Green Options

Blogging, social news, peer-to-peer philanthropy, microblogging, social networking, wikis, video sharing, and more. These are the new agents of change.

Back in May, we penned the original 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media. Though most of those first 10 are still relevant, the pace of innovation and advancement on the social web means many more have emerged in the past five months that deserve attention. These are the tools and resources that individuals, corporations, and nonprofits alike can use to communicate, create, and connect on the social web…for social change.

1. Blog It Out: When the die is cast on social media and final judgments are made, blogging will reign supreme as the single greatest force in Web 2.0. Whereas social networking is broad and shallow, blogging is deep and focused. That’s the power behind Blog Action Day, which takes place this Wednesday, October 15th, 2008. It’s a day when bloggers the world over draw attention to a single issue and (hopefully) inspire action. This year’s topic is poverty. And given the current financial crisis, it would seem many bloggers have gotten a head start.

2. Twitter Green Events: In the first 10 Ways, we wrote about the Twitter greenstream, a tagging mechanism that organizes and aggregates Twitter messages (Tweets) about doing green things. What’s evolved since then is the widespread use of unique Twitter tags at events. Most recently, we covered West Coast Green by tagging our Tweets with #wcg08. This helps people at the event to find and meet up with fellow Twitter folk. It also enables those who aren’t attending the event to follow what’s going on and what’s being said in real time. There are a couple ways to do this. One is to follow through Twitter Search (formerly Summize), where you can track keywords and tags. Another is to send a Tweet as follows: “track word: [insert keyword]“. And then you’ll start receiving all Tweets with that tag or keyword directly into your feed.