A Writer’s Life

There are a few important dates coming up over the next month, so I thought I’d do a quick post in case anyone didn’t know about them. One might be of interest to anyone looking to follow up on BlogCatalog’s Blogging Against Abuse Day.

The first is that October is international Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an annual campaign by the major breast cancer charities to increase awareness of the disease and to raise funds for research. In Australia alone 36 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every day and one in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer before the age of 85.

Part of the campaign in Australia includes Pink Ribbon Day on Monday October 22nd where you can buy a Pink Ribbon or Wristband to support the cause. Something else you can do is to support The Breast Cancer Site. The site helps to provide free mammograms to women in need; every click from a user raises money from sponsors which goes toward the costs of mammograms. 11,000 mammograms have been provided since the year 2000.

October 15th is BlogActionDay, a community project encouraging bloggers around the world to unite about an issue on everyone’s mind: the environment. BlogActionDay is in its inaugural year and is being supported by over 6,850 blogs and institutions including Greenpeace, Lifehacker, Treehugger, Web Worker Daily and Change.Org. Bloggers are being asked to publish a post relating to an issue of their choice about the environment and to donate any daily advertising revenue to an environmental charity. I haven’t decided what my topic will be yet but I’ll definitely be participating; if you want to find out more, check out BlogActionDay. And thanks to MusEditions and Sanjida for letting me know about it.

The third thing is more of a public service notice for anyone in the US. I heard about this from WC and couldn’t believe it; the laws in the US that keep Internet access tax-free are set to expire on November 1, 2007 and the houses of Congress are currently debating whether Internet access should be kept tax-free. I find the idea that you might have to pay whenever you go online bizarre and it really impacts people outside the US as well as US policy is often adopted as standard in other countries. It’s probably not going to happen but the coalition at MyWireless.Org has a form for people in the US to fill out urging politicians to pass the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act of 2007. You might like to have a look and find out more about keeping the Internet tax free.

Lastly is just a reminder that the next court sitting regarding the defamation case which led to the banning of Wordpress in Turkey is also set to take place on November 1st. Hopefully more information about the ban will be available after the 1st, but if you’d like to send a letter to the Turkish authorities asking that the Turkish courts reconsider their position or sign MidEast Youth’s petition, it might help. Plus you’d be joining with other people in condemning censorship, something which seems particularly important now with the events in Burma.

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