Eleven-month old Ian Herbst needs a liver transplant to live, and a group of Southwest Virginia bloggers, along with a local technology company, is working to raise $100,000 to help save the Radford infant's life.

Modern technology will hopefully be able to help Ian. But it's also getting the word out and the funds in.

Local bloggers -- including a chef, a firefighter, a lawyer and a zoologist -- have picked up the cause, spreading the Herbsts' story through the Internet and reaching more people in less time than any letter-writing or collection-jar campaign could.

They're asking people to recycle their old tech to help Ian, taking donations of dead cell phones and empty printer cartridges, which will be turned into cash ($3 for each phone, and $1 to $3 for each printer cartridge) the Herbsts can use to offset their medical expenses.

Ian suffers from biliary atresia, a comparatively rare children's disorder in which the "drain tube" from the liver is blocked or never formed. If the liver can't dispose of bile, it builds up until the liver fails.

After several tests, including exploratory surgery, the diagnosis was final: The only was to save Ian was with a liver transplant. In October, his parents took Ian to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, where he was put on the transplant list. His mother is also being tested to see if she can become a living donor, in which part of her liver will be given to Ian.

Although the Herbst's health insurance will cover a large portion of the transplant, it doesn't cover everything. When travel, food, lodging and deductibles and co-payments are figured in, said Brett Herbst, the total bill could run to a half-million dollars with the family's portion hitting about $100,000. And that doesn't take into account the anti-rejection drugs Ian will need for the rest of his life.

"As you might imagine, some of these drugs list in the higher tier," Herbst said.

The family, in fact, spent more than $400 for medication last month alone.

"You always count on your insurance to cover the more basic things," he said. "But then you have something like this pop up with a lot of add-on things that insurance won't cover, and it starts to add up pretty quickly."

The Herbsts turned to the Children's Organ Transplant Association, which helps families raise funds for transplants. One way they do this is by collecting old cell phones to be refurbished and sold by Cellular One's Restart program, which pays $1 apiece for them.

Word also spread at Herbst's employer, CCS-Inc in Christiansburg.

That's where Marty Martin, who was consulting for the company, heard about Ian. Martin has a blog, and he posted a note there about the Herbsts, COTA and the phone recycling.

But nothing happened.

Not satisfied with that, Martin decided to spread the word manually. He e-mailed more than a dozen Roanoke-area bloggers with Ian's story and asked them to mention it on their sites and get their readers to donate their old phones.

"Everybody's got that stuff laying around," Martin said. The trick was telling them what to do with it. That's where his wide-ranging blogging contacts came in.

"If everybody can talk to people in their sphere of influence," Martin said, "we ought to be able to get those phones together."

Before the Internet came on the scene, the only way to reach that many people was by mail or word of mouth. But with bloggers reading one another's work, a story like Ian's can spread through the Web incredibly quickly, as each blogger spread the word in his or her corner of the world: chefs, firefighters, techies or what have you.

"It's very strange to me," said John Herndon, who also works at CCS and is helping run the fundraising campaign. "It's like word of mouth that's amplified by the ability to do it through technology."

Herndon's wife, Paige, said she was initially skeptical about being able to raise that much money. "When we first started talking about it, we thought it was going to be so hard," she said, "but I think we can do it."

She knew they wouldn't be able to do it with a bake sale, though.

"It seemed very daunting making 100,000 brownies and selling them for $1 apiece," she said.

But by selling some old technology, and by spreading the word through the new media, they may find it just a bit easier.