In 2010, I decided to start matching everything I spend on a non-essential purchase with an equal donation to an effective charity. It's worked for me; even though mechanisms like this are arbitrary, it feels more logical than choosing a percentage of income. It feels nice that spending money on nice things for myself and my friends is aligned ( Read more... )

I went to the memorial service for Aaron at the Internet Archive last night. This is what I said.

I've been thinking about Aaron every day since I heard the news. When I think about Aaron, I remember the conversations we used to have about how we wanted to change the world. We sat in the dining room in my co-op, over plain white bread. He ( Read more... )

If you would like to help me get it unsuspended, please post a note here to help provide evidence that "Ping" is the "name [my] friends, family or co-workers usually call [me]" (as it says in the User Conduct and Content Policy). If you are comfortable identifying yourself and your relationship to me, that would help too. Thanks!


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I went to a memorial service today. It was for Jon Brilliant, son of Larry Brilliant, whom I'd known during my first year at Google.org. The service was beautiful and moving. It was also powerfully inspiring, and I had not expected that. We were dressed in bright colours, to suit Jon's style; and there were words and rituals from a mix of ( Read more... )

Thinking about charities to support? Perhaps you have opinions? I think it's good to talk about this stuff openly, so we can learn from and encourage each other.
If you're curious or looking for ideas, these were my top picks in 2010:

• Partners in Health
• Second Harvest
• charity:water
• CAMFED
• Doctors Without Borders
• Project Respite 2.0
• Oxfam
• UNICEF
• ( Read more... )

Last year around this time, I decided to begin an experiment: to match everything I spend on a non-essential purchase with an equal donation to an effective charity ( Read more... )

At the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, Bill Clinton thanked Eric Schmidt for Google's efforts in crisis response, calling out Google Person Finder in particular.

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The Google Buzz team launched the Google Buzz API today. Using the Google Buzz API browser, you can find out what information it publishes.
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There are roughly two positions being expressed in the debate about privacy online: "Websites are violating user trust and that's wrong" and "Get over it, there's no such thing as privacy anyway".
The problem is that the pundits in the latter camp tend to be affluent, powerful, male, straight, white, or all of the above. To them, users should ( Read more... )

Here are answers to some common questions about the Facebook API Browser. For details on the exposure of users' event lists, which appears to now have been fixed, see a previous post.
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