I’d like to continue on the theme of mass connectivity from my previous post, Connectivity equals productivity, a powerful reminder. I also want to pick up on some points Tim Flannery raised about our increasingly global civilisation in his recent keynote address, Innovation in a Changing Climate.

Firstly, let me summarise and paraphrase some of Flannery’s thinking. Flannery maintains that around ten thousand years ago, the first human beings came to settle in a village. At that time, humans lived as clans or families in eternal conflict with each other. Over time we have built larger and larger political and social units. Every step of the way we have been giving away a little more of our earlier autonomy; until today, where we have given birth to a civilisation at the heart of which lies many enormous cities.

Flannery asserts that this process has produced a species in which our interdependence is so great that hardly any of us can now live outside “the great hive”. Flannery points out that if we were cast out of our civilisation today, the great majority of us would perish within weeks. We would be like domestic rabbits in the wild.

Internet map image from The Opte Project

In that sense, we have forged a “power in common”, at the expense of us as individuals. He asserts that this sense of us as a group, as a global civilisation, has become the most precious thing in the world to us. In this way, we have changed ourselves. The only possible future we have is in common, at some level.

And what about that collective future? Flannery asserts that we have run most of the marathon already and the finishing line is now just a few steps ahead of us. The finishing line will consist of the creation of a global human civilisation. We are on the brink of that now. He asks, “do we have it within us to take the few extra steps?”. On a side note, for all you conspiracy theorists out there, no, that doesn’t mean a one world government, but rather some sort of collective global consciousness.

Of course, he is talking about this global civilisation in relation to collectively acting on climate change, which he says is a major roadblock in our way. He maintains that unless we address the issue of climate change this decade, it’s likely we will lose the opportunity to forge that global civilisation. He says that incompetent political systems may well have such an impact on us that we will be unable to proceed, and there will be increasing conflict over diminishing resources.

Connectivity and an emerging global civilisation.

Flannery didn’t mention connectivity, or the internet in this particular talk, but while listening to his words I couldn’t help thinking about this concept of the great human hive in relation to the mass connectivity that has been growing around the world. As well as the big trend towards urbanisation, we also have this trend towards worldwide connectivity. Recently that trend has been increasingly towards wireless connectivity.

Sure, we most certainly have a large digital divide, a gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology, and those with very limited or no access at all. However, the fact remains that we are more able to communicate with each other on a global scale than ever before.

So, the question is: are we on the brink of achieving a truly global civilisation, a sort of global consciousness aided by mass connectivity?

It seemed only fitting that I turned to “the crowd” for an answer. I posed some questions on Twitter and Facebook. Mostly, the answer was a resounding No. Only a couple of people said yes. Interestingly, they were both young people.

“The voices on the net say no.”

“Absolutely not, that’s impossible”

“It is further away than ever”

“Don’t mistake global communications with consciousness”

“The ‘civil’ part of the q. that has a problem. I don’t see a lot of civility going on. Connectivity cuts both ways”

“Religion, greed, and egotism. Those are things what will never go away or be put into a level of control that would allow global civilisation”

“No! Any travel to a two-thirds-of-world country exposes how many billions not on grid and completely ignored by global ‘thought’.”

“no – the same people who are excluded/voiceless locally are now excluded globally. It is a conversation between the rich.”

“Global Civilisation- possibly. Global Conscience – definitly not, people/countries are unique indentities and think differently”

“Sadly, absolutely not. The more info the more divisive are positions. look at the US. but still have hope for next generations”

“Global civilization yes, because for the first time ever we are growing a Gen Y that is connected across the  World.”

“I say YES YES YES! (but maybe cause I’m 24?)”

I think there are some good points there, especially the one about mistaking mass connectivity with consciousness, and taking into account the lack of connectivity in most of the world.

I don’t like to be pessimistic, so I’m going to end with my belief that, global civilisation and global consciousness or not, we can solve some of the humanity’s major problems, including climate change.

