have your starbucks and drink it too

from the fabulous Chris_J on Flickr

It's common to hear global health advocates try to break down the billions of dollars needed to defeat the "big three" — HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis — in terms that are easy to grasp and to perceive as "reasonable".

One of the most popular is one that Columbia University's Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, a special adviser to UN Secretary-Generals Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon, has used on more than one occasion — reminding us all how much we spend on that morning cup of Joe.

"Three dollars per year from each of us. That's all we're talking about, a cup of coffee, once per year from a Starbucks."

Did someone tell Starbucks?

From November 27 through January 2, Starbucks, through its partnership with (RED), is donating 5 cents to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for each purchase of one of three "Exclusive" coffee drinks. On December 1, World AIDS Day (tomorrow), Starbucks is expanding the program by donating 5 cents for each "hand-crafted beverage".

(RED) has been relatively successful in raising funds for and awareness about the HIV/AIDS pandemic by asking very little of consumers. Buy something for yourself, feel good about it, appear socially or politically conscious, and throw a few dimes to cover the cost of AIDS medication for people in Africa. It's a win win all around, even if some folks think it's a scam.

With news of the global financial crisis confronting us every day, we're all looking around to see where we can eliminate costs and, judging by Starbucks' financial performance lately, that morning latte or afternoon Frappuccino might not be making the cut.

Will the new campaign help the coffee/lifestyle company to reverse that trend? Will the guilt of paying $3 for something you could make for a quarter back at home be alleviated knowing you will be helping to save lives? Can we have that cup of coffee and still triumph over the big 3? Can you have your Starbucks and drink it too?

del.icio.us tags: global poverty

"Access doesn't last long if you have nothing to say,"
Jamie Drummond on the role of 'celebrity' in the success of the global poverty movement.

There are a great deal of rock stars working to alleviate global poverty. The most prominent is, of course, Bono. But while Bono can fill stadiums, one of the greatest of the global poverty rock stars is Jamie Drummond, who was profiled today in the UK's Guardian Observer.

Drummond is the Executive Director of DATA (aka One.org in the United States) and is the man behind the scenes who can claim responsibility for mobilizing G8 leaders to make historic commitments to provide aid to Africa at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 (getting them to live up to those commitments is the current task on his plate).

The article is definitely worth a read if you're interested in hearing how the debt relief movement "started" more than a decade ago, about Drummond's role in the Bush Administration's historic commitment to fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic or how Drummond has embraced mobile technology and the Internet from the very beginning as a integral tool for mobilizing for global policy change.

wonder of me x 100

Kristen knows she can get me to post when she tags me on a meme, although this time around she acknowledged that she might be pushing my aversion to "wonder of me" posts a bit too far.

Boy, did she ever.

I started this one the other night and needed to abandon it because it was just too gross. And, well, it's still pretty gross.

100 Amazing Things I've Already Done

This list is meant to be in response to those lists that are often generated about the things you want to do before you die to justify your time on the planet; the kind of list that will inevitably make you feel like sh*t as you look at your watch and realize that time is ticking and the top of Mount Everest isn't getting any closer to sea level.

So, yeah, this is a list of 100 thing that I have already done. Some are more impressive than others, some are about what has shaped me as a person, but all are things that I can pull out as story fodder ("Did I ever tell you about that time . . . ?"). There is a bit of starf*cking going on in here, so excuse me.

Enjoy. I tag everyone who feels the need for a little self affirmation. You can write the list in your notebook if you feel like it.

I have . . .

