progression.''
At Amazon.com alone, more than 53,000 people had donated more than $3 million by yesterday evening after the company made an urgent appeal on its home page. Catholic Relief Services was so overwhelmed with Web traffic that its site crashed. Online donations to the Red Cross outstripped traditional phone banks by more than 2 to 1.
This is what the blogsphere can do for those of you who are nay sayers....The internets actually can make a difference in the lives of our fellow human beings. We just need to be smart and realistic about what that role is...