The LA Times has a profile today of Joe Green, founder of Facebook application Causes, which facilitates  giving of time and money to favored causes:

How it works: Facebook users install a program called Causes. Facebook friends band together to solicit donations, promote advocacy and spread awareness for a cause.
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Google has created a website for people searching for information about people as well as people who have information to share.  It’s available in English and Spanish.

Similar to the Haiti earthquake, those seeking to donate by text have a variety of options, according to CNET:

As with the Haiti relief effort, donations can also be made via text message, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, the organization that processes the donations. Cell users can make a $10 donation to the effort by texting the word “Chile” to any of the following numbers: 25383 (Habitat for Humanity), 20222 (World Vision), and 52000 (Salvation Army).

The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.
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TechCrunch has a post on the latest State Department/private sector trip to practice “21st Century Statecraft.”

Prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is going, along with Jack Dorsey (@jack), founder of Twitter and the Square, plus a variety of State Department officials — including policy planning staffer Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra.  Cohen lead a similar trip to Mexico last year.
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Ever wished that visiting a doctor was as easy as sending a text message?

An in-person consultation will always be best for some ailments, but sometimes it isn’t feasible. A San Francisco start-up, Truth on Call, has rolled out a service that lets people text questions to physicians, then collects the answers.

It’s not cheap — $50 to get a reply from one doctor, with the responding doctor receiving 10 and the rest covering text messaging fees and payment to Truth on Call.  And they foresee the uses as going far beyond just patient and doctor. The New York Times has more:
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Check out this handy Creativity article on how new media is helping the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti. Among the initiatives Tali Krakowsky cites are:

Ushahidi is an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. They have created a Crisis Map of Haiti in collaboration with International Network of Crisis Mappers. The map represents a comprehensive and up-to-date crisis overview for to the humanitarian community.
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Ernest J. Wilson,  dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and a university fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, has a thoughtful piece in the Huffington Post on the ramifications of Google’s announcement that it may withdraw from China, and how it may affect not just China but also U.S. foreign policy:

A consequence of the digital economy’s timidity is that the U.S. foreign policy agenda has not changed very much in substance or tone. But now, if other major content producers follow Google into the ring, the strategic and diplomatic gravity of big Silicon Valley firms may finally match their economic weight. Of course, traditional matters like military strategy, state-to-state diplomacy and the like will always remain important elements of a nation’s statecraft. But moving forward we may see a couple of changes that suggest we have reached an inflection point.
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