I have a profound respect for charities with great vision and execution. However, I possess a monstrous disdain for those that manipulate the disadvantaged, use them as a platform to further their own personal goals, and take for granted, or even abuse their patrons.

When I heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), I immediately stepped-up and supported it. I immediately wrote about and promoted the campaign to encourage the world to buy one of their computers, so that a like computer could be donated to a child or classroom in a third world country.

In fact, the Internet and its denizen of bloggers have helped turn this charity into a massive darling that has received heaps of wonderful, international praise. I encouraged friends, colleagues and readers to support it, and instructed my company, Prescient Digital Media, to spend thousands of dollars on the program.

In fact, we were a relatively early contributor during the Christmas campaign of 2007. At the time, OLPC promised the delivery of their computers before Christmas. Four months later, and five months after they took our money, no computers have been delivered.

Have you noticed a lack of formal grammar or punctuation in your kids’ homework? How about in correspondence with friends?

Informal communications and writing styles adopted in text messages, email, and new social media tools like blogs have begun to creep into the world of print.

A new study by Pew Internet reveals that nearly two-thirds of surveyed students (700) say their Web communications style sometimes bleeds into school assignments.

Roughly 50% admit to omitting proper punctuation and capitalization, and, shockingly, a quarter of them admit to using emoticons such as smiley faces.

“The state of writing among teens today is marked by an interesting paradox: While teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft a significant amount of electronic text, they see a fundamental distinction between their electronic social communications and the more formal writing they do for school or for personal reasons,” says the reports authors.

I’ve been saying for about 8 years that the Internet would spawn a writing revolution. I must admit however that I didn’t forsee a possible re-writing of our English language :) LOL! IMO!