For this year's Yahoo! Green Award, Yahoo! looked for a “green mashup” that would inspire people to use social technology to help the environment. After reading through the project submissions in the “Environment” Cause Area of the NetSquared Project Gallery, they chose Live Climate to be this year's Yahoo! Green Award recipient.

Below is an e-interview with it's co-Directors, Nick Handler and Matt Evans (who is also the Founder).

1. How does Live Climate work? Where did the idea come from?

Live Climate is a non-profit, online marketplace for carbon offset projects that do more than just reduce greenhouse gases - they also help fight poverty, create jobs in poor communities and protect local ecosystems. We identify these offset projects and then connect consumers to them through our website - www.liveclimate.org. We provide information and media on the projects that describe how they work and how they positively impact low-income communities and local environments. The consumer can choose the project, or projects that they'd like to support and purchase offsets directly from them.

We have a winner for the Yahoo! Green Award - Live Climate!

Last year, FamilyFarmed.org received the Yahoo! Green Award for its potential to use Web 2.0 tools to benefit the environment by connecting everyday consumers with their local farmers.

This year Yahoo! looked for an innovative “green mashup” that would inspire people to use social technology to help the environment. The winner was chosen from the project submissions included in the “Environment” Cause Area of the Project Gallery on the NetSquared web site.

Here's a statement from the folks at Yahoo! about why they chose Live Climate

"We chose Live Climate because they are using the internet in an incredibly innovative way - connecting people through investments in carbon offsets to relieve poverty AND improve the environment. We are excited to award them $5,000 in Yahoo! Search Marketing keywords to help them inspire people to take action on climate change in a very personal and empowering way. Yahoo! is looking forward to future mashups on this site that will allow carbon offset buyers to connect more directly with project owners in developing countries."

You can learn more about Live Climate on their web site, www.liveclimate.org, and get involved with their work by signing up for their newsletter, or making a donation of time or money.

 

Net Tuesday SF Vlogger, Ross Chapman, posted videos of the presentations from our February and May Net Tuesdays on NetSquared's Blip.tv Channel:

Building Nonprofit Online Community with MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Groups and Upcoming
How Nonprofits & Educators Can Use Wikis

Check 'em out and help us thank Ross for volunteering his time by giving his web site a click.

Last year, NetSquared Featured Project, FamilyFarmed.org received the Yahoo! Green Award for its potential to use Web 2.0 tools to benefit the environment by connecting everyday consumers with their local farmers.

This year, Yahoo! is looking for innovative “green mashups” that will inspire people to use social technology to help the environment.

Yahoo! will review the project submissions included in the “Environment” Cause Area of the NetSquared Project Gallery. Using Yahoo! APIs is a plus, but not necessary. The most innovative green mashup will receive a $5,000 Yahoo! Search Marketing award.

Did you know that reuse groups, like last year's 3rd place NetSquared Innovation Award winner, Freecycle, are the most trafficked on Yahoo! Groups?

The folks at the Yahoo! Developer Network put together a great video about the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. (Thanks guys! ) You can watch it above, or on the Yahoo! Developer Network Theater. You can also subscribe to the Yahoo! Developer Network Theater via iTunes.

Join us at NewsTools2008, April 30-May 3, at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, a three-day conceptual mashup where journalists will work with technologists to create new tools for journalism that matters. The U.S. news media is changing fast. Strip away the legacy platforms, and what remains of journalism that is needed to support participatory democracy and community? At NewsTools2008, we'll ground you on the way news has been manufacturered until now, we'll overview how technology is disrupting the old ways; then we'll ask you to work for up to two days with journalists to build new systems that engage with all the best tools avaiable. The result we seek: The launch of at least a half-dozen new machine-based systems that move journalism outside of the traditional boxes and into our participatory, crowdsource culture.

See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv
or: http://www.newstools2008.org

Registration discounts and stipends availble for day-trippers . . . email for details: Bill Densmore, the media giraffe project at umass amherst
413-458-8001 / densmore@mediagiraffe.org

The next Net Tuesday San Francisco will be February 12 from 6-8 PM at the TechSoup/CompuMentor offices (525 Brannan St. Ste. 300; San Francisco, CA, 94107). Our topic is Building Nonprofit Online Community with MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Groups and Upcoming.

We have three speakers from Yahoo!

Ian Kennedy, a Product Manager for MyBlogLog at Yahoo!, will discuss how nonprofits can use MyBlogLog to build community on their blog or web site.

 

Gordon Strause, a Product Manager for Yahoo! Groups, will talk about how nonprofits and social entrepreneurs are leveraging Yahoo! Groups to build their organizations and movements, and more generally about how nonprofits can best leverage social software.

 

Vince Maniago, Product Manager for Yahoo's social events site, Upcoming, will discuss how individuals and organizations can use Upcoming as a platform to promote their events and ideas.

RSVP on Upcoming or Meetup.

Guayakí Yerba Mate is our beverage sponsor.

Here's a little more info about our speakers:

It takes about 18 seconds to replace a conventional incandescent bulb with a CFL (Compact Fluorescent Light) bulb. According to 18Seconds.org, "If every American swapped just ONE bulb for an ENERGY STAR labeled CFL, it would collectively save more than $8 billion in energy costs, prevent burning 30 billion pounds of coal, and remove 2 million cars worth of greenhouse gas emissions from our atmosphere."

At the beginning of December, nptech blogger extraordinaire, Beth Kanter, created a Network for Good Charity Badge for the Sharing Foundation's education programs, and began a campaign to win a $50,000 matching grant from Yahoo!.  In order to win, the Sharing Foundation had to have the most individal donors give through the Sharing Foundation's Network for Good Charity Badge. In three weeks, they raised $49,537 from 745 donors and won the Yahoo! Matching grant of $50,000.  Second runner up was WorldChanging with 522 donors giving $12,767.  Third runner up was Global Justice with 261 donors giving $14,321.