Wow. Strong’s last post was our five hundredth. According to our Word Press dashboard we have 500 posts and 3,883 comments. This means that we not really 133t be we are ‘soo ebbe’. But still. It’s a great milestone, and the comments to posts ratio is wonderful sign of the vibrant community that has grown up around Savage Minds. So congratulations to everyone who has visited the site — the anthropology blogosphere wouldn’t be the same without you!

While we do not place ads on Savage Minds, we do have a “help out” section on our side bar where we try to highlight worthy causes. In the past we’ve had links to charities helping victims of hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake. This time we are trying something different.

Our overseas readers my not be aware of the tremendous inequality rampant in American education, but it is not uncommon for schools in poorer neighborhoods to lack the most basic equipment and resources. While they now get tax breaks, teachers must often supply the most basic classroom equipment out of their own pocket. Addressing this is one of the most innovate charity organizations I know of: Donors Choose. Donors Choose allows teachers to suggest projects for their classroom and donors can give as much or as little as they like, tracking the project’s project every step of the way. If a project fails to be fully funded, you are given a chance to reassign your money to another project. It is kind of like eBay for educational giving.

Recently Donors Choose started a new program for bloggers, allowing blogs to set their own fund raising goals. Accordingly, Savage Minds has picked a few worthy projects and we are trying to raise $2,403.54 towards the funding of those projects. You can donate either to the Savage Minds Challenge as a whole, or to the individual project(s) you like best, as you wish. The projects include buying books for a school in Harlem, buying Social Studies books for a rural school, and equipping a video production club at a NY high school with 75% low income students. If we get just $6 a piece from everyone subscribed to our RSS feed we will easily meet our goal. You can track progress in the sidebar on the right.

Thank you!

Back in February Maia Green was a guest blogger here on SM. Her posts were very well received, sparking some good discussion, and so we thought she’d be a great addition to the full time roster.

Please welcome Maia Green, our latest Savage Mind!

I’ve been so busy I completely forgot to wish us a Happy Birthday! On May 15th Savage Minds turned one year old! After one year we have about 436 people visiting the website each day, and 439 people subscribed to our RSS feed. 38 percent of those people visiting our web page are returning visitors. Our Technorati rank is 10,409 (389 links from 158 sites), which isn’t bad when you consider that they track 39.9 million sites.

One thing these statistics show is that Savage Minds is a community – even though many people may never post a comment, we have many regular readers who’ve added us to their bookmarks, blogroll or feed reader. I find myself learning a tremendous amount from the excellent commentary left by our readers and I’m sure that this is one reason why many people read Savage Minds. Moreover, this community extends to the many new anthropology blogs that have been created in the past year.

I’d like to take this occasion to ask our readers for their suggestions. How would you like to see Savage Minds grow over the next twelve months? Are there guest bloggers you’d like to see? Features we should add? Topics or books we should be discussing? Please let us know.

I think everyone agrees that Michael Wesch’s brief stint as a guest blogger here has been a great success. I want to thank Mike for explaining his unique and exciting approach to teaching, and maybe we can have him back here at some point to write about his equally interesting approach to multimedia. For now Mike is busy preparing to go back to Papua New Guinea and so we wish him the best of luck!

Savage Minds had a little downtime recently but everything is all right now. We are still trying to figure out what happened. We are running on a communally managed linux box and it seems most likely someone decided that ‘AnarchoTechnoUtopia’ meant ‘write a page full of ajax that calls the mysql database twice a second.’

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Just a short PSA to let you know that you can now receive updates of new Savage Minds posts via e-mail. Just fill out the form at the bottom of our sidebar on the right. You’ll only get one e-mail per day that there are new posts, no matter how many posts, and when there are no posts you’ll get nothing. Courtesy of FeedBlitz.

And for the RSS aware, I wanted to alert you to a great site which can give you RSS feeds for sites that don’t normally offer feeds. I set one up for Japan Focus and it is working great!

It is my great pleasure to welcome our latest guest blogger, Maia Green. Maia teaches anthropology at the University of Manchester and is the first Africanist to guest blog here on SM. Her original fieldwork was on the impacts of Catholic Christianity in Southern Tanzania, and her volume ” Priests, Witches and Power: Popular Christianity After Mission in Southern Tanzania “:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521621895/sr=8-1/qid=1139853846/ref=sr_1_1/002-8806560-6968065?%5Fencoding=UTF8 appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2003. She’s continued working in Tanzania in more recent work, but now explores a wider range of institutions and processes, including health sector reform, transformations in anti-witchcraft practices and the practice and culture of international development. Her work also has an ‘applied’ dimension, since she has combined academic anthropology with work as a policy analyst and as an adviser to international development agencies. We’re looking forward to seeing Maia think about anthropology’s engagement not just with policy, but with a variety of different perspectives from outside academia. What better topic to cover on a space like a blog? We’re very happy to have Maia with us and very much look forward to reading her columns. Everyone please join me in welcoming Maia!

I am extremely pleased to announce that Thomas Hylland Eriksen has agreed to join us as a regular member of the Savage Minds team. Thomas will graduate from being a guest blogger to a full time Mind and will blog as time permits, which we hope will be quite often. I’ll be updating the site to reflect these changes over the course of the next few weeks to reflect this change. But for now, Please join me in welcoming our newest Mind!

What’s your favorite blog? If you answered Savage Minds, please nominate us for a Bloggie. Even if we don’t rank as your “blog of the year,” perhaps you’ll consider nominating us for best “new” blog, “topical” blog, or “group” blog …

Please join me in welcoming Anru Lee to Savage Minds as a guest blogger. Anru is a colleague of Kerim’s who will be helping us keep up activity in the blog while he is on break. Like Kerim, Anru works on Taiwan. She is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. Her work includes In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (2004) and a volume for which she was co-editor entitled Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (2004). Please welcome Anru to Savage Minds!