Good day social change makers! 

My name is Natalie Villalobos and I'm the founder of 300 Acres - a project that is attempting to raise $70,000 in 30 days to save 300 acres of ancestral land for the Shuar/Quichua people in Puyo, Ecuador.

We started the project this past Monday, March 5th and will give our biggest outreach push and donation raising through April 5th. We only have until April 5th to attain these funds or the land will be purchased by a development group that is interested in dividing the land - potentially cutting down the old growth trees, and starting a gold mining enterprise. This of course is explicitly against the wishes of the native people of this region.

I have been discussing what I call Scratch My Back Marketing since the beginning of 2009. I figured that it was finally time to write a specific post on the topic. Scratch My Back Marketing is based on a lifestyle and spiritual principal of giving to get. That’s right as in is better to give than receive. Now, I have nothing against receiving especially if it involves material resources such as capital. However, for our purposes I will settle for great comments left on my blog.

I hadn’t been following the news recently, so I was genuinely surprised when I saw “Google Buzz” in my Gmail dashboard today. My first impression is: this could work for me. But not as a replacement of Twitter. I rather see it as something to replace FriendFeed.

I have to admit – I never really got the hang of FriendFeed. While I want a service or an application that helps me to aggregate different forms of information streams, I don’t want to have to visit an additional site. But Buzz is integrated into Gmail which I visit a dozen times a day anyhow. And since most people I know check their Gmail or the iGoogle Dashboard regularly, this means you have real chance to create a lively discussion through Buzz.

Recent announcements by Google make me think, that the company might go down a path that would ultimately mean more inequality, a worse position for developing countries and a widening digital divide.

I’m referring specifically to Chrome OS, Google’s new operating system, and the announcement that Google would dump Google Gears, a service that makes it possible to use services like GoogleDocs offline. In both cases, Google emphasized the importance of cloud computing as opposed to working offline. The idea is that all data, i.e. your spread sheets, your documents, your photos, get stored on remote servers (a.k.a. "the cloud") and none of it on your machine.

Read more on: http://sm4good.com/2009/12/21/google-cloud-search-giant-widening-digital...

Google Web History is a service that stores your Google searches and the results you clicked on. This can be helpful if you can’t find a site anymore which you found useful earlier.

What Google Web History is not supposed to do is to continue to log searches from a computer that you haven’t been using in months! But that is exactly what has been happing to me! Read more: http://sm4good.com/2009/11/30/unforgettable-privacy-hole-google-web-hist...

If you are an internet marketer or website owner you may be getting the wrong results when they are using Google. Google made some changes to its search results. When you are searching from your Google account it may affect your search results.

http://ictkm.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/down-to-earth-cgmap-is-about-to-land/

Google 'launched' Google Wave about two weeks ago at the I/O Conference. It's continued to create quite a stir on the blogosphere, Twitter, and YouTube (2 million+ views!). Check out the 80 minute intro. video or read this TechCrunch article for an overview. 

Through Google Wave, Google seeks to change the way we communicate and collaborate online. I think it's worth pausing, though, to reflect on the Google Wave team's process around how they communicated and collaborated with the community to get us to this point. How might the Google Wave team have done things differently to better position themselves for world-changing success? And what are lessons we could learn for our world-changing projects?

Many have realized that Twitter, Facebook or any other widely used system of Status Updates could be useful for tracking possible infections and other trends, as well as having application in many other forms of group action and communication.

Sure enough, within an hour of posting, a friend over at the Brennan Center sent this link: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Just across the newswires… uber-geeks from Google, Twitter, MeetUp and other high-tech companies have shipped out to Iraq.  No, seriously.

Between April 19-23, a gaggle of executives visited Iraq as part of a U.S. State Department tour.  The department said that “the executives would offer ideas on how new technologies could help foster transparency, strengthen civil society and generally empower people and local groups by providing the tools for network building.”