• by January 5, 2005

People around the world have flocked to humanitarian Web sites in the last week to donate funds to relief organizations aiding victims of the tsunami.

The top charity sites for the week ending January 1 were the American Red Cross, which experienced a 1,285 percent lift in traffic, and the United Nations Children's Fund, up 2,034 percent, according to Hitwise, a provider of online competitive intelligence.

Hitwise finds that news sites and blogs played an influential role in directing people to sites that are set up to accept donations. For example, news sites directly referred 17.1 percent of traffic to humanitarian sites for the week ending Jan. 1, versus 5.5 percent during the prior week, according to Hitwise. However, search engines and directories provided the most referrals at 29 percent, up from 20 percent the week prior.

Hitwise says the blog site Tsunami Help (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com) was the most visited site in the humanitarian category; the site registered an 1,926 percent increase in market share of visits between Dec. 27 and Dec. 31, 2004. Apart from tsunami relief efforts, there may be a wee bit of relief from Stanford Wallace, otherwise known as the "Spam King." Wallace and his companies SmartBot.net Inc. and Seismic Entertainment Productions Inc., have been prohibited from spamming under an agreement with Federal Trade Commission, according to a Reuters report.

The deal means that Wallace can send online ads only to people who visit his company's Web sites until a federal lawsuit against him is resolved. Hopefully that protects the vast majority of us.

The pending case against Wallace alleges that he used spyware to infest computers, crippling them with unsolicited ads and other programs. He's also accused of trying to market programs to fix the spyware infestations. The government alleges the programs don't work.