TwitCause, the brainchild of Experience Project, is a concept that builds on the idea that people are more willing to spread the word about good causes. You begin by following TwitCause on Twitter, and each Thursday they choose a new cause to tweet about. The included link sends you to a page where you can donate to the cause via PayPal, or you can choose to help by simply pressing the Retweet button and educating your followers.

Additionally, people can nominate the charities that they think should be supported by TwitCause, which then get voted on to be next up. TwitCause is hoping to get more businesses and brands involved by sponsoring matching donations, or having people tweet in order to get the brands to make donations.

In a recent guest post on Beth Kanter’s blog, Julio Vasconcellos, who manages TwitCause for Experience Project, wrote that it’s difficult to fundraise via individual donations. People are less likely to open up their wallets than they are to help spread a message to the people in their network.

In my opinion, it’s the latter concept that is most sustainable, and recently it’s looked like corporations and brands are beginning to take that stance as well. In my own recent experience with Home Depot, I had initially asked if they’d be interested in matching whatever I raised for the New Orleans rebuilding organization LowerNine.org. They generously surprised me by coming back with an offer of a $10,000 donation of gift cards from their Home Depot Foundation, arming the organization with the tools and supplies they needed most to get their work done.

You’ll find Pepsi following suit with their Refresh Everything contest, while Chase Bank just wrapped up a contest where people voted on which charitable organizations they wanted to win cash. Perhaps this is the next phase in the evolution of TwitCause?

Have you had an experience with TwitCause or using Twitter as a tool for raising awareness? I’m interested to hear about it in the comments.

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With the revitalization of the inner cities and old buildings as ” industrial lofts”, the green movement, and the economy and the slow economic recovery of late, the timing for SPAGG.com is prefect:

Spagg.com Network – the first place where private owners can securely rent their cars to make extra money.  Owners and renters meet for pickup and drop off – it is perfect.  It cuts out the middlemen completely, and utilizing today’s social network technology and mobile access to the best advantage of car owners who need to offset costs, the environment we all live in, the reduction of congestion and parking issues, the reduction of dependence on foreign oil: everybody wins on this one!

Why Use Spagg?

• Prices other car renters can’t beat
• Environment: improve car usage efficiency
• Give your business to the community

How Does Spagg Work?

• You pick location, date and car
• Spagg matches you with a car owner
• We arrange a convenient pickup site
• Spagg helps you with insurance and payments

Why Is Spagg Safe?

• Vehicles in safe operating condition
• Users fully identified
• All rentals have property and 3rd party liability coverage

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My very first blog, Life is Marketing, was a Blogger blog, but I had to wonder how Blogger was faring in an era of microblogging (like Twitter), location-based services (like FourSquare) and mini-blog services (like Posterous and Tumblr). And since Rick works for Google, I had to ask him exactly where Google Wave is going to take us. Take a look:

I was a bit surprised that Blogger is doing so well, but Rick wasn’t the only one to indicate that blogging generally is not suffering from any sort of fall-off.  Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati, shared a number of stats that aligned with Rick’s in terms of blog use increasing. And I admire the overall plan to release Google Wave and let the world take it and use it as they will.

And you? Still blogging, or have you switched to mini-blogging? Or are you one of those folks I’m seeing who tried that and are back to regular blogging?

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I am not the only one to notice this; Android developers are also complaining about it, the developers are complaining about this as well in an article from GigaOm.

The low download volumes and lack of profits speak to the fact that app discovery isn’t easy in the Android Marketplace. Having used Android Marketplace for many months now, I have to say the experience is sub-par. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed felt that the Android Marketplace’s design makes it difficult for apps to be noticed. As I pointed out earlier, special marketplaces being set up by phone companies is only going to muddy the waters. Source:GigaOm

The only problem with the GigaOm article is that they quote a 30 respondent questionnaire, and other article shows that there are a huge number of projects ramping up to take advantage of the app store. Unfortunately though, this is the current landing page for the Android Market Place.

