I wanted to share some really exciting news: we just received confirmation that the White House and the UK Foreign Office will both be joining us in blogging about water on Blog Action Day this Friday.

With more influential blogs set to confirm their participation in the next few days, Blog Action Day 2010 is shaping up to be the biggest single day of action about clean water on record. But to make sure this happens, we need your help.

Every year, after Blog Action Day is over, we get countless emails from bloggers saying “I wish I had known about this day beforehand!” While there’s nothing we can do about those emails after October 15th, we have four days left to get the word out.

Here are three quick things you can do right now to help get the word out about the upcoming event:

1. Register your tubmlr blog.
   
2. Post about Blog Action Day on your tumblr.
   
3. Tell your friends about Blog Action Day.

Do you have other ideas of how we can raise awareness about Blog Action Day? Shoot me an email at maria at change dot org — I’d love to hear your suggestions!

Are you excited about Blog Action Day, but not sure what to post about? Don’t worry! We’ve put together some possible post suggestions to get you thinking:

• Water as a Human Right: In July, the United Nations declared access to clean water and sanitation a human right over objection from the United States. Today, nearly one billion people lack basic access to safe drinking water. More Info »
• Women: In Africa, women are predominantly responsible for collecting water. They walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 40 pounds to gather water for their community, which is usually still not safe to drink. More Info »
• Polluted Oceans: Not only is pollution bad for the environment, it’s also expensive! Death and disease caused by polluted coastal waters costs the global economy $12.8 billion a year. More Info »
• Uninhabitable Rivers: Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life. That’s not surprising considering the fact that 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually. More Info »
• Food Footprint: Do you know the water footprint of your food? For example, 75 liters of water are required to make a glass of beer and 15,500 liters to make a kilogram of beef. More Info »

Do you have any additional ideas? We’d love to hear them!

So you’ve checked out the Blog Action Day site, read up on water and maybe even registered your tumblr blog to participate. But now, you want to do more — but what? Glad you asked! Here are three things you can do right now to get more involved in Blog Action Day 2010:

1. Embed an action widget: Together with US Fund for UNICEF, we’re helping to build a movement of people across the world calling on UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon to accelerate the UN’s work to supply clean, safe drinking water to the world’s poorest populations. You can help this movement by grabbing our interactive action widget and embedding it on your blog, empowering your readers to join the cause.
2. Raise funds for water: We’ve partnered with leading organizations to enable you to raise money to provide clean drinking water to those in need. Among these is charity: water, which allows you to create a fundraising page to raise money to build wells in Africa. You can also directly donate through Water.org, an organization co-founded by Matt Damon. Just $25 provides clean water for a lifetime for one person.
3. Spread the Word: We need your help to spread the word about Blog Action Day 2010 across the web. Take a moment to tell your friends to sign up via email, Facebook and Twitter. The more voices we have involved in the conversation, the greater our collective impact.

Blog Action Day is shaping up to be a really exciting collection of voices from across the web and we hope that many more people can join us. Hope you’ll take a second to join the global conversation about water!

The Blog Action Day blogger community cast thousands of votes in the past month to help decide the topic for this year’s Blog Action day. Many different topics were discussed, but one stood out above the rest. Commending over one-third of the votes, this year’s topic is: water!

We weren’t too surprised by the popularity of the topic. After all, water is essential to our survival and yet nearly one billion people in the world today don’t have access to clean water and 42,000 people die each week from water-borne diseases. And the issue doesn’t stop there – water availability impacts a wide variety of causes  from the environment to women’s rights and from technology to fashion.

Want to learn more? Head on over to our new site to learn more about water and register your tumblr as a participant!

Never heard of Blog Action Day? No problem — here’s a quick rundown of who we are and what we do: Blog Action Day is a single day that unites bloggers all over the world on October 15 to discuss a single, global issue and shift the online conversation for that day. 

Last year, the topic of conversation was climate change, and we heard from diverse voices, ranging to The White House to Mashable to TMZ. This year, we’re looking to get an even more diverse group of people involved across the world to discuss one pressing issue. What is that issue? Stay tuned for an announcement later today!