Austin Hill — a smart guy who founded the company that eventually became Radialpoint, and writes a venture-capital oriented blog called Billions With Zero Knowledge — has put together what he hopes will become a Web 2.0-style charity called Gifter, and launched it with a “million-dollar blog post.” For every wish that is submitted, $1 will be donated to charity.
You can also sponsor a wish by donating $1 or more to Gifter (props to Austin for keeping all the vowels in the name, unlike most other Web 2.0 outfits). There’s an explanation of how things work here, including a description of how you can use online charity tools such as Tom Williams’ excellent GiveMeaning.com, as well as CanadaHelps.org (another of Austin’s ventures, called Project Ojibwe, has sponsored 2,500 wishes).
Coincidentally enough, Muhammad Saleem of The Mu Life and a partner just launched a website called Socially Given, where they are also hoping to use Web 2.0-type community tools to bring together people who want to contribute. Their idea stemmed from a post on Digg, in which Valleywag said it would donate $10 every time its “Diggbait” posts made it to the front page — and Muhammad calculated that this would bring in far more in advertising profits than would be given to charity.
Cambrian House, the Calgary-based “crowdsourcing” software-development company (which I wrote about here), also has a socially-driven charity effort of sorts called Robinhood Fund, in which people pay $5 to submit a wish, and then the community votes on who should receive the money collected each month. Past recipients have included a woman who needed medication for her sister’s Parkinson’s disease.