That isn’t going to work, especially if you want to browse and see what Android offers before you go splurge a few hundred dollars on a device. 20K apps is ok, but if you can’t see them, you can’t download them, and consumers will wonder what they bought.

Surprisingly this is a Google effort that looks like it needs some serious work. Normally when dealing with any Google system even in Beta there is a certain amount of polish. Even Google Wave had polish if it was confusing and painful to use. Realistically, and this is where Apple tends to get it right, the User Interface is huge, and while it might look good from the Google Phone of choice, from a web visitor viewpoint the web site is just plain old sad. Apple at least lets you tool around the App Store, although with the hundreds of thousands of apps they have navigating them might be difficult, it is not as difficult as the Google Android Store.

Seriously – Google needs to get this one together and make it easy to search, find, purchase, and all from the web.

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We all hate Mordac. Of course, on a logical level, most of us know that we need him (or her). When it comes to sharing data online, most people behave with more risk than they probably should. As the places to share your personal data have grown, so too have the ways that you can accidentally share too much. The problem is, it is sometimes tough to spot those moments when you are sharing too much without meaning to. As each of us starts to live more of our lives and place more of our identities online, knowing the do’s and don’ts of sharing personal information online will be increasingly important. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned and follow about what I share online:

1. Domain names. Registering a URL has become one of the most basic activities online and typically as part of the registration you need to enter all your contact details and a contact address for the URL. Unfortunately, unless you pay extra to have the URL kept hidden, this address will be publicly available along to anyone seeking more information about your domain name … which means you can accidentally be posting your personal home address online without realizing it.
2. Google Keywords. Do you think your keword marketing program is between you and Google? Now there is a tool called PPCWebSpy which allows you to get a significant amount of background information about any online ad program, including how much others are bidding for certain keywords, which keywords they are bidding on and other competitive information. Though this may be unlikely to cause you to abandon your keyword marketing program, you may want to consider adapting your keywords or bidding structure to not give away any competitive information accidentally.    
3. Location Tweets. One of the features that is easy to enable on many Twitter tools is the location feature which will automatically update your location along with each tweet, using GPS from your phone or mobile device. The problem with this, unlike tweeting about attending a party or boarding a flight, for example, is that you may inadvertently share your location automatically in situations when you’d rather not as well - such as travelling to meet a potential client or visiting a city for a quick trip you’d rather not alert your entire connection list to since you won’t have time to stay.
4. Your Birthday. On many social networks, it is easy to share your birthday online as well (and tempting so all your friends will know when your birthday is). The problem with this is that online identity thieves can often use a real name and birth date as a starting point to begin to steal your identity. And though you would not share your Social Security Number - treating your real birth date with that level of security is something people rarely do … but more should.
5. Reading Announcements. If you are a user of a web based service like MyBlogLog and you visit a site that uses it, you will automatically show up in their sidebar as a “reader” of their site. There are other similarly reputable tools that can automatically track and record the sites that you visit. The issue this may raise, again, is that there are likely times when you are researching competitive information or reading about topics that you’d rather not broadcast to the world (such as how to shop for a diamond ring or take a weight loss class).
6. Screen Shots. When you do a presentation online to take a screen shot of a web page, you may often include detail from your own web browser, including a list of your favourites or other tabs in the browser that you have open at the point when you take the screen grab. The best solution is to  make sure all your other windows are closed before you make a screen grab  so you avoid sharing any browsing information or personal info.
7. Hidden Document Info. Every Word, PPT or Excel file has information embedded into the file about the file’s author, date created and other information. If you are like most people, then many of your files may be based on files that you have created earlier, or been sent by others. This document information can be embedded into your files and give unwanted clues about the history behind a particular file and how you created it.

Any other situations where you have found yourself accidentally sharing secret information that you weren’t intending to? Share your experience on any others I may have missed the comments and I’ll add them to this list …

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