Here are 5 ways to make a difference and help someone that won’t cost you a thing, and best of all you won’t even have to leave your computer!
- Share your knowledge. A great way to help people is to share what you know. How many times have you used Wikipedia to look something up? I use it all the time, anywhere from 1-20 times a day and I’m sure you do too, maybe even more. Now how many times have you edited an article? Or created one when you came across an article that hasn’t been started? Probably much less than the number of times you looked something up. Well now is your chance. Why not boogie on over to Wikipedia and contribute some of your wisdom, imagine the number of people you’d be helping!
‘Help-o-meter’: 1 person per day per article, (i.e. you would help 365 people on average with just one article.)-
- Donate your PC Power. How often do you leave your computer running when your not there? Perhaps your downloading something? Running a virus scan? Well during that time you could share the processing power of your computer to help find cures for Alzheimer’s Disease, Cancer, Huntington’s Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta & Parkinson’s Disease. Even if you don’t leave your computer turned on alone, it can work away in the background while you work and with quicker and quicker CPUs, you hardly notice it’s there. For example I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU and while I type this and listen to music I’m running Folding@Home in the background, the only way it affects me is that it makes me feel good that I’m helping to find cures for the diseases above.
I prefer to use Folding@Home as they seems to have made good progress both with results they have received from people like you and I and they have also taken advantage of new technological developments eg. they have expanded from using CPU’s into using Graphics Cards. However there a are other distributed computing systems that are just as good, eg. BOINC. For a full list of distributed computing systems click here.
‘Help-o-meter’: Impossible to say. At the moment you are helping researchers study these diseases but in 5-20years when they discover the cure for Cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease, you could have contributed to savethousandsmillions of lives.-
- Grab your phishing r,od. Just imagine: between May 2004 and May 2005, about 1.2 million people in the US suffered losses caused by phishing, totaling approximately $929 million USD! That’s $775 per person! Ouch!
Luckily, new browsers, like Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, are starting to include phishing protection features, which is great as it warns a surfer when they come across a suspicious website, reducing the number of vulnerable users greatly. However, there is one problem: phishing sites go up and down like lightening, some staying up for only a few hours at a time. This means that if hundreds of phishing sites keep cropping up every hour as others go down, keeping and up-to-date record of all of them can be difficult to say the least. Enter Phish Tank! A place where ordinary people like you and me can report sites we think are phish sites and also verify other’s reports. It’s a very effective way of making sure the blacklist used by Firefox and IE is kept up-to-date. So far Phish Tank has uncovered 17,359 phishes out of 95,742 submissions.
‘Help-o-meter’: Well if you submit or verify one phish site and just help stop one person from entering their details on one of these sites then you could have saved that person $775. Not bad for about 30seconds of you time?-
- Question Time! Ever had a question that kept nagging at you? What was the name of that guy in the film? Who sang that song? Or have you just had a problem and needed a solution? Well, Yahoo Answers is the place to go. And many do! Yahoo Answers is where you can ask any question you want and other users answer back or suggest solutions. It’s easy and to help other people you would have to be the one answering the questions. Every time you answer a question you get points and if your answer is chosen as the best answer you get extra points. The higher your points, the higher level you can reach, the more you can help.
With new questions being added by the second, you can always find a question that needs to be answered. It also seems to be the ‘in’ thing to do at the moment with many huge celebrities posing questions to the public at large, for example Hillary Clinton, Leonardo Di Caprio, Al Gore, Bono, Stephen Hawking, Jonathon Ross and Oprah Winfrey. Check it out yourself and give it a go, Yahoo Answers.
‘Help-o-meter’: For every question answered, you help one person.-
- Support the Cause! So you are determined to stop the world from destroying itself by global warming? Great. Now what? You install CFL bulbs, turn your thermostat down by a few degrees and turn your computer off when you leave it unattended (don’t forget Folding@Home!!!). Ok that’s done, but the other 5,999,999,999 people in the world don’t do a thing. Right… Problem there. Enter Change.org, a new social network site. At Change.org you can meet like-minded people. It’s like a more upmarket MySpace. You sign up to causes that you would like to help and you see other people who would like to help change these things too. There are over one million non-profit organizations on the site that you can help by donating, if you wish, but you can also freely discuss the topic with others and state why you support that cause. They have all the major causes covered from recycling to improving public schools and if they haven’t got your cause on the site you can add it in a few seconds. Why not head on over and add your support to a cause?
‘Help-o-meter’: Impossible to say, in the short-term very few without donating but in the long-term you might just convince others to join your cause and put pressure on world leaders to make a change.
Well that’s the 5 ways to help make a difference online for free. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for putting up with me! If you are wondering I do all of the above so I speak from experience and have used all of them.;)
Oh and if you have any comments I’d happy to hear them. Thanks.
Bye for now,
Alan.
