Audience: US Income Tax filers who itemize Deductions
Sub-Audience: Haiti Disaster Relief Donators
Relevance: You can take a deduction for 2009 OR 2010
Action: Donate through March 1, 2010
Action: Save your receipts
Summary
If you’ve made a cash donation for disaster relief for Haiti to a qualified charity and you itemize deductions on Schedule A of your tax return, your donations are deductible on your 2009 tax return according to the IRS. This includes donations made by text message.
For donations by text message, a telephone bill will meet the record-keeping requirement if it shows the name of the donee organization, the date of the contribution and the amount of the contribution. For cash contributions made by other means, be sure to keep a bank record, such as a canceled check, or a receipt from the charity showing the name of the charity and the date and amount of the contribution.
If this post is relevant to you, please read the IRS news release: IRS: Haiti Disaster Relief Donations Qualify for Immediate Tax Relief.
Inspired by Justin Kownacki
The style of this post was inspired by Justin Kownacki’s article, The Relevance Economy in which he puts forward the idea that “relevance” of information is the metric that should drive “influence” rather than simply the “amount” of or curation of information.
With a glut of information, varying wildly in quality, it becomes necessary to do more than acquire information and let the crowd decide what is relevant. Instead, he puts forward the need for “Chief Context Officers” or “Contextualizers” to deliver relevant information to different audiences: the general public, decision-makers in companies and organizations, elected officials.
Better information curation is what we need. In the words of E. B. Boyd,
…users are going to be increasingly likely to flock to sites that curate—that apply some kind of human filter to sift through the reams of content and decide what’s valuable.
Searching for Relevant Information: Automating Contextualizers
Meta-data is necessary to put information in context. Thus, “audience,” “sub-audience” and “relevance” could be meta-data, unseen by the reader but used by a set of scripts to determine relevance on a per person basis. Amen to content in context!
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Valerie: That’s an interesting, and literal, application of my “contextualizers” theory. When displayed in this format, it does have the effect of making information seem less personal. On the other hand, I do like seeing the “action” items listed prominently, which has been my primary issue with our infoglut all along: there’s no way to know what to DO with the information we absorb.
I suppose the trick now is to find a way to offer information both in a holistic format and in an actionable, “file card” format for the people who barely have time to skim. On the other hand, maybe that dilutes the relevance of the information to the point of no return?
Hmm… More to think about.
When I get distracted by the current “one size fits all” method of information gathering, retrieval and presentation, I remind myself of the meaning of the words “relevance” and “context.”
Both words indicate a subjective quality to information that is usually overlooked; portals and search algorithms are intentionally blind to relevance, preferring to let the reader find that which is relevant by sorting through search results. If I understood your original article, you consider this a problem of such magnitude, there may be a niche for people who are able to sift, sort, cull and classify relevantly, subjectively.
With the post above, my expectation is that meta-tags are not displayed by default. They are used initially by catalogers who contextualize the information based on their intended audience, then by search algorithms to retrieve “relevant” information. It’s just a first pass by a self-admitted neophyte.
Interestingly, using StackOverflow architecture, OnStartUps.com has taken a first pass at contextualizing information for software start ups. Users ask questions, the community responds and answers are rated. With better control over the tags, the information could be easily sorted for that which is relevant.
Justin, thanks to you I am seeing the words “curate” and “curation” all over the place now as they relate to finding, sorting and gathering information in context.
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