If you want to find a good hairdresser in your area, you go online to Yelp.com. A good restaurant: Zagats.com. But where do you go to find a worthy -- and trustworthy -- charity to donate to? Try GreatNonprofits.org, a site that's trying to make it easier for all parties involved in a nonprofit -- volunteers, staff workers, donors and the needy -- rate it as a place to fund.

GreatNonprofits.org was started by Perla Ni, former publisher of Stanford University's Social Innovation Review, after people came to her post-Hurricane Katrina, asking what charities to fund. Ni didn't have a clue -- there was no measurement system online rating charities beyond the income/expense ratios. The charities she did find in New Orleans providing most of the shelter, food and water were small, obscure ones that weren't getting any media or celebrity attention.

That's the case everywhere -- lots of small nonprofits doing good work but lacking the time and money to promote their efforts. GreatNonprofits.org has reviews for about 400 nonprofits to date, most of them in the Bay Area where Ni's organization is based, but there are more than one million charities in the Web site's database waiting to be reviewed, if you have some insight to share.

Just about everyone is talking about something "green" these days. Whether it's green cars, green buildings, or just the green focused lifestyle itself, you can hardly turn around without someone pushing some green concept in your face. It's enough to turn a person, well, green.

I have always tried to maintain an earth friendly outlook myself. For me, that vision has been absorbed in the lifetime pursuit of trying to plant at least enough trees to offset the trees that have been utilized to serve my needs. Of course, I'll never know for sure if I've accomplished my goal. That's one reason why I haven't stopped planting them yet. That's also the reason why a particular blog post, from WeHeartWorld, piqued my interest.

The lively folks at WeHeartWorld, put together a list of ten companies which claim they shall plant at least one tree for each purchase of a specific item, or which facilitate the collection of donations for tree planting purposes. It's an absolutely fantastic effort, and I wish a host of companies would jump on that bandwagon. For instance, the "Plant a Tree for Me" campaign, sponsored by Dell, encourages consumers to make donations for tree planting. The claim is that a $99 donation to the Dell effort could provide a person with a one year carbon offset.