If you’re human, your heart is going out to the people in Haiti in the wake of this week’s earthquake and its awful aftermath. And if you’re reading this, chances are that you’re in a position to chip in to help.

My friend Xavier Lanier of Notebooks.com stepped up to the plate by offering $500 in matching funds for contributions by readers who donate $10 to Haitian recovery via SMS. Several other bloggers joined in with additional matching funds. And I’m adding another $250 to the pot. (It’s a small gesture considering how unimaginably lucky I am–and have I mentioned that the San Andreas Fault runs right by my home?)

Here’s how the Technologizer community can contribute and help ensure that the maximum amount of relief money gets donated, as explained by Xavier:

To donate via SMS, just send a text message to “90999″ with the word “HAITI” in the body. You’ll receive a confirmation message confirming that you want to donate $10 to the Red Cross. Reply with the word “Yes” and you’ll get a $10 charge on your next bill.

Once you’ve made the donation, head to Xavier’s post at Notebooks.com and leave a comment so he can track total donations. Thanks in advance.

Quick reminder: I’m guest-tweeting a Webcast interview with James Surowiecki, author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, today at 1pm ET…

Once again, I’ve been asked to be a guest Tweeter at a Webcast. This one’s an interview with James Surowiecki–author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds–and the subject is “Powering Crowdsourcing: Technology’s Role in the New Way of Working.” It’s been held this Wednesday at 1pm ET. You can get more information, watch the Webcast (either live or in playback form), and Tweet it yourself here.

Hope to see some of you there! Here, incidentally, are the first three Webcasts from the series, all of which I watched and provided color commentary for:

Chris Anderson, editor, Wired
George Halvorson, CEO, Kaiser Permanente
Richard Florida, author, Rise of the Creative Class

More year-ahead musings: I’ve written another guest post for WePC.com, and this one covers six new years resolutions that I’d love to see the PC industry make and keep. They’re entirely selfish, since they all involve stuff I wish every PC had. (Starting with a realistic estimate of the battery life I’m likely to get.)

Check ‘em out–and I’d love to hear any resolutions you care to make on behalf of the tech biz.

Here’s a story I did a year ago, but once again it’s as timely as it’s ever going to be. The Santaland Patents: The Most Festive Inventions of All Time.

Don’t look now, but it’s very nearly 2010. Which makes this a good time to recap the most popular articles we published all year long. Here they are, in case you missed any or would like to revisit them. (And congrats to computer archeologist Benj Edwards, who wrote three of the top four.)

1. 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes: Benj critiques vintage PCs, from the era’s masterpieces (the Apple II) to its forgotten curiosities (Mattel’s misbegotten Aquarius.)

2. Atari’s 1984 Touch Tablet: A Retro Unboxing: Benj finds and buys a shrinkwrapped peripheral from the golden age of home PCs, and documents the experience of unwrapping and installing it.

3. Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3GS: The most detailed comparison of a really old computer and a really neat phone you’re likely to see.

4 15 Classic Game Console Design Mistakes: Benj follows up his PC mistakes piece with one about regrettable game console “features.” (I like the Nintendo Entertainment System’s dreaded “blinkies.”)

5. Hey, Lauren! Is Apple’s 17-Inch MacBook Pro Expensive?: Inspired by a new Windows commercial that paints Macs as pricey and excessively hip, I compare the MacBook Pro to a bunch of Windows laptops, spec by spec and feature by feature.

6. Windows 7: Download It if You Dare: I briefly note that the public beta of Microsoft’s OS is available.

7. Mouse Trouble: 20 Weird Pointing Device Patents: Fascinatingly odd pointing devices, including my favorite: the pointy, palm-threatening pyramid mouse.

8. The Secret Origins of Clippy: A look at Microsoft’s multiple attempts to make computing better through animaed onscreen helpers, from Bob to Clippy to a bunch you never knew about.

