Scott may not ‘attend’ any particular church but he is on the Board of Management and Honorary Treasurer of Wesley Mission. His photo is in the foyer in PItt Street.

According to its website:

Wesley is a growing Christian Church and a Parish Mission of the Uniting Church in Australia, serving the community wherever the need exists.

According to Wesley, Scott is playing a critical role in shaping the organisation’s future. Wesley’s CEO noted in his annual review:

I was delighted to welcome Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC. Mark Scott and David Greatorex work closely with me in setting the course for the future.

There seems to be no particular reason why Scott, or the SMH, would overlook this pretty significant involvement in a religious organisation.

Given that the Wesley Mission turns over a $100 million a year, Scott no doubt takes more than a passing or casual interest in its affairs.

Perhaps, Scott considers his involvement a matter of business or philanthropy rather than personal religious faith.

YOU wouldn’t know Audrey Myrden has had hardship in her life. She wouldn’t tell you this.

To this young Manly wife to Barry and mother-of-three, her life has been charmed.

“I have been blessed with these wonderful children and a wonderful husband,’’ she said.

She doesn’t have a sign on her that says her mother died in her arms when she was 15, or that she had stage one breast cancer at the age of 27, or that her brother in Canada was recently electrocuted and died.

She is still thinking positively despite these hardships and despite that in March she was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiform with PNet features a terminal brain tumour.

She was told the cancer is considered one of the rarest in the world with as few as 55 cases diagnosed globally.

Mrs Myrden’s is the first in Australia. She is presently undergoing the most aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatment available.

“I don’t see any benefit in having negative thoughts,’’ she said. “Another seizure landed me back in hospital recently and when I looked around I saw a lot of people worse off. “There’s always someone worse off than yourself.’’

She said she doesn’t feel at all sorry for herself but for her family she is saddened.

“That’s the hardest thing seeing my kids (her three boys are Charlie, Jack, and Declan),’’ she said. “I came home with a bald head this week and my son Jack asked me to put my hat back on.’’

Audrey is well known to the Manly community as the former manager of The Barking Frog restaurant/cafe for about eight years, and helping to bring in an organic canteen at St Mary’s Primary School.
Barry is also a staunch member of the community having played rugby with the Manly Blues for about a decade.

The Myrdens’ entire family is in Canada and, according to Mrs Myrden, their friends in Manly have become their surrogate family.

Because the breast cancer precludes Mrs Myrden from taking out life insurance there is a fundraiser for the Myrden family to be held at the International College of Management, Manly, on August 15.
The event is called Audrey’s Wish and money will go to assisting the family. “I would love to start a fund for others in the same situation,’’ she said.

There is also a golf day at Manly Golf Course on Thursday, July 30.

For donations and more information about all activities go online to http://www.audreyswish.com.au.

For general information on cancer visit cancercouncil.com.au

I wasn’t alone. Here’s a list pf other bloggers who also gave up some time  for good causes: Life in Mono , Firebug Theme , Miss McMuffin , Autumn Leaves , Blogpost.com , Sheila’s Wonderings , The life of an Audit Diva , Adspace-Pioneers , Servant of Chaos , Wonderwebby , Consumer Psychologist , Imaginif

MICROSOFTS biggest-ever Australian grant will help create social networks for the blind.

Social networking websites and digitised libraries have become important sources of modern information, but until now they have been inaccessible to the 300,000 Australians who are blind or who have low vision.

Microsoft has today announced its largest Australian software grant, valued at $6.7million, to Vision Australia, a charity supported by The Australian.

The donation will allow Vision Australia to establish its own social networking platforms and build an online “i-access” library where clients can browse and download audio books, magazines and newspapers.

 News | News.com.au.

Twitter is just part of a highly successful internet strategy which also includes wikis, youtube and email. So good has this strategy been that Buzz News says that Obama is the marketer of the year in 2008:

Barack Obama is the 2008 marketer of the year, all categories combined. With the help of his teams, he has created an unprecedented multi-channel communication strategy. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, Obama is everywhere: more than 1,600 videos published on his YouTube page, his own Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc…and we can’t forget to mention all the content that Obama supporters have unofficially created for their presidential candidate.

It’s about money, of course, you can’t win the presidency without oodles of the stuff:

Thanks largely to the unprecedented use of the internet, Obama’s campaign attracted 632,000 new donors in September. By some estimates Obama’s internet activities have now raised more than 1 billion dollars since he started campaigning two years ago. That’s more than 10 times as much as John Kerry raised over the internet just four years ago.

That delivered an enormous $US150 million in September alone.

But it’s also about volunteers. The Obama campaign may have the best ground campaign ever, certainly much better than McCain’s, and it uses a wiki to help organise it:

The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage “precinct captains” — volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California — the nation’s most populous state. “The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America,” said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. “Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California.”

Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals’ Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas. According to Garcia, the campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop — or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.

In many ways this is all a 21st century of a highly successful 20th century strategy used by many organisations:

Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog about politics and technology. (said) Obama’s campaign organization has done a particularly good job of using new technology to reach voters.

“What is emerging here into fuller view is the most robust multilayered political machine that anybody has built in modern American history,” he said. Politicians have known for years the power of peer networks. Labor unions, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association are classic examples of social networks campaigns used to their advantage long before the Internet age.

But those organizations were 20th century in their design. Campaigns worked with leaders at the top whose commands would trickle down through committee heads and precinct captains to voters at the bottom.

The 21st century networks are less hierarchical, with ideas and energy traveling up, down and sideways among the campaign, activists, bloggers, friends and family members.

Win or lose, Obama’s campaign will be studied intensively by political campaigners, marketers and just about anyone interested in professional communications over the next few years. I predict we will be inundated by shelves of book titles and legions of (hopefully insightful) conference presentations.

I’m excited to announce today that World Vision Australia and more specifically their blog Learn About Poverty (a blog that they have specifically set up for Blog Action Day which contains some fantastic resources for all bloggers wanting to participate in that very worthwhile project) are offering one Australian ProBlogger reader the chance to travel to Sydney on 29th October for an amazing day of Digital Training. 

Good cause, great prize

75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies are eager to get involved in social-networking initiatives for marketing or customer relations purposes, but 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures, predicts Sarner. What are they doing wrong?

“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said.

What does he mean by a “mutual purpose?” Any social media campaign has to be an authentic involvement with a community. A successful campaign will serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it and finding that balance is not easy

Gartner’s research shows that by 2012 fully half of all purchases will have some online component. That could mean searching for product reviews, reading about a new product on a blog, or comparing prices even if the purchase is ultimately made in a stor