I first became aware of eco-running this past spring when my urban neighborhood, Riverwest, thawed out, and a winter’s worth of litter emerged from the melting gray snow banks. Every spring the neighborhood has to deal with the garbage that the thousands of people passing through insist on leaving behind. This year, however, we were introduced to a new, simple and ingenious approach to the clean up, courtesy of local resident and endurance runner, Sam Huber – aka The Eco-Runner.

Sam incorporates scooping up litter into his running regimen and is on a mission to convert people to serving their environment by simply picking up the trash in their path. Sam’s grassroots project is getting national attention and attracting new eco-runners (or in my case, eco-walkers) every day.

Visit Eco-Runner to follow Sam’s progress and learn more about how to green your exercise routine.

The web is changing the way musicians are marketed, and the way artists and fans connect. If you are in a band or into music merchandise, you need to check out Tunipop. Currently in beta, Tunipop bills itself as “the online source for discovering all forms of music-related fan gear and interacting with other members.”

Tunipop is not a retail outlet or a source for CDs, DVDs or digital downloads. Rather, Tunipop strives to help fans easily find official sources of available music merchandise like T-shirts and posters. It also helps artists market their fan gear more effectively.

The Merchandise Resources section directly links artists to apparel printing, on-tour merchandise and fan club management services, just to name a few.

The site will soon have about 5,000 pages of content which will mainly consist of artist listings within Tunipop’s Go2Merch directory. Coldplay, Elvis Costello, Alicia Keys and the Beastie Boys are some of the artists represented. Tunipop will eventually grow this directory through user-generated artist listings.

Future site enhancements include a syndicated blog, news, links and feature sections. A mobile version of the site is also in the works.

Tunipop wants to be a player in a $6 billion global market. They appear to have some traction, having beaten MySpace to the punch thanks to MySpace’s decision to delay their music merchandise push until later this year.

Tunipop has an interesting angle worth exploring, so check out the site or watch for it on your favorite band’s MySpace or Facebook page

I ran across this post from James Thomas of the Bicycle Design blog last night. It shows a prototype Trek Stop (think truck stop) that’s currently located outside a bike shop in Madison, WI. Think of the Trek Stop as a vending machine merged with a mechanic’s bike stand wrapped in the styling of a gas station awning. The vending machine sells all of the basics you may need while out and about on your next ride including tubes, patch kits, water bottles, etc. I could see these units being a success in areas where bikes shops aren’t currently found - in dense urban areas, near parks and trails that handle a lot of cycling traffic, or near mass transit hubs. Overall I think it’s a great concept whose time may appropriate with the cost of gasoline on the rise and the renewed interest in bikes as viable commuting options.

Since June first, we’ve had the most rain ever recorded here in Wisconsin. Rivers and streets are overflowing, basements are flooded, and you may have read about the lake that washed away. Here in Milwaukee, the floods we’ve gotten aren’t as devastating as those in Iowa or even a little further west in our state. After suffering mostly wet basements and some mildew, local news coverage is filled with people in boots trying to salvage their soaked possessions.

But what was interesting to me was a throwaway comment one man made on the news. Standing in two feet of water in his basement, he said he was “getting rid of all the stuff he didn’t need anyway.” It made me think of something I’d read recently about a new grass-roots movement, The 100 Thing Challenge.

The premise is this: if you have too much stuff, it can weigh you down. Editing your personal living space down to 100 things will help you let go of the past and move forward. Added benefits are that you can easily find things and you will gain a sense of control over your life. And who wouldn’t want that? Whittling your stuff down to 100 items is a little hardcore, but I think we could all stand to “challenge” our things, one by one, and get rid of what we don’t need.

Of course, I’m not advocating throwing all your stuff away in the trash. Gently used possessions are always welcome at Goodwill, and for more beat up items, try offering them on Freecycle, an online collective of community-based giveaway programs. In fact, I just used Milwaukee Freecycle to give away 12 pairs of ripped jeans to a teacher who will use them for an art project.

I can imagine that many of those people cleaning their basements out may be wishing they’d purged their possessions before the flood. Clear your clutter and concentrate on more important things in your life!

Have you decorated your bike tree and cookies yet? Sung your bike carols? Anxiously waited for the Bike Month peloton to land on your rooftop? I hope so.

With gas prices climbing and environmental concerns increasing, this is a particularly good year to celebrate National Bicycle Month. Started in 1956, National Bike Month is still going strong and growing.

To celebrate, take a minute (well, two) to watch this great little video about one man’s bike commute.

Mat’s Commute from Mat Barlow on Vimeo.

NEW NATIONAL LEGISLATION
Complete Streets Bill Now in House and Senate
(05.05.08) Representative Doris Matsui (D-CA) took an important step on Thursday, May 1 for safer, better designed streets yesterday by introducing the Safe and Complete Streets Act of 2008 (HR 5951) into the U.S. House. Click here to read more.

