A 48-hour-old fundraising campaign to help Haiti earthquake victims, done solely through text messages, was already stunning Red Cross officials on Thursday when it hit $3 million. By Friday morning, the tally had more than doubled. (notes: Please still help those victims online and offline)

The campaign, made viral on networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, had raised $8 million by Friday, according to a Twitter message from the White House that was reposted on the Red Cross account. The campaign leads a spate of online efforts that have allowed people to help victims of the devastating quake.

The Red Cross campaign’s tally would be double the $4 million that was donated to all charities by mobile texts in all of 2009, a spokeswoman said.  Abi Weaver, spokeswoman for the Red Cross, confirmed that the mobile giving campaign hit the $7 million mark about 11 p.m. Thursday.  “It’s shattered any record that we’ve seen with mobile giving before,” Wendy Harman, social media manager for the Red Cross, said Thursday.  Friday morning, “Red Cross” was among the 10 most popular topics on Twitter.

Many celebrities, including singer Adam Lambert, actor Ben Stiller, cyclist Lance Armstrong and actress Lindsay Lohan, used their Twitter feeds to plead for earthquake-relief donations.  “Yele haiti now for the disaster,” Lohan tweeted Wednesday, referring to musician Wyclef Jean’s online earthquake relief fund. “Please do all that you can. Please.” Yele Haiti also has launched a text message fundraising campaign.

Armstrong, an active Twitter user with more than 2.3 million followers, posted that his Livestrong Foundation had pledged $250,000 to humanitarian aid groups.

The online classified site Craigslist posted a list of relief organizations, including Medecins sans Frontieres and CARE, along with links via which users can donate.

Multiple Facebook groups related to Haiti had been created by Thursday. One of the largest, Earthquake Haiti, had nearly 170,000 members. Many Facebook users also were changing their status updates to reflect when they’d donated to the Red Cross campaign, thus encouraging their friends to do likewise.

Earlier Thursday, when the Red Cross topped $3 million in text and social media donations — it hit nearly $40 million from all sources by late Thursday — spokesman Jonathan Aiken described it as “a phenomenal number that’s never been achieved before.”

“People text up to three times at 10 bucks a pop,” Aiken said. “You’re talking about roughly 300,000 people actually spontaneously deciding, ‘I can spare $10 for this.’ And that’s remarkable.”

As of late Thursday, more than half of all donations to the Red Cross’s Haiti relief effort had been received online, according to a news release. Harman said the Red Cross has been active on Twitter since the California wildfires of 2007.

The organization also has accounts on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube as well as its own blog, and hosts an online newsroom that provides updates on the organization’s disaster responses. She said the Red Cross has “a pretty robust social media strategy” but that the Haiti response is unprecedented.  “It feels like every person who has a Twitter account has tweeted about it, which is a pretty amazing thing to see,” she said.

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Responding to a highly sophisticated cyberattack on opponents of the Chinese government, Google said Tuesday that it is no longer willing to operate a government-censored search engine in China — and may shut down its Chinese operations altogether.

Google’s stunning announcement could cost the company billions of dollars in lost future revenues, since experts said it’s unlikely the Chinese government — which broadly filters Web content and blocks access to social networking sites such as Facebook — will back down and open up what has been dubbed “the Great Firewall.”

But the search giant’s move may pressure other U.S. Internet companies doing business in China to take a stance on government censorship, and it will almost certainly complicate U.S.-China relations.

In a lengthy posting on its official company blog Tuesday afternoon, Google said it had uncovered a “highly sophisticated and targeted” cyberattack in December originating in China against Google and at least 20 other companies in which hackers attempted to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google said those attacks, combined with Google’s subsequent discovery that the Gmail accounts of dozens of Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China were being “routinely accessed” by unknown third parties, prompted the company to reassess whether the world’s leading search site should continue to operate in the world’s biggest internet market.

Google’s withdrawal from China would come with a major financial cost; its stock was already sinking in after-hours trading Tuesday. While Google is a distant second to the Baidu search engine in China, the rapid growth of the Chinese market means future lost revenues could be enormous.

“Its future value certainly will be huge, just by virtue of the sheer size of the market. The opportunity cost to Google might be many billions of dollars over time if they were to pull out — almost certainly,” said analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “I just think it’s kind of a courageous move of integrity.”

The surprising move could reset Google’s image back to its “Don’t Be Evil” idealism after recently taking on, in the eyes of some, the appearance of an Internet juggernaut seeking to control the world’s information.

“In a world in which we are so used to public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration. It’s amazing,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Berkman center worked with Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and United Kingdom-based mobile phone company Vodafone, as well as human rights organizations and investment groups, to develop a code of conduct for operating in countries that censor Internet activity.

“There is something special about the Google brand and the accommodations it made with the Chinese government to let Google China go forward was almost in friction with that. I sense an almost relief from the company saying, ‘Why do we have to do this?’ ” Zittrain said. “I think the Chinese are going to say, ‘Bye-bye Google.’ But just think about what happens if Google’s engineers set about making information as accessible as possible in China.”

Other analysts, however, said Google’s lack of traction in the Chinese market might have made the decision easier.

Google’s declaration and the accusation of China-based cyberattacks will further complicate U.S.-China relations, said Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration responsible for U.S. relations with China. “It adds to the already difficult agenda we have with China. It’s not going to be easy.