1. Surfed in Oregon
2. Won the gold medal in the National Latin Exam
3. Climbed the Acropolis in four-inch red heels
4. Salsa danced with Joan Baez and Desmond Tutu — at the same time
5. Been given ride home by Jackson Browne — from his concert
   
6. Talked to Maura Tierney in the bathroom at a movie premiere
7. Earned my master degree from Harvard
8. Driven cross-country — three times
9. Run Rock the Vote
10. Published a zine
11. Published a blog — for more than three years
12. Been a Salzburg Seminar faculty member
13. Traveled to South Africa – twice
14. Visited Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island
15. Dipped my toes in the Indian Ocean
16. Met Al Gore
17. Met Ted Kennedy
18. Taken a class from Michael Ignatieff
19. Done an independent study with Samantha Power
20. Developed the strategy for the first-ever Cabinet member blog
21. Kissed a Heartbreaker
22. Met two members of Nirvana — and kissed one of them
23. Seen a woman take her clothes off in front of the presidential palace in Prague
24. Maintained a friendship with Chris for 20 years
25. Survived and overcome
26. Been a guest on Loveline
    
27. Avoided financial ruin after a medical emergency that occurred when I did not have insurance
28. Celebrated New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh
29. Moved to London with no job and no place to live when I was 24
30. Visited the Lower 9th Ward post-Katrina
31. Written and read an original essay on NPR
32. Walked through Sherwood Forest
33. Trained young political leaders in Cambodia
34. Sat in a green room with Ted Nugent
35. Appeared on CNN as a regular political commentator
36. Contributed to fighting the global health crisis
37. Created a career out of doing “good”
38. Visited Bonnie Raitt back stage
39. Seen Badlands in a movie theater
40. Managed to avoid ever going bowling
41. Dropped out of college for a year and a half — and gone back to school
42. Moved to San Francisco (from Connecticut) on a Greyhound bus when I was 20
43. Met Bill Clinton
44. Trained youth organizers in Mexico
45. Been on the merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower
46. Been John Hughes’ pen pal
47. Stayed in David O. Russell's guest room
    
48. Gone from growing up on AFDC/welfare to now earning more than xx percent of the population (too tacky to actually write)
49. Been offered a job by Mary Robinson
50. Spoken at my grandmother’s funeral
51. Had an essay published by the Carnegie Corporation of New York
52. Attended a presidential debate
53. Met Bono
54. Met — and been quoted by in a speech by — Sting
55. Seen Wilco in concert (at least) 10 times
56. Climbed the Wicklow mountains in Ireland
57. Gone on a road trip to the Clinton Library
58. Talked on the phone with Katherine Hepburn
59. Shaken hands with John Edwards
60. Stood outside the Cambridge City Hall at 12:01 am on May 17, 2004 to congratulate the first-ever same sex couples to be married in Massachusetts
61. Voted in every local and national election since I turned 18
62. Attended the International AIDS Conference — in Barcelona and in Toronto
63. Maintained a database of everyone I have met for 10 years
64. Watched Taylor give birth to Victoria
65. Called John McCain a “wuss” on CNN
66. Received flowers from Martin Sheen
67. Managed to convince foundations and companies to give projects I am working on tens of millions of dollars
68. Been linked to by Jeff Jarvis
69. Had one of my ads used as set dressing (Zoey's dorm room) on The West Wing
70. Had another one of my ads used as an example of ad agency star Helen Hunt’s work in What Women Want
71. Overcome my fear of cockroaches
72. Had an essay published in How to Get Stupid White Men out of Office
73. Seen Edward Norton and Catherine Keener off-Broadway
74. Seen John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman on Broadway
75. Gone to an Ozzy Osborne concert — minus adult supervision — when I was 10
76. Seen Nation of Ulysses in concert
    
77. Seen Circus Lupus in concert
78. Seen Lungfish in concert
79. Seen Beat Happening in concert
80. Advised three presidential campaigns on young voter outreach
81. Managed to have the most perfectly 80’s iconic first make out session ever: behind the Space Invaders game; at the roller skating rink; wearing sneaker skates, designer jeans, a velour Izod pullover and a turtleneck with a whale on the collar; while Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” played in the background
82. Interviewed Heather Armstrong and Robert Scoble
83. Saw Jawbox in concert in London
    