By the way, I say it’s humanity’s problem because the Earth will recover eventually from the excessive greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere, even if humans aren’t around when it does. We would take (and are already taking) a lot of other species with us too, and perhaps new ones would emerge later.

What are your thoughts on this global civilisation question? I’m interested to find out.

Technorati Tags: climate change, connectivity, digital divide, environment, globalisation, Tim Flannery, urbanizatiion

From a mainstream communications point of view, I think there’s a growing issue with labeling things “Green”, or having a separate category for Green, as is nearly always the case. It’s true, a few individuals, organisations and businesses have started to move beyond using the Green label but most have not yet.

Mainstream backdrop

A little background is in order first. Over the past few decades, since the sixties and even before that, there has been growing concern around the world over rising pollution levels and increasing environmental degradation in general. In addition, world population is now approaching seven billion people, estimated to reach nine billion around 2050.

Further, since the eighties, mounting scientific evidence of human induced climate change (despite ongoing attempts to discredit the science), has become occasional front page news, and pretty much never out of the news completely. That’s most unlikely to change over the coming years.

We had the situation late last year where governments who agree that climate change exists and is a significant problem, met in Copenhagen to attempt to hash out a binding global agreement to curb global emissions. There was unprecedented media attention on the COP15 event and an enormous amount of pressure from different individuals and groups to achieve a sensible outcome. Needless to say, there was an accord reached but expectations were not met at Copenhagen.

However, it’s not over by a long shot. Global warming is still on the agenda and it’s not going away. As I said on Twitter the other day, I’m 100% convinced that climate change will continue to cause catastrophic damage to the careers of quite a few of the world’s politicians. In Australia (where I live), Kevin Rudd’s position as Prime Minister comes to mind. Among other issues, after publicly staking so much on it, he never really recovered from the failure at Copenhagen and his party’s failure to get a proposed emissions trading scheme signed into law. He was ousted from within the party after a significant drop in the polls. The new leader, Julia Gillard, will face the issue again should she be reelected.

The problem with Green

So given the contemporary situation, what’s my issue with the current proliferation of the “Green” label or category? What’s not to like? What we have appearing all over the place recently are things like Green sections on popular news blogs, sites and in newspapers. We have Green products proliferating, and companies advertising the new Greenness of their products and services, in some cases whether they are actually more environmentally friendly or not.

“Greenwashing” is a term I have less of a problem with by the way, as it seems like a fairly descriptive and accurate term for what has gone on in some cases. BP’s Beyond Petroleum makeover springs to mind as an obvious example, but there are many subtler versions out there. But I digress.

Now, after Copenhagen, we have governments such as the Obama Administration talking up a much needed push towards a new, emerging green economy, and the many green collar jobs that will create. We have technology related blogs and sites introducing Greentech sections. We have Green online social networkers wanting to build sizeable communities and become ‘friends’ with as many people as possible in order to help spread the word and get action on various environmental issues.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all well and good. Green has been useful and has worked well to attract and communicate with a certain percentage of people. I don’t think the fact that there’s a growing awareness and a proliferation of information, ideas and action is bad at all. It’s brilliant! The main reason I now have a issue with the label “Green”, is that we have got to the point where it’s going to marginalise what needs to become very mainstream, ubiquitous in fact.

So what next?

There are many people, perhaps the majority, who do not want to identify as Green and probably never will. Green is a turn off to many. Even though the label Green has become a lot more mainstream, to many it still conjures up images of hippies, “greenies”, “treehuggers” and environmental activists climbing chimneys.

But hey, guess what? A lot of these people would still like to help fix the environment even though they don’t identify with the Green label. Many might switch to clean power given half a chance, rather than use coal-fired power, if it comes at the right price that is. Many might buy an electric car one day that runs on clean energy. They might buy it because the technology is more advanced and it’s more efficient. They might buy more environmentally friendly products, but because they are better quality products, not just because they are greener.  They might buy locally grown food, it might be organic, but they might buy it because it tastes better and is healthier, and because Jamie Oliver says it’s better. But green? No not me.

