Wendy Lee with kids in Cameroon

My friend Wendy is stationed in Cameroon, West Africa, as a grassroots micro finance volunteer for the Peace Corps. After her first few months in a village without running water or paved roads, she realized that a lot of the kids in Cameroon can’t read and don’t have access to books.

When Wendy contacted an organization called Books for Africa about getting some books for the 4-room school win her village, the project quickly exploded  into a large-scale effort that aims to bring 22,000 books to 30 libraries across Cameroon.

Books For Africa gave Wendy an all-or-nothing proposal: either take a 40-foot container of 22,000 books, or nothing at all. The shipping costs $11,500.

Wendy has already raised more than $9,500 for Books for Cameroon, but she still needs to raise $2,000 by the end of October for the project to happen.

Please consider making a donation to Books for Cameroon. No amount is too small. If you can spare $1 or even $5, we will be that much closer to bringing books to these great kids!

All contributions to this Peace Corps project are 100% tax-deductible. And if you feel so inclined, please share this message with your network in hopes that we can raise the rest of the money to make the project happen!

• To make a tax-deductible contribution:  http://www.booksforcameroon.org
• Follow the project on Facebook:  http://facebook.com/booksforcameroon
• Read about Wendy’s life in Cameroon:  http://roundtwocameroon.blogspot.com

Nurses for Africa

At work, we’re helping out with a site for 16 nurses from St. Louis that are in Zambia, providing medical care and education and HIV/AIDS prevention. Zambia is in southern Africa. Each day, the team in Zambia sends us videos and emails about their adventures with the help of a satellite phone and Internet cafes.

We post them on http://nursesforafrica.net/. It’s so cool to get to work every day and learn about what adventures are transpiring half the world away. When researching for the project, I even connected with my old friend from middle school that was born in Zambia to find out about possible Internet service providers. Small world!

Books for Cameroon

While the nurses are in southern Africa, my friend Wendy is in Cameroon – on the western coast of the continent. She’s a Peace Corps volunteer. Yesterday I got a tweet from her, asking for some help spreading the word about her new project called Books for Cameroon.

Wendy lives in a small village where her house doesn’t have running water. But she does have the Internet! So, using her blog, Twitter and Facebook – she’s raising $11,500 to send 22,000 books from the US to Cameroon.

I worked with Wendy via instant message and email yesterday to write and edit press releases and pitch emails for her to send out to various local and national media outlets.

By the way, please donate to her cause if you feel so inclined!

I am continually amazed at the way technology makes the world a smaller (and better!) place. In a million years, I never imagined that I’d be IMing friends in AFRICA – working with the Peace Corps and volunteer nurses – to promote literacy and HIV/AIDS prevention. Even if my part is small, after all I’m not the ones in Africa doing the heavy lifting, I am so glad that I can contribute to their work in my own little way, from my own little home in St. Louis.

I thought so too until I found out that the company wanted me to blog about their clients products and how fabulous they are. And while I’m all for evangelizing the stuff I like, I think it’s crooked when people get paid to talk about said stuff. It’s a little something I like to call conflict-of-interest.

I turned down the job because, while I like blogging and money, I do not like to get paid money to sway what I blog about.

And it turns out that the FTC feels the same way. They are now proposing new laws to mandate disclosure of financial relationships between bloggers and products they review.

Read this Phillip Givens Law Blog post to learn more about the proposed FTC changes.

In advance of pending legislation, I’d like to disclose that rather than get paid to write anything on my blog, I, in fact, pay to blog. Between domain registration and hosting, this site costs me about $25/year. I have no paid advertising or sponsorships. How’s that for full disclosure?

My boyfriend was the kind of kid who would take a part things just to see how they worked. I never understood those people… until it came time for me to understand the Internet. It started when I was about 12. I had this really cool graphics software on my computer and there was a way to design web sites on it. So I made a web site and posted it online just to figure out how it worked.

So when everyone started talking about the “blogosphere” I just didn’t get it. Why post things in chronological order? Why would people turn to everyday individuals to hear what they say when they could turn to “credible” published sources? I thought blogs were little Internet diaries where dumb people posted their innermost thoughts for the world to see… and the proceeded to piss off all their friends and families when they saw what they posted online.

I started off just reading blogs, you know, just to see what good would come from it (check out my LINKS page for some of the blogs I frequent). Then I realized that I too had a unique perspective and experiences worth sharing. Not going to go in to details about my personal life or try to piss people off, but I could definitely share things from my school, work and networking experiences.

My subject matter has expanded and changed over the last 12 months If you check out post #1, you can see why I started Resume Rehab and focused this site a little more on marketing, networking and the web.

Then, like any good addiction, I got hooked. And I started writing on multiple blogs. I made new friends through the blogging world. Learned the joys of WordPress and SEO, keyword searches and organic linking. Not only has it been a fun year, I’ve also expanded my professional skills and can help colleagues, clients and friends with navigating the confusing world that is blogging.

I’ve been dabbling in Twitter now too, and let me tell you, I’ve opened a whole new can of worms.

Thanks for stopping by and reading what I have to say. Thanks for year number one and here’s hoping for an even more wild and fun year number two!

Too bad when I tried to look for her online to find out more, she didn’t have a web site, online resume, Linked In, blog, Facebook page… nothing.

Given the fact that the Internet has taken over the world of marketing (and most of the world, in general) is it possible for a successful marketer to have a virtually non-existent web presence?

Doesn’t seem like a very effective personal marketing plan to me.

But now, Google has taken search engine tracking to a new level, extrapolating influenza outbreaks by location, based on searches for flu symptoms.

According to an article on CNN.com today about Google Flu Trends, the Google data can predict flu outbreaks 2 weeks earlier than traditional Center for Disease Control reports.

Check out Google Flu Trends to see the latest results.

The only downside is that Google cannot tell you whether or not Mr. Sneezy at the cubicle next to you has been searching for flu symptoms. You’re on your own for that.