“I presume that Google has pretty strong evidence, otherwise they would not make this public statement and declare battle with Beijing,” Shirk said.

A Google spokeswoman said the company would not reveal the identity of the other companies targeted, but said they included companies from the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

Google does not have evidence that the Chinese government was behind the attacks, she said, but “we do know it originated in China.”

San Jose software-maker Adobe Systems is investigating what appears to be a related incident, which Adobe described in a statement as “a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies.” Adobe said it didn’t appear that any sensitive information had been compromised.

While Google filtered some information on its Chinese Web site, Google.cn, its filtering efforts were far less extensive than those of its China rival, Baidu.com, the country’s largest search engine, said Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on Chinese censorship.

“It certainly has been looking like it has been in a no-win situation,” she said, adding that Google had apparently concluded: “If we are making public declarations about upholding our users’ interests, at some point we have to stand up for our users’ interests.”

Google, which refused to place its servers in China and did not offer services that required it to collect personal data on users, most likely believed the hacking put users at risk, MacKinnon said.

The move, she added, “is an unprecedented situation” and will reverberate in China.

“It certainly sends a message to people in China when the world’s biggest Internet company says China’s policies for controlling the Internet are not acceptable,” she said. “When Google stands up and says things have gone too far in China — people are going to think seriously about that.”

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“Convergence” is too bulky a word to do justice to all the pretty gadgets on display at the Consumer Electronics Show, or to describe how they are increasingly doing more to give consumers the content and connectivity wherever and whenever they demand it.

Here’s what it means, though: Televisions are becoming more like computers. Computers are becoming more mobile like cell phones. And mobile phones are becoming more like both computers and televisions.

The idea of breaking down barriers among these electronic devices has occupied the personal technology industry for years. The latest crop of products at CES may be the first to start making good on this promise.

Consider Toshiba’s flagship product at the show, Cell TV. It’s a 3-D-ready plasma set with a processing power 10 times faster than a standard desktop computer. Cell TV can connect to the Internet and comes with a video camera and microphone for videoconferencing.

Not all of the Internet-connected TV sets hitting the market will have the bells and whistles of Cell TV. But the coming generation of sets, unveiled at CES this week, showed that the line between characteristics of a TV and a PC continues to blur. Skype, the Voice over Internet Protocol service, is available on LG and Panasonic TV sets.

The universe of portable, Web-connected devices also is expanding to encompass not just smart phones, but netbooks and tablets. These computer-like hand-held gadgets made a splash at CES this year, with many manufacturers getting into these product categories for the first time.

And third-party applications, similar to the ones consumers put on their mobile phones, are proliferating for TVs. Samsung announced at CES that it is creating an application store that will serve up content for a variety of gadgets and be open to all developers. Partners including Blockbuster, Netflix, YouTube, Twitter and Picasa have signed up.

“TV can be your DJ, your gaming opponent or your weatherman,” said Tim Baxter, president of Samsung Electronics America.

In consumer technology, trends that seem visionary at the outset often go nowhere. Most consumers probably have forgotten about WebTV, a service in the mid-1990s that connected the TV to the Internet using a special set-top box. Microsoft acquired the company, but the service faded into obsolescence.

This time, advances in Web-connected TVs are encouraging more device manufacturers and content providers to jump onboard, said Ronald Jacoby, senior director and chief architect of Yahoo Connected TV. In other words, it’s not just a handful of companies pushing the trend, which means the chances of the technology’s survival is high.

As an example, Jacoby pointed out a new TV set and remote control by Vizio that is integrated with Connected TV. The remote has a slide-out keyboard, making it much easier to navigate the TV like a PC. Also new this year: A box by Viewsonic that can connect an older TV to the Internet.

These new products represent small steps that will lead to a fundamentally altered concept of TV, Jacoby said. “We’re getting to this ubiquity of platforms and democratization of content,” he said. Rather than a model in which several content providers determine the programming, tech companies are “enabling anyone to go out there and make a widget and get your content out there.”

These changes don’t come without friction, however, and companies disagree on how to deliver on an industry buzz-phrase like “TV everywhere.”

For Vivek Khemka, vice president of customer technology at Dish Network, ” ‘TV everywhere’ should mean you pay one time for your content and take it everywhere.”

Dish Network is launching a service this year that allows customers to watch live and recorded TV on a laptop or Web-enabled mobile phone. They also can use these portable devices to instruct their home set-top box to record programs. This is a similar service to one recently announced by Comcast, which is allowing subscribers to watch TV via a Web browser.

But streaming content on a mobile device is problematic because of bandwidth issues, said Bill Stone, president of Flo TV, which is billed as the only national mobile broadcast network in the country. Many consumers experience network hiccups, which result in a halting feed, he said.

“The premise and the hype is that, ‘Everyone’s got a mobile phone and everyone’s watching TV, so how hard can it be to put them together?’ ” Stone said. “It’s darn hard.”

It may take several more years for consumers to sort through the array of products and services as more choices hit the market. But the industry is moving toward a future where personalized content is available at any time on any device, said John Burke, senior vice president of broadband home solutions in Motorola’s home and networks mobility division.

“I think the scale and magnitude of the shift from analog TV to digital TV to the Internet era of television is an unprecedented evolution that’s happening today,” Burke said.

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