There are a tremendous number of online resources out there meeting the call to help people in Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa. One of the better, and least denominational, is Network for Good. [Addition: This CNN page is also excellent]
From everything I’ve (sadly) heard over the past few days, nothing will help people more than plain old cash money. The organizations involved there simply need funds to keep supplies and food moving. I am donating to American Jewish World Service but it matters not.
Giving online, unlike sending a check or volunteering, still feels strange to me. The disconnect between the button clicked and the recipient helped is all too wide. But from the reports, it may be that donating on the Web may be the fastest route to those overwhelmed by tragedy.

Yahoo! is slowly transforming it’s old Times New Roman image to a more sophisticated search engine that actually looks like it’s 2004.
Most relevantly to me, the company is now beta-testing refurbished My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! is an old friend of sorts; it’s been my homepage for about 7 years, which means that I probably see this page about 7 times more than any other page on any site. On this page, I get news, weather, stocks, box office info, horoscopes, and now RSS feeds from blogs I like. But this new version of the confabulator is a bit like watching an old friend don new pajamas where the fit is a bit tight in the shoulders and too loose in the waist — and yet, the pajamas look kind of nice overall. The stripes work and the colors are gentle and calming but the overall package feels like it’s going to be uncomfortable to sleep in, particularly in the groin area.

Brought to you by the folks who began, run, and promote the Web Standards movement, it’s cool to see a site finally dedicated to looking at safer, better browsers.
Included on the site are testimonials of people who switched off of Internet Explorer for a variety of means and now use either Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari. It’s about time that the Web standards movement is pushing the positive benefits of standards, which include better and safer browsing as this site clearly advocates. I’m hoping that this site will start to bring real, readable, and realizble Web standards to the people.

I have a special folder in my email client called “Automat.” This catch-all sub-folder, within the inbox, contains the whole gamut of digests, permission-based emails, forums, and account updates I receive.
I barely read any of them.
Instead of getting all sad about it, I thought I’d post all the good things I’m missing, thus allaying my alternating fears and feats of waste and knowledge saturation. They are:

• Apple’s weekly in-store and online promotions
• TidBITS’ newsletter
• WebDesign-L’s daily email digest
• Evolt.org’s and css-discuss.org’s digest
• Webproducers’ email posts
• iPrint.com’s weekly sales promotion blowout
• Typephile.com’s Forums emails
• Email promotions for both PhotoWorks and Ofoto
• Other promotions from ITCFonts.com, Dotster, Adobe, AMEX, L.L. Bean, iPrint, and my favorite, PayPal

Found on the Tiffany & Co. | Frequently Asked Questions section. I wonder if this is a little like asking Krups if they manufactured that World War I machine gun I have sitting in my basement. (Note large historical ellision between 1846 and 1950).

Just when I thought that MoveOn.org was moving on and video advertising was becoming increasingly a parody of itself, take a look at these relatively well-crafted political videos at Bush in 30 Seconds. The first, third and fourth ones are the best.

It’s the middle of Chanukkah, almost Christmas, and a few days to the New Year. What else to do but celebrate with some links:
The “new” new Zeldman, which I think is kind of disjointed, disfigured even. I don’t know why the tabs exist on the page, why a robotic asian woman is featured on the right side of the page, and I don’t know why there are about 8 different typefaces and type treatments throughout the site.
A blog that I’ve found to be good reading on Canadian real and Web life, which features poor design but great content.
Method’s web site, while no longer cool in its non-graphical graphical interface and stripped-down text-based logic, is still in black and white. When Method first did this a few years ago, I was taken aback. Now, it just seems funny and maybe interesting.
A list of RSS readers, which I may or may not have posted before.
My friend Victoria’s new company called Sweet Yaya that sells luscious-looking sweet things.

I’m not sure of the total veracity of this Sunday Mail report on Mossad’s total involvment in capturing Mr. Hussein but the questions asked about Saddam’s capture one week ago are profound. These are things I’ve been asking myself, small twitches of wonder going off in the back of my head, but I’m glad that here they are in one, detailed list:
• WHO were the two unidentified men armed with AK-47 rifles who stood guard over the hole? Were they there to protect Saddam or kill him if he tried to escape?
• WHY did Saddam not use his pistol to commit suicide—and become the martyr he had long boasted he would be?
• WAS it cowardice that stopped him—or was he expecting to make a deal? To not only reveal the truth about weapons of mass destruction, but also about his deal with Russia and China, whose secret support had encouraged him to continue to confront the US.
• THE hole he hid in had only one opening. It was blocked. He could not have escaped. So was it in effect a prison? Was he being held there as part of a trade-off?
• WHAT was the $US750,000 (about $A1 million) found on him for?
• WHY did he have no communications equipment? Not even a mobile phone was on him.

FirstGov.gov was re-launched recently and I have much interest in it.
First, it seems to attempt to take the place of the for-profit portal featured in that all-too famous documentary a few years ago. Second, the re-design itself is boring, insulting, even tortuous — it looks like it was designed by eight different government committees sitting behind locked doors who could only communicate via keyholes. I wonder, even, if there was a designer in-house to build this monster.
Third, the site, as a friend noted, is not 508 compliant so it doesn’t adhere to the accessibility standards that the U.S. Government has set for itself. And lastly, sites like NYC.gov, which I had the pleasure of loosely working on a few years ago, have become models for online government communications.
Postscript: I do think the FirstGov portal is a good idea. I just wish the site looked and acted smarter.

I got quoted on Zeldman, page down to see my little reflection.