We will have big businesses who come to realise that investing in clean technologies, efficiencies and more sustainable production processes will in the long run make them even more profitable. It will also give them a leading edge when it comes to how their brand is viewed by the public, their customers, suppliers, shareholders and by the media. They won’t have to shout “we’re Green” and try and make it stick. It’ll become obvious they are making real changes when perhaps others aren’t doing so much.

The issues need to be so mainstream that they need to be integrated within many other information categories: news, technology, politics, business and finance, transport, energy, food, lifestyle, you name it. The majority of people in the world are going to need to change the way we live and work in order to move towards a more sustainable situation. Having a Green category that appeals to only a minority (admittedly growing) percentage of people is simply not going to be enough to do the job.

So I think it’s time to move beyond the Green label. It’s been useful but it’s served its purpose. It is happening to a certain extent but it needs to go much further. Most of the time I think Green in used for want of something better. I think sustainability is not a bad term to use within businesses. I think the term Clean is useful when talking about the clean economy, clean energy and cleantech. Eco can be useful but is a bit like Green in that it has often been used as a greenwashing instrument. Perhaps we need some new terms. Perhaps we don’t need a new label at all. After all, the idea of, and push for a more sustainable future needs to become so mainstream that it doesn’t have a name anymore, it’s just normal. We have a long way to go.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree we need to move beyond “Green”?

Technorati Tags: BP, business, cleantech, communications, cop15, Copenhagen, environment, green, marketing, Obama, population, social media, sustainability

Frankly, in light of the ongoing Gulf oil spill, I’m surprised there aren’t even more negative comments like this appearing on BP station venues on Foursquare. Maybe there are in the US, especially around the Gulf Coast?

And as you’d expect, there are a LOT on Twitter. “Oil Spill” has been in and out of (mostly in)  Trending Topics for over a month. This is what happens in social media when The Gulf Between Greenwashed Image and Reality becomes blatantly obvious.

Technorati Tags: BP, Foursquare, Gulf Coast, LBS, location, location-based, oil spill

I was a big fan of using Tweetie, then I started using the replacement Twitter for iPhone app after Twitter recently bought the app and took it over. There’s no doubt, it’s a great app, there’s much to like about it. You can easily move between multiple Twitter accounts (if you have more than one), access and manage your Twitter Lists, make and save Twitter searches, upload and tweet out images, shorten URLs within posts and more.

So if I like it so much, why have I just made the switch to the new Seesmic for iPhone? Well for me, here are a few of reasons that make it worth it. Keep in mind that I haven’t tried Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or any other similar app, so I’m willing to be convinced if you think any have better features than this.

1. The biggest reason is that it’s not only a Twitter client. You can operate multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook account, and a Ping.fm account from the app. The Ping.fm account access really opens it up to a lot of different network accounts.

2. You can hit the reply or compose button on one account and then choose which account, or multiple accounts, the message will be sent from. This is something you can’t do with Tweetie/Twitter. I find myself wanting to do this quite a lot.

UPDATE: Scratch no. 2. In comments tomtubbs has pointed out that you can actually do this in Tweetie. In all the time I was using Tweetie and Tweetie 2, I never realised you could do this. Doh! Or is this a fairly new feature? It’s still good you can do this in Seesmic too though.

3. You can easily move between accounts or saved searches by swiping the screen sideways. This is a small but nice little time saver when reading messages across accounts.

5. If you have Ping.fm set up, you can select a Ping group to send a particular message from, while the composer is open no less. This is a great feature!

I’ve now set my Ping account up with additional groups, so that each service is a group of one. This means that if I want, I can individually select my Google Buzz, Friendfeed, Flickr or any other account to send messages from, all at the time of composing a message.

