www.freerice.com

I've had some down time this week and i stumbled across freerice.com [www.freerice.com], a website backed by some big names (Apple, Liz Clairborn, AMEX etc). Their tag line: "For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to end world hunger."

Users, like myself (and now hopefully you as well) play a vocab game. For every word you get right...10 grains of rice.

I found the website while trolling through today's most popular gaming websites on del.icio.us.

How strange the world is : my 10 minutes of vocab entertainment aids a 'hunger reduction' initiative (with 10 grains of rice); food is wasted and thrown out every hour in developed regions and all we can donate are 10 grains of rice ; we've resorted to online vocab games to aid in hunger reduction (you'd think knowing about starving people would have prompted us to act appropriately, and earlier).

I realize that i am not giving due credit to the initiative; it is small steps that aid in resolving such problems. That being said, i don't think i am out of place for thinking the thoughts i articulated above.

From a marketing perspective (i.e. marketing the hunger issue - getting people to think about how serious the problem is) - the website is useful. I doubt that i alone experienced this, but seeing only 10 grains of rice being earned each time made me WANT to keep going and earn more.

I think what got/gets to me is the 10 grains - we can only spare 10 grains at a time? We waste and throw away food, starve ourselves and resist carbs - and all we can spare are 10 grains.

Strange.