China Dream Blog is ushering in a new era of fund raising, helping the underprivileged and getting bloggers out of their homes.

B loggers, in general, could be described as narcissistic self-promoters. Given that I could be accused of resembling that statement, I would also like to point out that there are some others in the China blogosphere who have been using their profiles to aim high in the name of altruism.

Recently, a new fundraising movement started in the blogosphere under the banner of the China Dream Blog: Travel China for Charity and Understanding (blogofdreams.com). The blog is based around the concept of two travelers visiting every Chinese mainland province. During their adventure, the travelers hope to meet with and chronicle the daily lives of average Chinese citizens. In addition, they hope to meet a representative of each of China’s 22 ethnic groups during their travels.

The identities behind the China Dream Blog, Lonnie Hodge and David DeGeest, explain their collective motivation for creating this fundraising venture:

Our motivation for the trip came from a group of women known as the League of Extraordinary Chinese Women. The LOECW was comprised of 5 women from various walks of Chinese life—wives, semi-professional women, a bookkeeper, and a student. The one thing they had in common was advanced-stage HER2 breast cancer … One member of the original group has survived, and a newer, younger member has been added recently—a 22-year-old student who lost her leg to bone cancer. Both of the survivors lack the financial wherewithal to apply standard medical treatment to their illness. We devoted time and energy from our blogs and lives to raise money for members of the league. As a result of our initial efforts, we were able to extend the life of some members, and we enabled the student to purchase a prosthetic leg.

This is a great cause, but how does one go about raising money for people in need?

Before you get the idea that this blog is just about dreams, the goal of the site is to generate an enormous amount of traffic and use the ad revenue generated by this traffic to donate to 501(c)3 charities that help both Chinese and American literacy and medical concerns. In other words, The Dreamblogue will enable you to donate to charities just by surfing and returning to the site again and again.

This website and concept is just in its infancy, with the bulk of its entries getting the word out about their concept. There’s still a long way to go in terms of fundraising, but already the China Dream Blog concept has made ripples in the Chinese blogosphere.

Hodge, who is much better known as The One Man Bandwidth (onemanbandwidth.com) and a veritable renaissance man of the blogging age, has long been a prolific favorite in the blogosphere, and undoubtedly his renown culminated in being awarded the Best Asian Blog in The 2006 Weblog Awards (weblogawards.org).

The China Dream Blog site was already awarded a Bloggy Award (bloggyaward.com), which, given the "Hey! Look at me!" nature of this award site makes you wonder how much of the China Dream Blog’s appeal comes from genuine interest, persistent marketing or Internet hype. This touches on one of the more interesting, and probably controversial, aspects of this blog—the unashamed push-marketing of this site using a big bag of SEO tricks and manpower. The SEO nous comes from Hodge, and the power comes from his classes and students working in the area of Internet marketing. Undoubtedly this is a great combination of skills for charity. The myriad of methods employed to raise awareness of this fundraising effort makes this blogger think the cause is somehow clouded by all this cleverness.

A number of other Shanghai bloggers have also had a crack at the blog-to-charity method. Apart from lurking around written blog sites, this little netizen also likes visiting China's vibrant Flickr photography communities, and in particular the Shanghai Flickr groups (flickr.com/groups/51035786673@N0). Shanghai Flickrites continually work on getting the established online photographic community "unplugged" and moving towards some positive community impacts. In this respect, Shanghai Flickrites recently organized the ChinaNext photography competition fundraiser for underprivileged students in conjunction with Shanghai Sunrise. Not only did it get bloggers and net lurkers out of the house, it also contributed funds towards a new library for a local school.

Perhaps a new era of social conscience is dawning where it doesn’t take a major calamity to open people’s pockets for charity—perhaps we just need a blogger or two with a great idea.