9. Game Boy Oddities: In celebration of the iconic Nintendo handheld’s twentieth anniversary, Benj Edwards looks at some of its many offbeat examples–from the Game Boy that dispenses nitrous oxide to the one that went to Iraq and back.

10. The Amazing World of Version Numbers: I ruminate on such essential questions as “What’s the highest version number ever?”

11. Your First Look at Nook: A review of Barnes & Noble’s ambitious, feature-filled, and rough-around-the-edges e-reader.

12. Do You Think This is Sony Ericsson’s Answer to the iPhone? Idou!: First photos of a fancy phone that went on to ship as the Satio.

13. Is Gmail Down? Ask Twitter!: It dawns on me that Twitter is a good place to go for answers to real-time questions. (Hey, this was back in February–that’s a decade or two ago in Twitter time.)

14. The Patents of Steve Jobs: We all know about the gadgets Apple’s co-creator worked on that have changed the world. Here are a few that haven’t, from his staircase to…a tablet computer. (Sounds interesting!)

15. The Press Releases of the Damned: Yes, there was a time when the AOL-Time Warner merger, the release of Palm’s Foleo, and the layoff of Circuit City’s most experienced staffers were trumpeted as good news.

Can we draw any lessons from the above stories? Absolutely: The only thing folks like to read about more than the newest tech products are some of the oldest ones. Thanks to everyone who made these pieces hits–and I’ll let you know if any story we publish in the next two weeks squeaks onto the top fifteen for 2009.

Shameless self-promotion: I’m guest-tweeting another Webcast. This one’s a conversation with Richard Florida, the influential author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?. He’ll be discussing how companies can benefit from artists, musicians, engineers, and scientists–the “creative class.”

The Webcast is today at 2pm ET; you can watch it, view tweets from me and others, and tweet it yourself by going here. Hope to see some of you there…

If you see some very short, no-headline posts from here on out–like this one–don’t panic. I’m experimenting with doing more super-brief posts throughout the day, usually pointing to something interesting elsewhere on the Web. I wanna call your attention to things Technologizer may not cover, and most of these items will be so short that I figure a headline would be superfluous…

Very brief reminder: I’ll be watching and tweeting a Web interview with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson today starting at 2:30pm ET; you can find it here. Drop by if you’re interested in hearing him be interviewed about tech’s role in health care reform…

It’s the holiday season, more or less! So Technologizer is throwing a holiday party–our second, following the T-Tweetup back in May. We’re calling it Tech the Halls, and it’s this Thursday, November 19th in San Francisco. It’s about to “sell out”–but if you’re in the Bay Area and would like to attend, click here for more information and to RSVP. (If it is sold out by the time you read this, contact me. We’ve set aside some tickets for Technologizer readers.)

Tech the Halls is pleased to be sponsored by SugarSync, Marvell, Eastwick Communications, and Marketwire. Hope to see some of you there!

This is way, way overdue: Technologizer’s 5Words now has an RSS feed. Subscribe to it, and you’ll get every installment in your reader. It joins our feed of all Technologizer stories. Both are full-text; neither has ads; both are good ways to have our content come right to you…

I doubt that anyone noticed at the time (including me!), but June 9th was the first anniversary of my first post on Technologizer. It was mostly an announcement that the site was in the works, and I didn’t blog again until July 14th. That’s when things really got underway here, and I’m therefore declaring today as our first birthday.

It’s been the most remarkable and enjoyable year of my career in tech journalism. I thought we could find a critical mass of folks who’d read what we have to say here, and you showed up in droves–around 400,000 folks visited the site last month. (It helped, I think, that the past twelve months have been so interesting, between the iPhone and Android and Chrome and Windows 7 and Twitter and netbooks and all the other topics we ruminate on hereabouts.)

