Five Dollar Heroes' first corporate partnership?

I got a pretty unusual e-mail during the holidays. A new hotel search site, HotelsCombined.com, offered to donate $20 to a charity of my choice if I mentioned them here on the blog.

Well...I admit, I'm not one for product placement or offering endorsements or anything like that. For one, my endorsement probably isn't worth the server space used to store it (roughly $0.000037 or thereabouts). And I'm a firm believer in letting folks make their own decisions about how they spend their time and money.

But it IS $20 to charity. So I ran a few searches on the HotelsCombined.com site, and it works pretty well in aggregating hotel prices from a bunch of other travel sites and finding cheap rates. Plus, you gotta give the company points for a creative and charitable way to market their new site.

So there you have it...Five Dollar Heroes' first corporate partnership. I'm going to ask 'em to throw that $20 at CARE, our weekly charity. And I'll go ahead and ask you to click on over to the HotelsCombined.com site and check it out.

As an added incentive, any readers who are Facebook users can "become a fan" of HotelsCombined.com and the company will throw another $5 at the charity of your choice. Check out the details of this offer here.

Vote on where $2.5 million will get spent

The folks at American Express are having a competition of sorts to determine where $2.5 million should be donated. American Express members nominated 1,190 charitable projects, which were then winnowed down to 25 worthy causes by AmEx's advisory board. Now, everybody -- not just cardholders -- can vote to see which get funded. The top five projects get $500,000 each.

I think it's pretty cool that everyone on the Internet can chime in on this, and I'll be quite interested to see which projects make the top 5. It'll tell us a lot about what problems people think need to be tackled first.

So check it out at membersproject.com. You have to sign in as a guest to vote, but if this speaks to you, go for it. Voting ends Oct. 14, so be sure to chime in!