Loic from Seesmic has said that they plan on adding Foursquare at a later date too, so hopefully you’ll be able to check in and send messages via Foursquare, as well as seeing your Foursquare activity timeline.

6. You can send tweets to Evernote, which I use on a daily basis. This is a handy feature if you want to read an article later that someone has linked to, for instance.

One downside to the Seesmic for iPhone for me is that you can view your Twitter lists but you can’t manage them from the app. Twitter for iPhone is great for this and I hope Seesmic adds this functionality.

Those are my reasons for using it instead of anything else at this point. Do let me know if you are using something you think is better.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, flickr, linkedin, Ping.fm, Seesmic for iPhone, Twitter, Twitter for iPhone, Twitter search

There has been quite a lot of talk about real-time search during the past year or so. The focus is usually on Twitter Search and what Google is doing, or going to do to counter Twitter’s obvious potential in the area. However, there are other players and the number has been growing. Are they any good? Which is the best one for “right now”?

When asking these questions to myself, I figured the best way to find out was to compare them by searching for a current event that’s popular on the web at the moment. It’ll come as no surprise to many of you that I chose “oil spill”, which I’ve already written a couple of posts on in relation to social media.

My Top Picks

Because this is an extensive post, right up front let me say that my favourites at the moment are OneRiot and Scoopler, but I think which one is better really depends on what you’re looking for when you search.

I like OneRiot because I can go straight to their homepage at any given time and get an good snapshot of what’s trending “right now” across multiple social sites and networks. Some of the most popular stories in multiple categories are featured. This applies to Scoopler too, but you have to dig a little deeper than the homepage to scan more than a handful of popular topics that are trending. Searching on both these sites is quick and easy and produces quality, relevant results. I’d have to say that OneRiot is fast becoming my favourite, both for its design and features.

Having said that, following are 10 different offerings, including OneRiot and Scoopler.

Google Search (News and Updates)

When you do a general Google Search, you get results that by default include ‘Everything’. The most relevant in terms of real-time search are the categories ‘News’ and the new ‘Updates’. As far as real-time search goes, Google News is looking a little slow, although when I searched for “oil spill” there was a quality item at the top of the list from just “10 minutes ago”. Who’s to know how many people are sharing it around social media though? That’s also what I’m interested in.

The Updates section is a little more interesting in terms of real-time search. It provides status updates from just seconds ago that are constantly being fed in as you view. Looking there now, I see updates coming mostly from Twitter, one from Friendfeed and a couple from Facebook. The results in Updates don’t seem to be ranked in any way.

What’s useful for some purposes is the interactive graph you can use to view retrospective updates. You can easily tell when there has been a period of high activity on the search term and view the results from that period of time.

UPDATE: It seems that Google has now added Updates with images, and moved the Updates category right to the top of the list above News, so it’s not hidden in a drop-down menu.

Google Buzz Search

When you do the same search in Google Buzz, it pulls results in from all public Buzz posts. My “oil spill” search pulled up some interesting and relevant posts, but the search is obviously quite limited by just being internal to Buzz. Items that have been posted and commented on recently appear at the top of the results. Consequently, at the top you might see a post from a few days ago that there is still a conversation going on about right now.

At present, the results don’t appear to update in real time, you have to repeat the search to see newer results. Buzz seems useful as an addition to the previous Google search but not comprehensive, and I wouldn’t use it as my “go-to” source.

Twitter Search

Doing a Twitter Search results in tweets arriving in real-time. Or rather, the results are updated at the top of the page with a “x more results since you started searching” message, with a refresh button.

The results you get are most certainly recent, but as many people have commented, there tends to be a lot of noise. You get everything, not matter how trivial. This is  because the tweets and any contained links aren’t ranked in terms of popularity, or importance.

You can of course check Twitter Trending topics for what’s popular at any given time. However, anyone who uses Twitter regularly will know that there tends to be a lot of noise there too. As I write this, the top few trends are justin Jieber, firstdateturnoffs, #theuglyfriend, and #followquestion. These maybe fun for those participating but not incredibly useful for much else. If it’s really big news, it will usually trend though.

