Day 60: Take a survey

At Make a Difference surveys, $3 will be donated to one of several organizations you can choose from (I picked the Special Olympics). It's one of those surveys where they are looking for your interests and illnesses and whatnot so they can send you the types of junk mail we're trying to avoid, so just use common sense when providing personal information. Overall, a simple task for $3.

Day 55: Walk for a cure

Walk MS - Step by Step Closer to a Cure will be held April 4 at Audubon Park. Registration is free to participate, or you can become a "Virtual Walker," where you can raise funds online.

For more information, click here.

Day 54: Open a new e-mail account

For every email you send, Care2 donates to the Environment and other good causes!

You can choose from the following domain names:
@animail.net
@moose-mail.com
@snail-mail.net
@whale-mail.com
@wildmail.com

This web-based service is free and comes with 5 GB of storage, spam filtering, spell checkers in 12 languages, a secure login option and more.

Five percent of all revenue generated by the Care2 service will be donated to charity. You can also send free E-cards (including musical ones!), and you can schedule cards months in advance so that you never forget an important occasion.

Click here to sign up.

Day 53: Add your cause to your e-mail signature

An easy way to point others toward causes you're interested in is to post your cause's Web site in your e-mail signature.

For example:

"Your Name Here

I GoodSearch for (insert charity here).

Raise money for your favorite charity or school just by searching the Internet with GoodSearch - www.goodsearch.com - powered by Yahoo!"

Day 52: Create a petition

Passionate about something? Want to make a difference? Make a petition at The Petition Site. If you're not feeling particularly inspired, search the site for petitions to sign, such as this one, to forgive student loans, or this one, to help feed hungry children.

Day 47: Freecycle

Here's how freecycling defines itself: The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,681 groups with 6,432,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free.

There are 7,655 active members in the New Orleans group.

Day 46: Thank a serviceman

Operation Homefront is an organization driven by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn to create a resource library "dedicated to the service men and women from the Land of Lincoln, their families, and the citizens and organizations that support them."

Through this organization, you can e-mail our troops to thank them for their service to our great nation. Click here for the link.

Day 44: Social vibe

Social Vibe provides a free, simple way for you to get corporate sponsorship for a cause dear to you simply by placing an ad widge on your person web pages, including myspace, facebook, blogger and others. Setup only took me about 5 minutes, and you can see the result in the bottom left of this page.

There are three easy steps after signing up.

1. Select your cause (health, education, animals, peace and human rights, arts and culture). I chose the Children's Miracle Network.

2. Select the advertiser you want to feature. (I chose apple. There were many popular brands: Nike, Ed Hardy, Sprint, Colgate etc.)

3. Earn points for donations to charity.

Then copy the html code and put it on your page. Done and done.

Day 42: Send an e-card mammogram reminder

Every woman older than 40 should have an annual mammogram, according Many times, early stage cancers can only be found via mammograms.The Center for Disease Control has created an e-card you can send to the women you love to remind them to get their annual exam.

Click here to get started.

Day 37: Sell on eBay

If you sell on eBay, you can donate 10 percent to 100 percent of the final sale price to one of more than 1,000 nonprofits. Furthermore, eBay rewards your generosity by offering a fee credit. When you create a listing with eBay Giving Works and that item sells, eBay will credit the insertion and final value fees back to you, equal to the percentage of the final sale price that you elected to donate. You also will receive a tax-deductible receipt for your donation.

Day 34: Donate your computer's idle time

This one is way over my head, so I'll give you the details and you can check it out for yourself. But, apparently, you can donate your computer's idle time to scientists, who use it to "cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars" and conduct other types of research. This is called volunteer computing.

The grid computing software only uses idle CPU cycles, and when your computer needs more processor cycles, the software automatically turns those resources back over to the program you are using. It starts automatically when you open your computer and runs quietly in the background. You just download the software, install it and forget it. You can use grid computing applications on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Click here to link to Berkeley's volunteer computing site, boinc.

Day 31: Shop online

This one couldn't be easier.

1. Go to www.goodshop.com.
2. Choose your charity.
3. Shop online at more than 700 retailers worldwide.
4. Goodshop donates as much as 30 percent of your purchase to your charity.

Day 27: Online volunteering

This is one of the most fascinating ways to volunteer I've come across yet. UN Volunteering online offers ways for you to "share you skills, knowledge and ideas - from a computer anywhere in the world."

