The Associated Press' Jason Straziuso has a great article about a great story: How the virtual community Reddit quickly rallied to raise $80,000 in donations to help a a Kenyan orphanage beset by violent thieves, one of whom hacked an ophan in the face with a machete. After a Redditor posted a photo of the boy's gory scar, the Reddit community went into action. Jason asked me to comment about the story, jumping off from what I wrote about Reddit on Internet Evolution earlier this week: "The request wasn't for millions of dollars for an abstract, seemingly unobtainable goal, but thousands of dollars for a very specific, easily understandable end. When the factors like that are aligned, the results, as we see, can be hugely powerful," I told him. Read the whole story here.
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This is actionable social media. I like this example very much.
I couldn't get reddit to work for me when I tried to get posts into the Second Life groups. But I'll have to give it another go soon.
What I see here is that a story hits, and has immediate ways presented for people to get involved - and very much eases the process of making that involvement possible.
I can only hope Reddit does not end up in the same data-mining fiasco that places like Facebook occupy, but I'm not sure how they could avoid that fate when operating within an unregulated profit-based market.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, February 02, 2012 at 11:19 AM