There has been talk of Twitter Search soon beginning to crawl the links that people tweet and indexing them, but that remains to be seen. This would add quite a bit of value, not to mention revenue opportunities for Twitter.

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme tends to work well for slightly older items that have been retweeted a lot, and for that reason is quite a good addition to using Twitter Search. Twitter Search doesn’t go into how often content has been retweeted and Trending Topics only just scratches the surface of what is popular at any given time.

You can sort your results by Best Match, Highest Tweets and Age. None of these give any real indication of what’s rising in popularity “right now”, but using the combination of Highest Tweets from the “Last Day” should give a reasonable indication of what is currently popular.

Facebook Search

In terms of real-time search, when doing a search on Facebook you tend to get quite a few results you don’t want. The category “Posts by Everyone” seems the most relevant to the real-time cause. Given the recent outcry about Facebook changing users’ privacy without making it clear, no doubt many people don’t even know some of their posts in this section are searchable, but that’s another story.

You can further filter the results by Status Updates and Wall Posts only, or Links only, or Notes only. On the whole, I’m now surprising myself by saying the results actually appear to be a little more useful than Twitter for the information I’m searching for here.

Friendfeed Search

Last year Friendfeed was bought by Facebook, and I doubt there’s going to be too much more work done on it. It wouldn’t surprise me if it shut down completely at some stage. In terms of visitor numbers, it’s most certainly on the decline. The core team is now at Facebook, and that’s a great thing for Facebook in my opinion.

In terms of search, like Facebook and Google Buzz, your search can include posts from “All Friendfeed users”. At the present time, this tends to give a not too dissimilar result to Google Buzz. Although on the decline, users seem to have left their content feeding into Friendfeed, so there is still quite a big pool of content to search in.

The results are updated in real-time without having to hit any refresh button, and you tend to get results from quite a wide variety of sources which is good. Looking at it now, I’m getting posts and links flowing in from Twitter, Digg, The Huffington Post, New York Times and delicious. It’s not bad at all.

Scoopler

I’ve already stated in the opening that Scoopler is one of my current favourites. When the search results appear, you get a column of constantly updating tweets, or “What people are saying” on the right. The central column contains popular, relevant results from various sources. It’s just the kind of thing I’m looking for without having to sift through a lot of irrelevant noise and repetitive content. You can also break the results down into video, links or images results. The results also tell you how many times each item has been shared and how old it is.

With its mixture of live tweets coming in and other popular content, Scoopler gives me some really solid results for what I’m looking for. It’s presented in a way that’s pretty easy to follow.

One annoying feature is that when you click a link, it pops up as a window inside the existing window, instead of in a new window or browser tab. This is inconvenient if you want to keep a page open and go back to open more results, which often tends to be the case with me. The sharing options are good though.

Scoopler works by looking at what people are sharing across  services such as Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and more. A mix of algorithms, filters and optimizations are applied to continuously deliver the most up-to-date results, and it works well. Top Scoops is well worth a quick look while you’re there, as well as checking out some of the preselected categories.

OneRiot

As stated above, apart from Scoopler, OneRiot is my other favourite right now. I’ve found myself going there more often because it comes up with the results I’m looking for. It looks good, it works well, and it’s fast. The featured content also gets me hooked every time I go there.

As I said at the outset, it’s good because it tells you how many times each item has been shared, when each piece of content was last shared and even who it was first shared by. The sharing options aren’t as extensive as Scoopler but I don’t mind that, I tend to use external methods anyway.

Like Twitter Search, it updates as you search with the message “x new results from the real-time web”, along with a “Show” button. Each search includes a Featured Content section in the right column.

If you’re more interested in quality over real-time views, you can simply switch from “Realtime” to “Pulse” mode, which shows popular recent links about your query.

