This week Ash pledges to grow a beard to help save a million gallons of water and Ben and Jerry’s are similarly resourceful and save your left-over Twitter characters. Crowd-sourcing (and new tools!) take the pain out of content generation. We look at Storify – a tweet capturing tool, Philanthroper – a Groupon for good and new Facebook Non-Profit Resources.

I was reminiscing the other day about the joy of writing and receiving letters and my friend lamented that people send emails nowadays. Well that seemed pretty obvious – yeah, I suppose they do.But just looking at my personal email inbox today I can’t find any messages from people I know; every single one is a marketing message of some description.

Twitter launched UK office, looks to buy Tweetdeck. Everything Everywhere waives text donation fees and Marks and Spencer rewards Foursquare check-ins with charity donations.

Facebook introduces a new version of Questions, Google takes on competition with NFC payments and Plus one Service and LinkedIn reaches 100 million members

Facebook upgrades like button functionality and adds suicide functionality. Also, how much are QR codes actually used and what is the #cookiepocalypse?

This week: Biz Stone launches new Non-Profit, our obsession with Facebook grows and a look at how we engage with Facebook Pages.

After last weeks double serving, here’s this weeks equally fattening portion of beautiful bytes.

Another week, another beautiful bytes round up of what’s hot in technology and charity.

Happy New Year everyone – welcome to 2011! I hope you all had a great break full of overindulgence – I think my Christmas dinner has just about settled. Time for some tech news I think!

The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2010 report is full of interesting insights if you are blogging and want to promote your blog – or your website, for that matter – to a wider audience.

One of the areas I often end up exploring with clients and at conferences is the difference in demographics between Facebook and Twitter users, between the platforms and what they can be used for.

What’s great about Steve’s posts is that they come from a place of data – fact – rather than opinion (as Adam is fond of saying). There really isn’t enough hard, meaningful data shared in the UK on charitable giving (with JustGiving being a notable exception). It would be great to see Blackbaud doing something similar to this in the UK.

Welcome to the first of a new weekly blog from beautiful world; beautiful bytes, a roundup of third sector digital news. All in one easy to swallow post.

I took part in two social media panels today at the Women’s Resource Centre’s Facing Our Future Conference at the Cass Business School, alongside Fiona McLaren from Amnesty UK and @BeckyPants, founder of whomadeyourpants – a cooperative in Southampton, ‘empowering marginalised women and making utterly splendid pants’.

Will Facebook ever displace Google as a search engine? Probably not. But, it could quickly erode Google’s dominance as the way people find information.

We were pretty excited when we discovered, a little while back via Twitter, that one of our campaigns had been nominated for a new social media award.

Simon and I were talking the other day about fashions in web design and whether people just copied off each others’ sites or whether there are best practices emerging. So I thought that it would be a good idea to have a history of charity homepages, starting from now.

It’s the last day today that NCVO members can submit their questions to me, via the NCVO website, on online fundraising. I’m intrigued to find out what they’re going to be!