Edenbee is a social network working to tackle climate change through better personal choices (with a little encouragement from like-minded souls). It went into an invitational beta* earlier this month. It has all of the essentials of a social network — ways to build a network with friends, ...

Tom Raftery* at lowerfootprint.com notes that soon Dopplr will be adding carbon footprinting to the service. Dopplr is a social networking site for frequent travelers, designed to aid serendipity in travel. Users can tell their friends and colleagues of travel plans, and see who's going to be at ...

From right here in Austin, a fellow named Peter Smith is leveraging the power of Blog to advocate for a new feature in Google Maps, "Bike There." According to Smith, his blog and petition (27,000 signatures as of this writing) were created "to ask Google to help ...

Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), reveals the emissions of power plants and electric utilities across the world. Its database contains information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies. (CARMA is produced and financed by the Confronting Climate Change Initiative at the Center for ...

In the comments to an earlier post, pfly asked a key question that hits on a problem designers and architects of green interfaces will need to consider as we strive to make more useful tools. pfly lives in the Pacific Northwest, where emissions of greenhouse gases due to ...

Today at SXSW Interactive, Jon Lebkowsky moderated a great panel called Visualizing Sustainability. I'll write something up about this panel in the next few days, but meanwhile, here (29 Mb .mp3) is an OK-quality recording made with my laptop. I expect a recording of better quality ...

Thanks to all who have written comments and sent me notes over the past couple of days. Keep ‘em coming! I hope you can hang out and contribute here from time to time. These days, it’s South By Southwest Interactive here in Austin, so this post ...

“Our first green products must be ourselves.” In the summer of 02007, Valarie Casey, current head of software/digital experiences at IDEO, wrote an article in frog design’s bi-monthly newsletter DesignMind called the Designer’s Dilemma. She wrote, Our addiction to sweeping change has hobbled us from seeing the most obvious opportunities for ...

Harry Ward’s prototype for his Orb energy monitor is an example of a simple and attractive device for monitoring real-time energy home use. Dan Lockton writes about the Orb on his blog, Architectures of Control: Design with Intent: Recent design graduate Harry Ward’s Orb energy monitor is especially attractive: a toroidal ...

Along with geognerd's insights in the comments of yesterday's post, I've found some interesting things on the Prius dashboard. First, a Prius enthusiast named John put together a breakdown of the different states of the "Energy Monitor" screen, with side-by-side comparison of the latest design with an earlier one. The ...