The economy definitely had an impact on this year’s West Coast Green with less venders but with less money that mean that people just had to get more creative with less moola such as the floating island, show gardens and even the sustainability built Jewish Sukkoth. The usual green rock stars like Eric Corey Freed and Michelle Kaufman made their presences felt with their energetic personalities.

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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.

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So what’s West Coast Green?  Well, when we covered it last year, the event was billed as a “residential building conference and expo.” This year, however, the program will expand to cover the wide range of issues and ideas surrounding green building and development, and the event’s being described as “…a feast of innovations and ideas — an educational smorgasbord designed to widen your vision and stimulate your mind with the latest best practices in green building.” Homebuilders, homeowners, policy wonks and ecopreneurs will all find plenty to keep them engaged.

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I recognize all the benefits of green building, but, as I’ve never owned any kind of building, I’ve never explored a homeowner’s eco-friendly options in much depth, or been to a conference targeted at the industry.

Right from the opening plenary, visionaries (led in prominence by Steve Wozniak) hammered home the feeling that the green building industry is really at a tipping point where a cascade of exponential growth is possible. In this respect, I didn’t feel too out of place. I had heard a similar message at every niche conference I’d been to since starting Green Options. Indeed, the implications of a true transition to a sustainable economy are the same for green pioneers in every industry. If you can provide any product or service in a more environmentally responsible way, and do it as cheap or cheaper than the old way, you are the future.

So what? People have been saying we’re at a tipping point for years… They’re just another kind of salesman trying to drum up business, right? Even if it’s growing, it’s just a bubble, like everything else.

Wrong.

In the many industries that demand consistent natural resource inputs (energy, building, transportation), people have been doing things essentially the same way for a long time. And entrepreneurs are finding solutions that preserve all of the advantages of our unsustainable practices, but with less toxicity, fewer resource inputs, and beautiful outputs. Any industry can optimize a business model for more than one variable–say, profit AND impact on the system as a whole.

Some of the exhibitors did just that.

There were multiple firms that recycle packaging styrofoam into insulated concrete forms. The best one I saw was Apex-Block. Some might object to the use of styrofoam in any "green" building, but my take on it is that we need cost-effective, energy-efficient solutions now, and there’s no shortage of styrofoam being produced and thrown away that none of us can do much about at the moment, so… get real.

There are were also some "breakthroughs" whose green-ness I question: both of the two ethanol-burning fireplace booths I visited were more concerned with emphasizing the simple, sleek, user-friendliness of ethanol as a fireplace fuel than where the fuel came from. I found it ironic that 10 minutes later I was listening to a pre-eminent architecture professor use his Powerpoint to contrast decreasing crop yields from global warming against our policy of sacrificing food for fuel.

It didn’t surprise me too much that my fireplace salesmen friends weren’t up on the significant disadvantages of corn-based ethanol. All day, the fragmentation of the green building professionals I saw at the conference struck me; it seemed a little like most of them didn’t know there were that many others out there. As they grow, WCG and conferences like it continue to help refugees from the old economy find their place in the new.