If you're an NPR devotee, you've probably already heard about Free Rice, a brilliant and fun website that fights world hunger while helping you improve your mind. Here's the basic scenario: the website presents a vocabulary word, and four possible definitions. If you choose the correct definition, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the U.N.'s World Food Program. You can keep playing (and donating rice) for as long as you want. The program also determines your vocabulary level based on your answers to the questions. (You can go as high as 50... if you reach that and let me know, you'll get a shout-out in my blog!)I love this site and the overarching concept. It amazes me that I can help fight hunger (albeit in a small way) by doing something I enjoy. Go check it out! (Thanks, Paj, for the tip.)
As a side note, completely unrelated to ethical eating: I suspect that business models like this, where advertisers are willing to pay for site traffic, are heading for a crash. Haven't we all grown pretty much immune to web advertising? I was on the Free Rice site for ten or twenty minutes yesterday and couldn't name a single advertiser who had paid for my traffic. As much as I like the model, since it supports so much free content, I fear that a new, more intrusive wave of advertising is on the horizon.
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