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!