Facing AIDS for World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day is in less than a week (December 1)! In addition to our Bloggers Unite and Second Life activities, AIDS.gov invites you to join us in using social networks to help reduce stigma around HIV/AIDS and to promote HIV testing.

Why use social networks? Many people are already using social network sites to share information about issues that are important to them. For example, (Product) RED’s, MySpace page has over half a million friends and has another 100,000 fans on Facebook . MySpace created MySpace Impact , “a channel for the causes and campaigns MySpace users care about.” Facebook Causes , created by Project Agape , were developed to organize people for collective action - and Causes is now on Myspace as well. According to Facebook, “the real power of Causes… is that supporters of the cause can easily multiply their impact by inviting their friends to join and donate to the cause.”

The Power of Blogs: Bloggers Unite on World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day 2008 (December 1) is now less than two weeks away! Worldwide, an estimated 33 million people are living with HIV . In the United States, an estimated one million Americans are living with HIV.

AIDS.gov is partnering with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and Blog Catalog for Bloggers Unite on World AIDS Day 2008 . This event encourages bloggers from around the world to dedicate their blog posts on December 1, 2008 (World AIDS Day) to issues related to HIV/AIDS.

World AIDS Day in Second Life

World AIDS Day Second Life Poster

World AIDS Day (December 1) is less than a month away! One of our many World AIDS Day activities will be our participation in a Second Life (SL) 2008 World AIDS Day event. As we mentioned in a previous post about SL, virtual worlds can be an effective way to reach people with HIV resources and information. Thanks to a generous grant from the National Library of Medicine, the Alliance Library System (which also developed Health Info Island ) will open a brand new SL island on World AIDS Day. That island will be dedicated to HIV/AIDS education, outreach, and support.

In preparation for the SL event, we sat down (in SL, of course) with two of the event’s organizers, Ricken Flow (Rick Davis in the real world) and Jenaia Morane (Jena Ball in real life). Rick and Jena are both doing HIV work in SL and told us a bit about their experiences.

Introduction to Mashups: 1 + 1 = Mashups?

AIDSportal “HIV Jobs” Mashup

Mashups -- what are they? Are they being used by the HIV/AIDS community? To learn more, we spoke with Rob Worthington from AIDSportal and AIDS.gov advisor, David Galiel .

What is a mashup?

Rob told us, “A mashup is a way of combining data, content, or a function from different websites in a new or innovative way. This can create extra value or utility.”