Social media and technology have allowed us to interact like never before. But what if we took the social media and technology we use every day one step further – using it to do good and make an impact?

replyforall – a cause email signature that donates to nonprofit partners like YouthAIDS, Partners In Health, Wildlife Trust, and others – has come up with the “Top 5 Ways to Use Technology for Good”.

5.) Enhance your blog with social action. Now when you blog, you can integrate social actions with the help of Zemanta.com. Zemanta.com recommends images, links, tags, and articles from the Socialactions.com database, making them easy to promote to your readers.

The add-on is currently available as a free download for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and is compatible with major blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad. You can act on the relevant social actions yourself, and then add them to your blog posts with a single click. Test drive Zemanta with their demo to see how you like it, and start spreading awareness to your blog readers about your social actions of choice.

4.) Micro-Volunteer. You’ve got the fancy phone, now do something with it! You can make a difference with the help of companies like The Extraordinaries, by micro-volunteering on your iPhone. Just download their phone app, and you can volunteer with those ten minutes you’re waiting at the doctor’s office. You can help translate a nonprofit page into a foreign language, fact check for reporters, review congressional bills, even tag images for the Smithsonian. While it’s currently available only for the iPhone, the success is great, and they are working to expand to other smartphones. So you can do what you can, when you can, and still make a difference.

3.) Be in the know, and vote with your wallet. KnowMore.org‘s Firefox add-on alerts you to the social and environmental impacts of brands, products, and companies as you browse the internet. Their database contains over 200 profiles of major corporations, and works with major search engines and your web browser.

KnowMore.org creates alerts about the worker rights, human rights, political influence, environmental concerns, and business ethics. Whether you’re searching for a product or service or directly entering a company’s website, KnowMore.org lets you know exactly what they’re up to, with a “Learn More” option if you want the specific areas of concern. Question your goods with the help of KnowMore.org, and vote with your wallet.

2.) Give some temporary CPU time. If you’re a computer geek, chances are you have a bit of CPU horsepower lying around, and there is a research project out there that could use it! Distributed computing projects are used by researchers with huge amounts of data to compile, compute, and analyze. When you donate your CPU idle time, the research is broken into components and some of it is sent to your computer, where it can be worked on quickly and sent back to the main server.

You can donate your computer time by first downloading BOINC, and choosing your project of choice. They range from climate prediction to fighting cancer to advancing artificial intelligence. And you don’t have to do a thing; some of the graphics are pretty awesome, and you can see progress bars, too. You don’t need to have a PhD to do research, or money to donate to researching being done already, you just need a computer.

1.) Donate your email. What better way to make a donation than to have someone else pay for it? replyforall is a free cause email signature that automatically inserts into your outgoing email messages. You have 8 causes to choose from, each of which represents nonprofit partners. You choose your cause, personalize the information to appear in the signature, and hit send. replyforall then shares the advertising revenue with its nonprofit partners allowing you to donate without cash. Supported on both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, replyforall works with email clients Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Outlook 2007. Now you can raise awareness, drive donations for your cause of choice and monitor your impact all by doing what you do everyday – email.