84. Worked on a diversity project that was cited by President Clinton's Initiative on Race as a “Promising Practice”
85. Had Carrie Fisher/Princess Leia ask me who she needed to f*ck to get into the VIP section
86. Exchanged emails with Pierre Omidyar
87. Met Walter Mondale
88. Gone to a rave in Southampton, England
89. Visited Angkor Wat
90. Shared "guest" status with Billy Baldwin on an ABCNews.com web chat
91. Served as an adviser on UNAIDS project
92. Attended four of five True False Film Festivals
93. Become a connoisseur of single malt scotch
    
94. Eaten dinner at a table next to Donald Rumsfeld
95. Served as a BBC political commentator on that fateful 2000 election eve
96. Worked on a documentary film project with Frances Reid
97. Organized a mayoral debate for young people in Kansas City
98. Driven the 101 from Los Angeles to San Francisco
99. Stayed at the oldest hotel in Savannah, Georgia
100. Attended one of two Dismemberment Plan reunion shows
     

del.icio.us tags 06.9.07

CoCreating CSR - Working Assets has been doing it for years -- asking its customers to tell them what they care about and then putting the funds behind the cause. It's a great idea (I unsuccessfully pitched a similar idea to an unnamed client a year or so ago) and something that American Express is currently undertaking through The Members Project. If you are a Cardmember, you've got eight days to weigh in with your idea for what "will do some good for our world." On July 3, an "expert panel" will pick the top 50 ideas and then throw it back out to members to vote on the best, which will receive up to $5 million in funding. Cause related marketing -- and corporate social responsibility -- should be in line with your customers' values (as well as your core brand values), so why not just ask them?

No Thank YouTube - YouTube is launching in China, but like the comments generated on the Mashable post sharing the news suggest, Western companies need to do more than provide translation -- and acknowledge that there is already a thriving world of homegrown web 2.0 sites that are doing fine without them, thank you very much.

Global Mobile - The world's top mobile web users live in the UK, the U.S., South Africa, India and Indonesia (via 901am).

If You Threw a Party and No One Came - MiGrito, the bilingual (Spanish/English) social network, has launched Tu Grito 2008 to allow presidential candidates to communicate with members. Unfortunately, so far, only Hillary Clinton has bothered to create a profile. Wait, I take that back. George Phillies has created a profile as well. But can someone tell me who Phillies is, please?

Putting Good Will in the Bank for a Rainy (Snowy) Day - Former CEO Dave Neeleman may be out of a job, but Jet Blue is still flying high. Despite the spanking the airline received earlier in the year when they left customers stranded on tarmacs in the name of weather delays, Consumer Reports says the company is still considered to be one of the best for customer service. As Spike at Brains on Fire points out, companies that start out with a good rep -- but encounter a little turbulence -- can pull themselves out of it if they continue to rely on their reputation for honesty and transparency and putting the customer first.

del.icio.us tags 04.08.07

I took the day off on Friday and spent most of the three day weekend trying to catch up on life: taxes, laundry, newspapers, Target runs -- and not a lick of work.

It was punctuated by the best hour and a half I've spent in a long time, walking through the Sackler Gallery with an old friend: the most rewarding "catching up" I did all weekend.

In the spirit of catching up, here are way too many del.icio.us tags and an empty promise to try to stay on top of things around here.

Twitter Will Save the World - Andy Carvin wants to put Twitter to good use and is thinking creatively about new features that could take the service from "what am I doing right now" to "what do I need right now to save someone's life".

Stop Your Whining - The folks at Business Week shouldn't be so terrified of the venomous mobs attacking brands left and right. Even the folks at Chevy managed to make it out alive, guys. In fact, despite your suggestion otherwise, opening up their brand to be "attacked" was a big success for Chevy. The campaign micro site brought in nearly 650,000 visitors who spent an average of nine minutes on the site. Two-thirds went on to visit Chevy.com, driving more traffic to the site than Google and Yahoo! during that same period. And, yes, sales increased.

