Like many other people I subscribe to iTunes’ weekly email newsletter to keep up-to-date with the latest releases on the iTunes store.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to see this in my inbox:

It is a promotion for a release of John Lennon cover songs by famous artists aiming to raise awareness of the genocide taking place in the Sudan. I flagged it as a great use of social media (in a pretty loose definition of the term) for a cause.

Today I came across a second article in Wired on how activists have demonstrated Google Earth’s potential as a live-saving humanitarian tool, and then received corporate backing from Google itself in support of the initiative.

It’s great to see Darfur getting this attention and seeing the role these popular online services are playing in supporting the cause.

(As an aside, the folks at Campaign Monitor did a terrific review of HTML email best practices which includes a graphic illustration of why the iTunes newsletter is pretty bad from an accessibility and technical perspective. Good food for thought when designing your newsletter.)

Update: I neglected to mention that I first heard about Darfur and the genocide through blogs - Jim Moore’s to be precise - around June 2004. Shortly after reports started coming some of Jim’s friends started Passion of the present as a way of sharing information and organising a grass roots effort.