UPCOMING EVENTS
May 16: Bike to Work Day
Not a centralized national event, so you might want to Google “Bike To Work Day 2008″ for more events in your area.

May 21: Ride of Silence
Ride of Silence will begin in North America and roll across the globe. Cyclists will take to the roads in a silent procession to honor cyclists who have been killed or injured while cycling on public roadways. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, the motoring public often isn’t aware of these rights, and sometimes not aware of the cyclists themselves.

FOR MORE BICYCLE AND CYCLING ADVOCACY INFO
Bikes Belong Coalition
(very nice design, excellent up-to-date content)

League of American Bicyclists
(great advocacy info and contact forms to talk to politicians about cycling rights/issues)

Bicycling Magazine’s This Just In blog

Please feel free to share links and resources that you find helpful. Happy National Bike Month!

Twitter is a truly unique channel which both mimics and complements existing communication media.

Twitter is:
• public and published — like a blog
• conversational and concise — like text messaging
• available via a subscriber model — like RSS or Atom
• a social networking tool — like MySpace or Facebook.

In 140 characters or less, I regularly update my Twitter status via text message — which, in turn, automatically updates my Facebook status. This blog entry will be announced to those following ActiveMinds on Twitter, and simultaneously broadcast via our RSS feed.

Some call it “micro-blogging,” but this label is misunderstood. The Twitter FAQ (and certain Penny Arcade comic strips) give the impression of an extended Facebook status — where the egocentric can broadcast even the most mundane day-to-day occurrences. However, spend just a few minutes watching TwitterVision, and you’ll realize its true nature as a global conversation. As a user, I can be selective about what I’m “hearing,” and I can listen and respond to anyone in the room. More impressively, this conversation is growing rapidly. The Twitter user base has doubled since January to 1 million users, with an impressive 20% daily usage rate.

Others have written about the multitude of marketing opportunities this new medium provides, and its growing popularity does nothing to hamper this. As an information broadcast tool, Twitter has no entry cost for your business and a simple subscription model for your audience. Even better, so long as you provide content that interests this audience, they are captive. Your contribution to the conversation appears as an alert in the desktop clients, iPhones and web browsers of those listening. Compare this to a banner ad or a headline alongside hundreds of other messages in an Inbox or RSS aggregator.

Like any technology, Twitter is no silver bullet. The primacy of content does not change – it’s king, right? If anything, the terse nature of Twitter makes it easier to update, but it also makes it more critical to ensure your 140 characters are well spent.

So, if you’ve got it, why not tweet it?

It’s a shame our leaders can only tell us to “buy, buy, buy” during an economic downturn (slump, recession, whatever you want to call this). As the price of fuel and food climbs upward, they should be urging us to grow Victory Gardens, pitching in to sustain ourselves and reduce our dependence on industrial methods and foreign fuels. When economic recession coincides with a global climate crisis, it makes even more sense.

When you grow even a small portion of your own food, you reap manifold benefits. You get the satisfaction of reducing your dependence on others for your most basic needs. Vegetables are absolutely the best thing you can eat, and when you grow your own they are cheaper, fresher and tastier. You get to control what fertilizer is used (or not) to grow them, and no petroleum is required to truck them to your kitchen. You get to slow down a bit and maybe connect with your neighbor to swap surplus tomatoes or borrow a shovel. Best of all, you get to be out in the fresh air, using your muscles with a real purpose and not just completing sets of reps. It’s the perfect solution: get in shape while improving your diet.

Michael Pollan makes the point more completely in his essay, Why Bother?:

It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape [i.e., driving ourselves to the gym].

I say we take his advice. Let’s skip the health club this summer and work out in our back yards instead.

(Photo: Flickr - Dr. Hemmert)

A recent story out of the UK caught my eye earlier this month – six Maasai tribesmen flew into London to run in the London Marathon. They weren’t just doing it for fun – they were raising funds for clean water resources in their Tanzanian village.

The story itself was fascinating. Wearing their native garb, jewelry and shoes made from car tires, most finished the marathon in under five hours and the group raised over £60,000 (approx. $127,000 USD) for their village.

I was equally impressed, however, by how well the organizers used minimal technology for maximum effect.

The Maasai Marathon site is bare bones, allowing visitors to get more information about the cause, learn more about the runners and donate online to help the Maasai reach their goal. The organizers created an effective offline campaign to generate interest and drive traffic to the site. Without bells and whistles and excessive social media tools, the site is a tool for visitors to get the information they need to make an educated decision about supporting the Maasai’s effort.

As a web designer, it’s always tempting to experiment with the newest and shiniest tools and technology to create a “wow” online experience. However, sometimes simplicity is far more effective than maximum interactivity. In this case, the simple online site a) was more in keeping with the tribesmen themselves (who don’t own computers) and b) kept the focus on the Maasai and what they hoped to accomplish.

