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The Chinese students and scholars associations at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia and at Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, OK and the local Chinese communities here have just started a campaign to raise money to build a safe school for children in the Wenchuan area where the quake hit hardest (many children here are now orphans). We are calling for monetary donations. Let's show our love by building a school for the children.Our target is to raise US$50,000 or more through the effort of each of YOU! If everyone contributes $25.00, it will take 2,000 people to reach our target. We have started in various states in the United States and around the world to collect funds for such an effort. In each state there is going to be a group of coordinators (You can volunteer to be one) to manage the collection of the monetary donations

In Twitter’s Scoble Problem, a Business Model

Anyway, to put Scoble and his Tweets in context, let’s assume for a minute that he always has 25,000 followers and he sent them 12,000 updates which are all 140 characters long, the maximum size allowed by Twitter. Again, hypothetically speaking, assuming each update is 100 bytes, then 12,000 updates generated used up 30 GB of data. (12000 updates * 100 bytes)* 25,000 = 30000000000 (30 GB) So here we come to the good part. This massive database of followers is what Twitter should turn into a business. Twitter should charge Scoble, Leo, me, Michael Arrington and anyone else who has more than 100 friends and followers. How about something simple? $10 a month for 1,000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be paying them around $250 a month.

Let’s take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of, say, 1,000 messages for $10. Businesses like Comcast that want to use the service for commercial reasons should pay for the service, and so should startups like Summize, which want to build their businesses based on Twitter’s API. This would also fit the Freemium business model that Twitter investor Fred Wilson so loves. And at the same time, it would help Twitter overcome its abhorrence for adding advertising to the messages. I think many of us have a lot to gain from the service: My alerts about my posts on the system are a form of advertising for my work, and generate enough attention that paying for the service makes lot of sense.

This is what Yochai says and if you think blogs or Flickr or del.icio.us or YouTube or Wikis and especially Wikipedia, you begin to get a sense of what he means by ordinary connected folk having the “physical capital necessary.” This physical capital is simply a modem and a computer. Have that and you can participate. Now contrast that very low barrier to entry with what is needed to start a television or radio station, or to publish a magazine or newspaper.