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iePlexus Social Media News Brief: January 22, 2010

From the social media world continuing to help with the relief efforts in Haiti, to Hilary Clinton stepping in between Google & China, here’s a look at what happened this week in the social media world.

We start with an update on last week’s earthquake in Haiti. We told you last Friday that the social media world helped raise over $8 million to help the victims of the earthquake which struck last Tuesday. As of the last official word, the social media world has raised over $22 million. On Thursday, the Red Cross tweeted that 50% of what has been committed or spent is being used to bring food and water to earthquake survivors, while 30% is helping purchase and distributing relief supplies. Leaving 20% to provide the logistical support and other items needed to keep the relief effort running. In a related note, President Obama and the first lady visited the Red Cross this week to learn about their efforts, and although the President has a Twitter account, he hit the Twitter update button for the first time ever on the Red Cross’s Twitter page. It’s the first time a sitting president has ever tweeted. The social media and internet world plan on raising more money to help the victims tonight. George Clooney, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Sheyrl Crow, Taylor Swift, and Alicia Keys, and somewhere around 100 other stars will entertain viewers on both the web and traditional TV tonight at 8pm ET in a benefit called Help Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief. MTV organized the event and will be broadcast live online on MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Bing, along with close to another dozen sites. MTV, CBS, BET & CNN will all broadcast the event simultaneously. That’s tonight at 8pm Eastern.

-The China Google battle continued this week. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for China to “conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions” that Googleimplied were conducted by the Chinese government against human rights activists. China which censors much of the internet for their users, has censored much of the case within the country. The Chinese Government has said that they doesn’t want the conflict between the nation and Google to be “over interpreted,” and that this incident shouldn’t affect its relationship with the United States. Clinton does not agree. “Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.” She announced that the United States will spend several million dollars on initiatives to protect Internet freedom around the world.

-And finally, the folks over at Creative Cloud released some interesting statistics about how many tweets there really are. They posed all If you printed twitter questions, saying if you printed Twitter the seven billion tweets to date are composed of 104,860,000,000 words, as many as 133,000 copies of the the King James version of the Bible. They also say the paper used to print all the tweets would weigh three and a half million pounds, the equivalent of 82 school buses fully loaded with 84 happily tweeting kids. And finally if you laid the pages end to end, they would stretch 60,763 miles or two and a half times around the earth.

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