OneRiot describes itself as “the leading realtime web search engine, and the first network for advertising on the realtime web”. OneRiot says its search results are influenced by what people are sharing on Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Facebook and by their own panel of users. They say their search results reflect the real-time social buzz around any piece of content. This is achieved with OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm – PageRank for the realtime web.

In addition, OneRiot’s self-serve ad marketplace, known as RiotWise, is aiming to help advertisers reach users across a range of real-time web services with relevant and very timely content. I’ll be interested to see how that goes. OneRiot recently posted an item called “How Big is the Realtime Advertising Market?” which makes for interesting reading. They assert that “with over 500 million users and growing fast, the realtime web represents one of the biggest underserved markets in history”

In any case, I’m currently using OneRiot on a regular basis, it’s pretty good.

Collecta

Collecta returns real-time search results from blog posts, blog comments, articles, Twitter, Jaiku, Identica, Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog, YouTube and Ustream. It continues to search as long as you keep the search open, and you can pause the search at will. There are good sharing options on anything you find, and it’s easy to open content in a new window.

It’s easy to switch various types of content on an off, depending on what you are looking for. If you leave them all on, which is the default, the results tend to be dominated by status updates. What I find a little unsatisfactory is the repetition of content in the Stories results, and I didn’t appear to get any results at all for Photos and Videos, which for a search like “oil spill” is not so great. Both Scoopler and OneRiot came up with a range of good image and video content.

Sency (Real-time Location Search)

Finally, here’s a new twist on real-time search. Launched just last month, Sency offers a service where you can search what’s being said “right now” inside of 14 cities in the US. I’m in Australia but I tried a search on “oil spill” to see what was being said in New York City. It would have been good to have been able to search in somewhere like New Orleans, but that’s not a city that’s available yet.

I can definitely see some benefits to being able to search for real-time content by location, and it’ll be interesting to see where this particular area leads, especially with location based services and features gaining momentum at the moment.

In Conclusion

Real-time web search hasn’t been around for long, it’s still early days. I’m sure there will be a lot of development in this space. What I find exciting about it is that I’m finding myself using and liking different search engines other than Google for the first time in the better part of a decade!

It remains to be seen whether Google will make an big effort to take over the space. In the meantime, to my mind, for those who participate in the real-time web on a regular basis, there are some really interesting and useful developments going on. Watch this space!

I have by no means covered all the services out there in terms of real-time search. Have you tried any others? Do you have a favourite from the ones I’ve compared or any other? Do you disagree with my views on any of the above services?

Technorati Tags: Buzz, Collecta, Facebook, Facebook search, Friendfeed, Google, Gulf, News, oil spill, OneRiot, real-time, Scoopler, search, Sency, Tweetmeme, Twitter, Twitter search

Further to my previous post about the Gulf oil spill in relation to social media, Google has launched a Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Crisis Response page. Every day a new Google Earth layer is being produced to track the spread of of the oil spill.

In addition, Google is encouraging people to help by volunteering during the crisis and by donating to the Alabama Coastal Foundation.

Interestingly, they are also attempting to crowdsource news by asking people to upload their own videos of the Gulf oil spill as the situation develops. The videos will automatically be fed back to the crisis page.

There is also a Deepwater Horizon oil spill page developing on Wikipedia, with a substantial and growing number of references. No doubt this will become a significant resource as the disaster continues to unfold.

Technorati Tags: Earth, Google, map, YouTube

There seems no doubt that there’s going to be a large amount of social media content in relation to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If the impact of the ongoing spill turns out to be as bad as many are suggesting, there is sure to be a continuing deluge of images, video clips, blog posts and status updates hitting the social web.

The aftermath of the spill could go on for weeks or months and have a devastating impact on the Gulf Coast. In addition to mainstream media coverage, something tells me that as the oil spill reaches the coast, citizen journalism is going to go into overdrive. With all the clean-up volunteers and people living in the area, no doubt people will tell their own stories with cameras, blogs and via Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Unsurprisingly, right from the outset blogs often categorised as “green” such as Grist (a Technorati Top 100 blog) have been covering the spill. However, soon after it became a lead news story pretty much everywhere, I noticed “Gulf” trending on Twitter as people expressed themselves and passed around links to news updates, images and blog posts.

