Freerice From Just A Few Clicks!

Freerice.com - an online fundraising effort by John Breen, has really taken off and has obtained enough rice to feed 50,000 people. The Internet fundraiser uses a food linked word game tied to ad revenue raise money for the United Nations World Food Programme.

Visitors to Freerice play a multiple choice game that generates 10 grains of rice per click. The site has become a rather viral success story in a very short time and has raised awareness to this world need greatly according to Josette Sheeran - Executive director of Rome based WFP.

We have covered several notable efforts to help many over the course of the year and it is great to see another success story played out over the Web. From the One Laptop Per Child initiative to this latest great success story - people are finding creative and useful ways to use the Web to its best benefit - reaching out. Sheeran told Reuters:

“The site is a viral marketing success story with more than one billion grains of rice donated in just one month to help tackle hunger worldwide.”

Stories like this one are my favorites actually - tell friends and readers about good things. To be honest, examples like this are not common enough compared to the relatively more vast ones about comparatively less important issues. As you can see from the screens belowl, Freerice is drop dead simple. It only took me 1 minute to raise 150 grains of rice or more - just by answering some vocabulary questions.

Freerice home page with simple instructions

Considering the hundreds of hours we all spend on a variety of tasks and entertainment - a few moments spent on some questions is perhaps the most significantly Web 3.0 task we have seen. It is fun too, and I learned a few words in the process - a true win-win website and a great cause.