A few years back I remember looking at a map of the UK which showed what the country would look like after decades of global warming. I was particularly struck by the concept of Cambridge on sea (the rest of East Anglia had succumbed to the ocean) and the new home for the British parliament in err Muswell Hill.

Since Al Gore’s thoughtful Inconvenient Truth movie global warming does seem to have taken root in the nation’s consciousness. In fact now it almost a social faux pas not to be not doing your bit recycling and buying low energy light bulbs.
 
Which it is why it is all the more odd that there are so few UK based websites dedicated to environmental issues? The only two of any size are Hippy Shopper (disclosure – this is a Shiny blog) which is dedicated to ethical living and New Consumer which operates in a similar vein and is the offspring of the mag of the same name.
 
The Guardian’s green pages hoover up a lot of eyeballs  and of course on the other side of the Pond there’s Treehugger.
 
But where’s the web 2.0 property in which users upload videos of their environmentally friendly homes. Why can’t I find somewhere that shows me how to change an environmentally friendly lightbulb? It seems all the more odd given big business growing obsession with attaining carbon neutral status.
 
I suspect that I won’t have to wait too long for something like that to arrive as we are starting to see a green rush in new media publishing.

Today UK CNET unveiled its green blog Smartplanet, which is edited by ex Stuff man and good mate of Shiny Adam Vaughan. It has some great interviews and smattering of video too. The ‘how big is your carbon footprint?’ vid in which a lot of south Londoners claim not to know what a carbon footprint is, is depressingly revealing.
 
Over in the US hot new start   up nextnewnetworks has Viropop, which mixes traditional blog (can we say that now?) style text with MTV style green news video features. It smacks a little too much of TV people making video for the web, but at least it doesn’t have the worthiness that dogs many environmental sites.
 
Another site worth checking out is Generous, a kind of social networking site for do-gooders which encourages its users to commit to doing one small thing to save the planet. And for ethical motoring there’s autobloggreen from Weblogs Inc or should I say AOL?
 
There are whispers that BBC Worldwide ““ the commercial arm of the BBC ““ will be debuting in the green space shortly and I’ll bet News International has something its sleeve too.
 
From a brand perspective this explosion in green new media provides many interesting opportunities. So far many of the key green blogs have been rather prickly towards brands ““ and in many cases quite rightly so.
 
And while the new sites are much more brand friendly even the older ones are mellowing. The granddaddy of all green blogs, Treehugger appears to be more interested in writing about the commercial aspects of the environment these days. Incidentally, where are all the comments on Treehugger? There used to be some fascinating debates on the site, but now it takes something really controversial to spike an argument.
 
Overall though brands wishing to engage with green audiences via the web need to be realistic. What do they hope to achieve by targeting green sites?  Exactly how watertight are their green credentials? Green blog readers might seem a little cuddlier these days, but I’ll bet that once engaged they still have plenty of bite.
 
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 4:03 pm by Lewis Webb and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.