A couple of days ago NASA released the embedded satellite images of the spill, which very popular blogs such as Mashable and The Huffington Post helped to distribute far and wide on the web. The Huffington Post now has a page dedicated to ongoing coverage of the spill, with well over a thousand comments from readers.

ReadWriteWeb reported that a multimedia website has now been set up by British Petroleum, Transocean, (the oil rig owners), the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Department. The site has a Social Media section which links to a Facebook Page, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

After the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina relief effort, the White House seems keen to communicate via all media that it will do “whatever it takes for as long as it takes to address this crisis”.  Here are a couple of messages that have appeared on Twitter and YouTube in response to the crisis:

This video posted on YouTube was linked from Obama’s Twitter account with the message “From day one, we have launched & coordinated a relentless response to the Gulf Crisis.”

Let’s hope the Obama administration and the companies involved follow through with on their promises to put maximum effort into the clean up. Whatever the case, this is not going to be good.

Technorati Tags: Grist, Gulf Coast, Huffington Post, Mashable, Obama, oil spill, white house

Tens of millions of people watch and share YouTube videos regularly, but there are other places to search for good online video. Here are 3 of my current favs.

TED is also pretty well known. TED lives up to its own claims of hosting “riveting talks by remarkable people” and for finding “ideas worth spreading”. Almost every time I watch a TED Talk I come away feeling inspired, and sometimes just blown away by what people are thinking and doing around the world.

The embedded video is just one that I found in my inbox this week, from the regular email updates I receive from TED. It’s brilliant, and only 3 minutes long: How to start a movement, by Derek Sivers.

Lesser known is FORA.tv, which contains longer, more in depth talks, lectures and interviews on issues related to economics, environment, politics, science, technology and culture. So often these days we only seem to have time for very short, shallow and trivial video content online. This site certainly offers something different and impressive.

On a local level (to me), we have SlowTV, in association with The Monthly magazine here in Australia. @stuarthorrex on Twitter recently reminded me of this content, and after watching James Hansen’s Looking for real solutions after Copenhagen video over the Easter break, I’ve been ranting about it on Twitter ever since. It’s a must watch if you’ve ever wanted to know more about the science of climate change.

So many people seem to have an opinion without actually knowing what top scientists are saying right now. James Hansen is known as the ‘grandfather of climate change’ and is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the science of climate change. This video contains his latest thoughts and findings.

I don’t know about you, but I find that I NEED to make time to find and watch intelligent online video on a regular basis. Funny YouTube video only satisfies a certain part of my mind.

Do you know of any other places to find great online video? Please do share.

It’s the Friday afternoon (in Australia) before the big, yearly event. Earth Hour is 8:30pm, Saturday 27 March.

I’ll be in at the Earth Hour Global office for Earth Hour. See you online for the countdown to the event.

If you feel so inclined, please take a few moments to help spread the word online. You certainly won’t be alone if you send out a few Earth Hour tweets of support :)

Technorati Tags: Earth Hour earthhour

The team at Twitter has been doing some research and has come up with the Top Twitter Trends of 2009. As I worked as social media manager for Earth Hour Global, it’s very pleasing indeed to see that Earth Hour made it into one of the top 10 lists – the News Events list no less!

Back in April, after Earth Hour 2009, I posted briefly about how contagious Earth Hour became online, but it’s amazing to look back now and see it as one of the top topics for the whole year on Twitter.

Thanks to everyone who participated by tweeting about Earth Hour, helping to spread the world online! No doubt many of you have also been tweeting about Copenhagen and #COP15 (which have both been trending) over the past couple of weeks. This is certainly continuing to add to the pressure on governments for action on climate change. More power to you. Rock on!