Simply choose a task that matches your skills (research, translation, project development and management, writing and editing, design, IT development, training and coaching, coordination and facilitation, consulting).

Focus on a specific development topic (education, income generation and employment, youth, governance and human rights, health, environment, culture, gender, among others).

Then select a region in the world.

My contribution: I registered online, it took less than a minute. They'll send you a confirmation e-mail and then you can set up a profile that matches your interests with their opportunities. I'm very interested to see where this one leads me.

Day 26: Chat

If you use instant messanging devices, Windows Live Messenger i'm donates to the organization you support with every instant message you send. Download and install the latest version type the text code of the organization you choose on your display name.

You can instantly invite friends from Hotmail, Facebook and other social networks to join you. The more who join and start IMing and e-mailing, the more Microsoft give.

Day 23: Throw some rice their way

Test and your knowledge and challenge your friends with a fun game that supports a great cause, http://www.freerice.com/index.php. Funded by the UN World Food Program, 20 grains of rice are donated for every question you answer correctly to help end world hunger.

Day 21: Point and click

One site, six ways to give. Go to http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/home.faces. At the top there will be tabs for the following causes: hunger, breast cancer, child health, literacy, rainforest and animal rescue.

Click on hunger, you give 1.1 cups of food to the needy.

Click on breast cancer, you help one woman in need get a mammogram.

Click on child health, you help one child in need receive health care.

Click on literacy, you help a child in need achieve literacy.

Click on rainforest, you help protect 11.4 square feet of rainforests.

Click on animal rescue, you give .6 cups of food to rescued animals.

You also can sign up for a daily reminder to go to the site and click. For signing up, you will receive a Seek Peace silicon bracelet and give two extra cups of food to the needy.

You can also send free e-cards to your family and friends, encouraging them to point and click for some good causes.

My contribution: I signed up for daily reminders. Turns out you have to pay for shipping to get the bracelet.

Day 20: Write to the president

Today, Inauguration Day, sign a petition to President Obama making child survival a priority of the new administration as part of UNICEF's Believe in Zero campaign. The organization says every day 25,000 children die from preventable causes, malnutrition, poisoning by unclean water, malaria and measles.

My contribution: I signed the petition. which requested my name, address and e-mail, and received the following response:

Thank you again for adding your name to our petition for a Presidential Initiative to Accelerate Child Survival, calling on President-elect Obama to scale up the coordinated, high-impact interventions that are proven to save child lives in even the poorest communities.
Your support brings us another step closer to a day when no child dies from a preventable cause.
Sincerely,
UNICEF USA

Day 19: Vow against violence

Deepak Chopra, president and founder of the Alliance For A New Humanity, was on "Ellen" on Jan. 12, where he urged viewers to take a vow for non-violence in their thoughts, speech and actions. To join his global movement, click here.

My contribution: I took the vow and got this short but sweet response:

Thank you for taking the vow.

Please forward this message to two friends:

I took the vow

Will you?

http://www.itakethevow.com

Easy enough.

Day 9: Be a Lifesaver

CPR and first-aid classes can be time-consuming and expensive. But at www.firstaidweb.com, you can take online courses at your convenience that prepare you to help others in an emergency.

According to the site: "Each of our step-by-step CPR and First Aid lessons are thoroughly explained with minimal technical jargon and include a helpful quick review section. A brief quiz will recap everything you learned and will give you the confidence you'll need to take appropriate course of action should an emergency arise."

Certificates can be obtained for a fee.

My contribution: The course took me 25 minutes. I learned the difference between admininstering adult, child and infant CPR. Good stuff.

Day 6: Sign up for wireless AMBER alerts

Help locate missing children by signing up for wireless AMBER alerts.

The AMBER Alert system was created in memory of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman of Arlington, Texas, who was abducted while riding her bicycle and later found murdered. AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alerts are emergency messages broadcast when a law enforcement agency determines that a child has been abducted and is in imminent danger. The broadcasts include information about the child and the abductor, including physical descriptions and information about the abductor's vehicle, which could lead to the child's recovery.

Click "here or text the word AMBER, followed by a space and your five-digit zip code to 26237.

My contribution: When I entered my cell number on the site, it first sent me to verizonwireless and then back to the home page with the following response: The Telephone Number xxx-xxx-xxxx is not a valid wireless number or your carrier is not participating in the program. But the text message worked. I received this response: You've successfully set up an AMBER alert. To cancel this subscription, respond with your zip code + quit. Took less than a minute for the whole process.