Another Tech Mash-up for a Good Cause

What happens when you put the following groups in a (hypothetical) bag and shake it up real good?

The Partners:


MTV's Staying Alive Foundation is a multimedia HIV and AIDS prevention campaign and is itself a partnership between MTV Networks International, Family Health International, the Kaiser Family Foundation, UNAIDS, UNFPA.

Facebook Causes lets Facebook users show there support for causes and non-profits they care about by joining there pages and facilitating donations.

SpinVox is a platform that converts your voice into text. The cool thing about it is that you call into their line and speak your message and SpinVox can then post a text version of your spoken message to your blog, send a text to all your friends or update your social networking profile. So our knobby overworked fingers can take a break.

What comes out of that bag after a good shake is StandByWhatYouSay.com.
Here is a little snippet from the press release:

MTV's Staying Alive Foundation, SpinVox and Causes on Facebook yesterday announced the launch of their joint campaign, 'Stand By What You Say'. The groundbreaking initiative encourages young people to speak openly about sex, sexual health and HIV/AIDS, with a view to increasing awareness and breaking down the stigma and discrimination which so often accompanies the disease.

The campaign uses SpinVox to convert the voice messages that people leave in to text. Those that speak up are then asked to bolster their support by pledging money to the Staying Alive Foundation, MTV's HIV and AIDS charity which allocates grants to youth-led organisations who work to raise awareness on a local, grass-roots level. SpinVox itself will be 'standing by what it says' to match funds raised to the value of $50,000.

Callers are greeted by 2008 Staying Alive Foundation Ambassador Kelly Rowland, who prompts them to leave a message at 513-729-6417. The voice messages are converted to text and posted on a bespoke Staying Alive Blog http://www.standbywhatyousay.com by SpinVox. Topics such as 'sex secrets,' 'one night stands' and 'condoms' will act as conversation starters and encourage debate among global youth audience. Different themes and questions will be posed throughout the campaign to keep the contributions
coming.

I think that anything that helps people speak positively about sex and their sexual health is a good thing.
And this is a really interesting tech twist.  I don't know yet if speaking your message and then having it
converted to text is really better/different than typing.  But I will keep watching and seeing what kinds of
messages come rolling in.