Ready to give money to your favorite charity? Before you write the check, make sure you know the do’s and don’ts of donating.

Here are some common-sense key points outlined by the IRS when it comes to donating:

• Donations are only deductible during the year they were made — keep a notebook or excel table of your donations and the date, and don’t forget them at tax time!
• Make sure the charity is tax-deductible — verify your organization is listed as tax-deductible on the IRS website.
• Make sure to get a receipt from the organization you donate to

The tax masters at H&R Block have some more technical details to help you get the most out of your donation.

I’ve spent about a week messing around with a new Twitter account, and I must confess it is pretty cool–perhaps I’ve become “twitterpated.”

(See this video if you don’t get the joke above)

On the bottom of the homepage is a quote from Nicolas Carr, calling Twitter “the telegraph system of Web 2.0.”  I can’t agree more.  Twitter is a great way to get a short message to hundreds–or even thousands–of people in less than a second.

Twitter feels like a meld of the instant communication features of IM (AIM, GoogleTalk, MSN) and the social networking aspects of Facebook.  While you can update your status, it allows for replies and side conversations between you and all of your friends.  Twitter goes beyond text updates though–you can embed pictures and video in your tweets.  Don’t forget another great feature–you can take Twitter with you on your phone!

As I was poking around and looking into some background info on Twitter, I found a site filled with Firefox plugins to make any “Tweeting” experience easier and more enjoyable. I’ve found several of these tools make Twitter even more awesome for myself–Now I don’t have to have the Twitter tab always open while I browse the web.

I like Twitter, and I can see myself replacing my Facebook and AIM account with it in the near future.  It’s an all-in-one solution for those who crave instant communication, collaboration, and media-enriched web content.

Right now I’m sitting in my most boring class…but I’m not bored.  Luckily I installed StumbleUpon while waiting for the professor to arrive.

Normally, I have about 5 different website I visit on a regular basis (Facebook, forums, etc).   I really like these sites, but after a short time I want more content from web browsing.  StumbleUpon has helped satisfy this.

During the past 30 minutes of stumbling, I’ve found some totally cool web pages that I know I’ll be coming back to.

I “stumbled upon” a site called ‘This Is Why You’re Fat“–a blog that simply links to pictures of the most greasiest, disgusting food combinations I’ve ever seen.  Gross, yes–but indescribably funny.

I’m sure there are more productive uses for StumbleUpon than entertaining college students who are bored in class–but I don’t really care.  I think StumbleUpon is great because within minutes I was able to quickly find several websites to quickly pass time in a boring class.

No Luke Skywalker, Google is not you’re father, nor is it the dark side of the Force.  However, it can make you more powerful than you could ever imagine.

How often do you search using Google?  How often do you not get the results you’re looking for?  That’s because Google can’t read your mind when you enter one word into its search box.  After watching classmates search endlessly for an article or image and only get bombarded with totally unrelated topics and garbage results, I’ve decided to put together a few tips for better and faster searching.

• site specific searches with “site: targetsite.com”
• specific filetypes with “filtype: extension”
• search image sizes with “imagesize: resolutionhere”
• local theater times with “moviename zipcode”
• add “&imgtype=face” to an image URL to search for only faces

These are only 5 of the hundreds of operators and options available with Google, but I find them to be the most useful.  Lifehacker, HubSpot, and TechTracer (1, 2) have articles that cover extensive uses of the search engine.  I hope you find this information to save you time and energy in your searching!

I’m not a huge fan of country music, but as I was thinking about a Facebook topic for this post, one song in particular came to mind.  Brad Paisley’s “Online” is the story of  an overweight, socially inept, ultra nerdy pizza delivery guy who lives his nights a famous Hollywood character.

How does he do this?

Simple.  While social networking sites like Facebook are great ways to keep in touch with distant friends and relatives, who is to say these people aren’t misrepresenting themselves?  Everybody wants to be the person in the spotlight, and the ease with which Facebook (other social sites too) allows someone to “enhance” their online profile is often too tempting for many.  Craig Murphy shares some of these sentiments in a post on The Social Programmer.

Don’t get me wrong–Facebook is a great tool and I enjoy being able to quickly contact distant friends.  However, I think it is important to know who you are becoming “friends” with on Facebook.  Nothing beats getting to know a person like good old fashioned face-to-face conversation.