Myanmar Cyclone: Appeal for Help

I had the pleasure of meeting Win Zaw a few years back while organizing a Tomb Raider-esque trip to Cambodia. Win Zaw is Burmese, and at the time, he was working for another Cambodia-based local operator. More recently, he started Asia Expeditions and we've continued to work together.

Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar last Friday. Since then, news of the situation has been increasingly alarming, not just the scale and scope of the disaster but also the government's handling of relief efforts. Sitting safely in my Causeway Bay office, it's hard to know exactly what to do to help aside from making a donation to a relief organization. But then, I always wonder how much actually gets to the ground. So when I caught Win Zaw on gmail chat yesterday (fortunately, he and his family as well as colleagues are all fine), I asked what we could do to help. He told me he was waiting to hear back from his contacts in Burma and would send me an email with an update and list of needed supplies. Below is his email. If you would like to help, feel free to send supplies directly to Win Zaw at the mailing address below (NOTE: Please mark all packages "Charity for Myanmar Disaster". Otherwise, he will have to pay heavy customs duties.). I will also be collecting things and making a shipment Wednesday (14 May 2008) morning, so feel free to send items to WANLILU Play Ltd., Room 1501, One Hysan Avenue, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.

----------------------
Hi Winnie,

First of all, many thanks for your concerned and appreciate your hard work.

Here I got the line with Esther and the place is less damage than the main area, however, there are thousands of refugees flows into town.

There are no GOV assistant at all and most of them are at the school, foodball field, church, etc..

People got sick, diarrhea, and the people from the town send daily foods to those refugees and some donors sent rice and other dry goods, that can be use by the time they do not get any support from the town. Nightmare!!!!!

Here she ask me to send if we can:

1) Drinking water: they can mange through localmade pump and we need more purifiers.

2) warm clothes / blankets /mosquito nets.

3) anti-diarrhea tablets and other medicines such as insect- repellant, etc..

4) food, (Esther try to have more rice from Yangon to delta)

5) Candles as no electricity at all.

6) mosquito nets if available

7) Firstaid boxes

There are very less medical assistance.

So far, she does what she can and of course, we will update with more details later.

Do let me know any progress and again, I thank you so much for your helps.

My regards,
Win Zaw

Asia Expeditions
No. 18, Street 370,, PO. Box 957
Boeng Keng Kang I, Chamcar Mon,
Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia
H/P: 855 (12) 732 236
Tel: 855 (23) 726 644
Fax:855 (23) 996 893
Email: winzaw@asia-expeditions.com
website: http://www.asia-expeditions.com

Goodwill Shopping Twine

For the past week or so, I have been playing around with Twine. It all started late last October when IE sent me the link to a Technology Review article touting: The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream. I read the article and replied to IE: "I soooo need this!!!" In a nutshell, Twine is trying to glean meaning from all the content and data that we come across every day, so that when we do search for something, the results are that much more relevant, because it "knows" the connections/relations/relevance of all the stuff we've highlighted from the internet. At least, that's the theory. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee's (inventor of the web) vision of a semantic web, an intelligent web so to speak, is that it should be able to analyze and make sense of all the data in the web rather than just presenting a bunch of information based on a search query, leaving us to sipher through and decipher what it is that we need. I signed up for the beta version of Twine back in October and then forgot about it.

In the meantime, I was struggling with a project that started off as another Little Cream Book idea. I was trying to find 26 social enterprises, from A-Z and around the world, that produced products for consumers while also enabling social change, whether it be for the environment, sustainable development, art education for local communities, etc. I was having a tough time pinning down the 26 enterprises. There were so many great companies all with inspiring stories and as we kept looking, we would come up with even more. Finally, in January, I came to the realization that I was going about the project in the wrong way. I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. So I decided that what made more sense was to post everything we had come up with online and allow the goodwill shopping directory to grow over time. The original idea was to create a blog, with an entry for each enterprise. Entries would be tagged by product category (so that if you were looking to buy a new pair of jeans, you might find Pierce Jeans, which "gives away a significant chunk of its company's profit to help feed the children all over the world".), by producer country (say you're Christmas shopping and decide you want to buy gifts that might also help refugees from Darfur you might find Social Atelier, which "donates a portion of the proceeds [from sales of their T-shirts] to the Solar Cooker Project".) or by retail/distribution location.

We were in the midst of setting up the blog when the Twine beta invitation finally landed in my inbox a week or so ago. I thought Twine would actually make the whole process a lot more efficient and allow the Goodwill Shopping twine to grow faster. In concept, all I would need to do would be to bookmark a particular site and the site would be tagged with all the relevant data (people, places, organizations as well as whatever other tags I inputted). I could even add comment or descriptions for each bookmark and those would be similarly tagged. If other people had also twined the same site, I'd be able to link to them and the assumption is that they would have similar interests and be able to add to my twine or vice versa.

Well, after a week of playing around, Twine has a long way to go before fulfilling its basic promise of auto-tagging. Of those who have tried it, some are disappointed and while others who are a bit more accepting and hopeful. Right now, I feel that del.icio.us (for tagging and sharing bookmarks) and google (finding what I'm looking for) are doing a better job than Twine. But I can see the potential of Twine if it attracts the kind of usage that facebook does. Twine is supposed to get smarter with more use. As it sees more connections between items being added, its recommendations become more refined. The only catch is that web sites need to catch up, because not all are programmed in the standard that allows Twine to make sense of the data (i.e. identify and tag correctly the useful bits of information). In fact, the majority of websites I was twining weren't programmed in that way so I had to key in my own tags.

If you're interested in testing Twine and/or contributing to the Goodwill Shopping twine, let me know. I have a limited number of invitations.