Pay Attention - I sent John a del.icio.us link to Compete's announcement of their new measurement for engagement, which they call "Attention". John got around to posting about it before I did because he has less work to do than I do ("I'm sorry too, Dmitri . . . I'm very sorry . . . Alright, you're sorrier than I am, but I am sorry as well . . . I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri!"). Good stuff from John, who thinks the measurement for engagement needs to go further and gives his recommendations for what needs to be measured.

Have Fun, Wonder Why - I spent an insane amount of time creating something that looked like a book cover circa 1983 (except that my teen idol was Jeff Tweedy) after discovering ScrapBlog. But, in the end, I didn't know what the h*ll to do with it. It's easy and fun and has loads of features. If you figure out how I can use it, tell me.

The State of Things - Dave Sifry posted on the State of the Web on Thursday, expanding on his regular State of the Blogosphere feature (can we retire that term once and for all?). It's interesting to see Sifry assert, in his explanation of the expansion, that Technorati is not only the "leading blog search engine*," (until someone else actually manages to do it right, without excluding content and using a more complex measurement of authority) it is also "the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web". (Well, la-di-f*cking-da.)

What's new? Here's what perked up my ears/eyes:

• We're now at 70 million blogs.
  
• Spam blogs continue to be a pain in the ass that make me hope that they will be the only reading material in h*ll for those who have created them.
  
• The number of blogs ranked in the Top 100 most popular sites has grown from 12 to 22 in the past quarter and users are becoming less likely to distinguish between the two.
  
• Farsi is now in the 10 of blogging languages.

*Okay, okay, Compete backs up Sify's claim that Technorati is the leading blog search engine. But there has to be something better out there!

Sorting out South African Blogs - Amatomu, from South Africa's Mail and Guardian, is the go-to blog search engine if you're looking for content from South Africa. Fascinating stuff, as they're tracking trends. I'd be interested to know a little bit more about the people behind the blogs.

Flickr Fun - FlickrSpy tracks photos as they are uploaded, which is cool, but also occasionally a less than flattering portrait of user-generated content. I'm not quite as in love as I am with Flickr Related Tag Browser, but it's still fabulous -- just don't dawdle if you want to click on a photo, it'll be gone in a blink of an eye.

Searching in China - Read/Write Web says that 87 percent of the 105 million Internet users in China use search (more than 91 million people) and the majority of them are using Baidu, with Google coming in second and making "significant progress" in the past couple of years.

del.icio.us tags 03.27.07

Mobile in Africa — In Kenya (via PSFK), mobile company Safaricom has launched M-PESA, a new service to transfer money via cell phone/SMS. According to PSFK, Kenya has one of the fastest growing rates of cell phone use in the world. I'm a fan of of the photo of the laughing woman farmer who has apparently just received money from her dutiful son in Nairobi.

Asian Social Networks — Mashable shared the news of two new social networks (it still astounds me how many of these things pop up every day). IndyaRocks was launched in private beta (you need to ask for an invite), but Naveen from It's Me . . . Just Me writes over at India Blog Watch that he received his invite within an hour of making his request. While I was traveling in Europe last week, CNN International had a week long special on "India's Generation Next". According to CNN, "Nearly one out of 10 people on the planet are under 25 years old and living in India." While the percentage of Internet users in that group is relatively small — I think one of the segments I watched said it was about 25 percent — that's still a pretty enormous potential pool of users for IndyaRocks, particularly if the network also draws in Indian youth living outside of India.

The other notable social network was also for Asians: Ningin. I'm trying to figure out who exactly they're trying to target, as "Asians" is a pretty enormous category. With everyone going niche, a social network that appears to be relevant to more than half the world's population is about as far as you can go in the opposite direction.

Katie and the Edwards — You may be ignoring my poll, but folks out there can't shut up about Katie Couric's sit down with John and Elizabeth Edwards on this week's 60 Minutes. The comments on the CBSNews.com page are now up to page 87 . . .

Speaking of Health Issues — I've got one last social network item. TauMed, the health social network which has apparently been around for a while, is going to be adding some new features next week, including a social bookmarking feature that I'm interested to see. (As always, thanks to Mashable.)