I may have been optimistic, but I didn’t know that PCMag.com would name Technologizer as one of its favorite blogs. Or that my Twitter account would become a cool annex of Technologizer, leading TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner to name me as the #1 techie to follow on Twitter. Or that we’d have the opportunity to throw a great party and help to put on a packed conference. Or that so many people along the way would get what we’re trying to do here. (It all started with support from all the great people at Federated Media, our ad partner, and WordPress, our publishing platform.)

I also didn’t know that Technologizer would be able to assemble such a sterling crew of regular contributors–especially Ed Oswald, David Worthington, Jared Newman, Benj Edwards, and Jason Meserve, plus my PC World compatriot Steve Bass. I’m happy to be outnumbered by them.

Of course, all of us who get a byline here are outnumbered by you, the Technologizer community. And the biggest single thrill of the past year has been watching so many of you participate so actively in the conversation here. Every day, I’m impressed by how thoughtful and knowledgeable you are–and by how constructive the first year of Technologizer comments has been. (Even though registration isn’t required to comment on the site, the quality of the chatter is tremendously high, and I rarely need to break up fights or toss out trolls.) You’re a classy bunch, and I can’t thank you enough.

Technologizer may be twelve times as old as Bing–which is commemorating its first month of existence this week–but we’re still young. And we’re working on a bunch of new stuff we’ll roll out in the next few months which I think you’ll really like. Please continue to hang out with us here–It’s trite to say that the best is yet to come, but in this case it happens to be true.

Mind if ask for a favor? Federated Media, Technologizer’s advertising partner, is conducting a survey to learn more about the demographics of Technologizer’s community. The information we collect won’t be used in any personally-identifiable manner–just to do a better job of targeting ads to the type of folks who visit the site, and therefore making them more relevant and useful. If you haven’t taken the survey yet, could you take a few minutes to do so? Thanks!

Click here to begin the survey.

Has it really been forty-five years this week since Technologizer’s debut? Why, it seems like just a few months. But it’s true–we’ve been covering technology since April, 1964, when CPU speed was measured in picohertz and “satellite radio” was something the CIA used to spy on Castro.

From our humble beginnings to our present-day state–which is arguably even more humble–it’s been a wonderful ride. After the jump, a few mementos and memories.

Continue reading this story…

Do you, our readers, think that Technologizer is resistant to innovation? Organized and efficient? Respectful of authority? Loyal team players?

These were the analyses bestowed upon this blog when I punched the URL into Typealyzer, a free Web tool that reads the text of a blog (though any page will do, really) and determines a personality to match. Apparently, we’re “The Guardians.”

“The Guardians are often happy working in highly structured work environments where everyone knows the rules of the job,” the description reads in part. It also says we “listen to hard facts” (good, as far as journalism goes) and “can have a hard time accepting new or innovative ways of doing things.” For a tech blog? Yikes.

Typealyzer was created by Mattias Östmar of the Swedish media analysis R&D group PRFekt. An article in BusinessWeek says his site uses word frequency analysis to come up with a blog’s personality type, based on the Myers-Briggs model.  Östmar’s goal, according to the site’s manifesto, is to “learn more about what motivates and gives us a sense of meaning on a psychological level.” Aside from learning about each other, Östmar hopes providers of goods and services can better reach their audiences.

I’m not thrilled with the analysis we got, so I plugged my personal blog into Typealyzer, and I’m apparently one of “The Thinkers.” Can’t argue with that. Ed Oswald, judging from his blog, is a “Mechanic.”

And Harry? For some reason, typing in HarryMcCracken.com, no joke, confuses the algorithm. “The only supported languages are English and Swedish,” it says. Sorry boss! (Okay, it’s because the URL redirects to another address. He’s actually a “Doer.”)

Mind if ask for a favor? Federated Media, Technologizer’s advertising partner, is conducting a survey to learn more about the demographics of Technologizer’s community. The information we collect won’t be used in any personally-identifiable manner–just to do a better job of targeting ads to the type of folks who visit the site, and therefore making them more relevant and useful. If you can take the survey, I’d appreciate it.

Click here to begin the survey.

Thanks!