So I found this awesome new site called Wordle - where you can create fun word maps out of text! Just enter in the text you want (something you wrote, an excerpt you love etc… ) and you’ll get a fun visual representation.

Above is a TakePart wordle that I made! takepart to make your own wordle today and spread the word on words you love!

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TakePart.com is in its alpha stage. But not for long. We are in the process of building our new BETA site and we would love to hear your thoughts on how you Take Action online.

Your feedback is enormously helpful and to thank you for your help, we are giving away some tunes. The first 250 people to respond to this survey will get 4 free songs from the Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur:

U2 – Instant Karma
Green Day – Working Class Hero
Jack Johnson – Imagine
Snow Patrol - Isolation

Take the survey:

http://poll.takepart.com

takepart and tell us how your take part online.

Related:

Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur

It’s almost X-Files time again - the new trailer is out!

I have always been a big X-Files fan, I even went to the first the screening on opening day of the first movie back in high school. It may not be the most overt show about social action - but one thing is for sure, The X-Files (while being fun, creepy and entertaining) does encourage folks to look beyond the obvious and to seek out the truth. And more often then not, the first step in political action is to look past what’s in front of you to see the reality of a situation. So watch the new trailer below:

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Mother’s Day is this Sunday (don’t forget!), so be sure to take a look at some of the great posts we’ve put together in celebration of moms everywhere! Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

Katie Halper:

Top 10 Mother’s Day E-Cards

Hillary Andrews Will Not Lick Bob Stokes’ Swizzle Stick

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Nicole Hughes:

Top 10 Green Gift Wrap Ideas For Mothers Day

Peak Oil Strip Tease

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Andy Kondrat:

Tornado Devestated Town Rebuilds As Green Model Community

Radiohead Attempts An Eco-Friendly World Tour

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Jon Popham:

Nepalese Art Photography: Rubin Museum of Art

America’s First Wind-Powered City

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Giulia Rozzi:

Women For Women International Celebrates Mothers Day

Even More on the Kentucky Derby

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Gina Telaroli:

Video Blog: The Week In Social Action

The War Now Tomorrow and Forever

The Indypendent has a nice article up about the difference between the MayDay protests in 2006 and the response in 2008:

On May 1, 2006, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in scores of towns and cities to demand amnesty for undocumented workers and an end to punitive anti-immigrant legislation.

Today, two years later, there were small, scattered protests across the country. In New York, 500-1,000 people marched where 100,000 plus marched two years ago. In Los Angeles, the turnout was 5,000 where two years ago there were a half-million or more demonstrators.

The difference, of course, is that the Bush administration’s response to the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006 has been to launch workplace raids across the country, netting hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and driving the rest back into the shadows. [The Indypendent]

And it seems that fear is very real as an even scarier article in the New York Times features a report called “Detainee Deaths 2004-November 2007.” It’s the government’s fullest account to date of deaths in immigration detention.

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Here’s a brand new video blog try - please watch and let us know what you think!

If you’re anything like me, you’re pretty overwhelmed with what seems like an infinite amount of social networking sites. I mean wouldn’t it be much nicer to see all these “friends” rather than clicking through the profiles of all these “friends?” Well in the meantime social networking sites offer a way to stay connected with old friend while also providing opportunity for artists, activists and entrepreneurs to mingle. Social network sites allow users to promote their work, find people to work with, and create communities that share interests, goals, and ideas.

Different social networking sites are geared toward different goals, from sharing good books to sharing plans to save the world to simply just making new friends. Here are just 10 of the hundreds of social networking sites available:

1) MySpace: Probably the most popular of the networking sites, MySpace offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. MySpace has greatly helped promote new bands, comedians, and social issues. The site is so popular it’s even become a verb aka “hey totally MySpace me!”

2) Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and

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