The Maasai campaign reminded me how more is not always better. It’s critical to define your goals clearly and choose your tools carefully to reach that goal. If the goal is simple, always consider a simple solution. Great editing skills are every bit as important as flashy solutions.

p.s. If you’re intrigued by the Maasai’s story, you might want to check out the chief’s diary of his week in the UK.

The modern website can do some amazing things for your business. It’s truly evolved from an online brochure into one of the major marketing engines and key drivers for growing your business.

To understand how we got from simple marketing sites to complex modern web applications, let’s take a quick walk down memory lane.

The web, in its 1.0 flavor, offered static content and little interactivity. A business would translate its traditional marketing collateral into a series of web pages (brochureware) that were rarely updated, and communication was generally one to many (broadcast). This technique was cumbersome and costly to maintain. It also didn’t scale well as sites grew.

To combat this problem the web evolved in the late ’90s into its 1.5 flavor. The introduction of web programming languages (such as Perl, ASP and PHP) and database connectivity allowed for dynamic content that was centralized and easily updated via a web administration system versus a developer. The underlying theme here is that content became easier to manage and publish more frequently. Databases allowed for the introduction of two-way communication on websites via message boards and self-help applications like FAQ’s and forms. The first generation of web software applications — such as content management systems (CMS) and Ecommerce — were introduced. Unfortunately, the cost of entry generally prohibited most small to medium companies from adopting them.

The next evolution (or should I say revolution?) on the web was Web 2.0. For the first time sites allowed users to interact with the website and contribute to its content. Search engine optimization (SEO) became a major factor in any redesign — site structures and content were highly optimized to gain higher organic rankings on search engines. Community features were introduced, including blogs, ratings, wikis, comments, threaded discussions and groups. Technologies such as web services, XML and RSS were added to allow content to be decentralized and syndicated. Sites also became a little smarter, offering different ways to navigate content by offering related or suggestive content and filtered navigation.

So, the question is, where are we now? What is the term being used to describe the next generation of web applications? And what technology separates this evolution from its predecessors? The term that the industry has settled on for the next generation website is the “Semantic Web”. Wikipedia has a great summary of this:

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

Google’s iGoogle platform is a great example of this technology. It allows you to create your own, completely customizable web dashboard. You can add custom content tailored to your specific needs via RSS feeds, applications and widgets (from Google and 3rd parties). All of your settings are saved for repeat visits. At its heart the Semantic Web is the introduction of the “smart website.” Content is highly targeted to individual needs and desires and can be accessed via any number of media, including the traditional web browser, PDA or smart phones. It is the dawn of a new and exciting era online — one that empowers us with access to personalized information on demand, helping us keep up-to-date in the increasingly fast-paced lives we lead.

With the press coverage environmental issues are getting these days, we may think of “green” issues as something new — another shiny object the press will pick up and discard at will. The official “environmental movement,” however, has been around for over 40 years now.

Earth Day, as a concept, was first introduced at a Seattle convention in 1969 by Wisconsin’s own Senator Gaylord Nelson, a passionate environmentalist and activist, frustrated with the government’s lack of interest in/attention to environmental issues.

He thought he had found a way to bring the environment into the political limelight when he had persuaded President John F. Kennedy to make a nationwide conservation tour in 1963. Although President Kennedy traveled through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Utah, Washington, and California speaking about the need to conserve natural resources the effort received little media attention. Senator Nelson realized he needed another mechanism for promoting environmental concern and asked himself “how are we going to get the nation to wake up and pay attention to the most important challenge the human species faces on the planet?”

While reading an article on anti-Vietnam War teach-ins that were organized on college campuses across the nation to protest that War, the thought occurred to him: Why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment? Upon returning to Washington, Nelson raised the funds to get Earth Day started. He wrote letters to all 50 governors and the mayors of major cities asking them to issue Earth Day Proclamations. He sent an Earth Day article to all college newspapers explaining the event and one to Scholastic Magazine, which went to most high schools and grade schools. (Source)

The first Earth Day was then held, with great success, on April 22, 1970. In Senator Nelson’s own words:

It was obvious that we were headed for a spectacular success on Earth Day. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of my U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, inquiries, etc. In mid-January, three months before Earth Day, John Gardner, Founder of Common Cause, provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters. I staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes as coordinator of activities.

Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

– excerpted from How The First Earth Day Came About – Senator Gaylord Nelson

As a lot of people are remarking today, every day should be Earth Day. Until it is, however, this particular holiday is simply a good reminder for all of us to think about our relationship with and responsibility to the world around us.

(Many thanks to Flickr user, *L*u*z*a*, for the use of her photo.)