According to a new study by Network for Good and True Sense Marketing, 20% of all online giving takes place in the last 48 hours of the year. So get out your laptops and cell phones, it’s time to dig into your cyber pockets and spread some love around.

There are plenty of ways to do it, too. This year’s digital darling, Groupon, has teamed up with crowdfunded microfinance pioneer Kiva to make your philanthropy dollars go further: 40% further. The coupon site is selling $25 donations for $15, with Groupon and its sponsors making up  the $10 difference up to $500,000, Kiva isn’t out a dime. The deal ends, along with 2010, on December 31.

Groupon competitor, Living Social, has a somewhat more complicated offer going with Global Giving, involving percentages of sales, a processing fee, benefiting five charities in Canada, the U.K. and Australia. Today it the last day, so we should know son how well it worked out.

No matter how you send in your dollars (credit card, text, check or “old timey“* coin in a kettle), be sure to use Charity Navigator to make sure an organization is as worthy as its cause.

There are plenty of worthy causes, too. But if you’re stuck, New York Times columnistNicholas Kristof has a few suggestions for lesser-known groups that could use some help (btw, no holiday required—give early, give often…).

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories—a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference—have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page. (Ed. Note: the site was taken down after the TrackerNews Project wrapped) 

It was a wonderful little bubble while it lasted. Getting up before dawn. Dressing in easy-to-peel layers for whatever the day might bring. Walking over to Boynton-McKay, a diner of rare perfection, where the wi-fi was as reliably good as the pancakes (a boon in connectivity-challenged Camden…) Ascending the stairs and more stairs of the town’s famous 19th century Opera House. A few minutes to mingle-navigate among tables of nibble-food before settling down for a morning of things worth thinking about.

But first, a little music. Logan Richardson’s soulful, playful, questioning sax riffs on “America the Beautiful” one day. Zoe Keating’s clear, deeply layered, architecturally precise, transcending cello pieces another. How lovely to start each day by notthinking. Just being. In the moment. Together. Brilliant.

And then it was off and running, from economics to education, urban decay to urban agriculture, environmental catastrophe to conservation hope, design theory to food design, cardboard robots to paper diagnostics, communications to comics, art to dance to music. To, to, to…