Popular Science has rounded up the best green tech inventions of 2007. The winner is Nanosolar’s PowerSheet, a remarkable advancement in solar technology. It’s cool for lots of reasons: first, it’s cheap, especially compared to conventional glass panels. Second, it’s made on what amounts to a printing press, so it can be produced in rolls big enough to cover huge surfaces. Check out PopSci.com for the entire article, including a slide show describing PowerSheet’s construction and a video explaining its applications.

2008 will mark the 5-year “blogiversary” of my personal blog. (I can already see myself on the corner, tearfully waving it off to its first day of kindergarten while it glances back at me, lovingly, through the bus window.) Five years, in the blog world, is like five dog years. I’ve seen plenty of blogs come and go in that time. So, if I know nothing else in this crazy life, I know how to keep a blog going…

For those who might be new to blogging, here are a few helpful rules I live by –

1 ) Love what you’re blogging about.
Like your partner or your pet, some days you’ll love your blog dearly. Other days you just won’t have time for it. Some days you’ll even resent it. If your blog is about things you truly care about, your enthusiasm may wax and wane, but you’ll never lose interest in it.

2 ) Know your limits.
If (like mine) your posts are quick little nuggets pointing readers toward other sources, you can easily blog multiple times every day. But if you’re writing longer, essay posts, don’t assume that you can post every day. Set the bar low at first – once a week? biweekly? – to keep from failing. It’s key to find the style that best suits your writing style and time constraints.

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After being neck deep in the Active Insights project for a few weeks, it’s interesting to see just how many of our recommended ideas and strategies are aligned with other prominent sources out in the marketplace.

I was reading Ad Age Online and I saw something that immediately caught my attention. They’ve been running this great column called CMO Strategy, with articles from various editors and reporters about value proposition-rich topics that are meant to appeal specifically to M-level business associates (marketing managers). This past week’s column featured a thought-provoking article by Kimberly Anderson Kelleher entitled, “’Good’ Matters to Consumers.”

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According to Michael Lombardo, author of “the Leadership Machine,” “There is enormous complexity at the leadership level of organizations today.” Lombardo’s work suggests that in addition to setting goals, building strong teams and keeping an eye on cash, today’s CEOs and company presidents need to be more sensitive to diversity issues, learn to think differently and drive innovation, and they need to be more directly involved in managing the challenges of e-commerce.

E-commerce? Wow! Part of me thinks it’s about time. After all, Forrester Research has been projecting continued double-digit growth in e-commerce for years. They go as far as to say that, on average, e-business will represent 10-15% of the typical business’s revenue opportunity within the next three years.

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It’s been a few months since I attended Interbike 2007 in Las Vegas which, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is one of the largest bicycling industry trade shows on the planet. All of the big bicycle manufacturers are there with their new bike line-ups for the coming year and all of the accessory and clothing manufacturers vie for the attention of bike dealers in hopes that they’ll pick up their product lines. It’s a great opportunity to see what’s going on overall in the industry and peep the newest innovations and products before they hit the general consumer. It’s also the perfect place to notice trends that will shape the industry for the next few years. Since the show, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the trends I see in bike design and marketing.

Change in the bike industry traditionally starts on the fringes and then gets picked up by the mainstream market, so it’s fitting to look at some of the smaller players in the field to see where they see opportunity for new products and ideas. Passionate, small players are the ones willing to take risks, so its interesting to see what opportunities they see in the market. The following report is my unscientific, off-the-cuff observations of developing trends in the cycling industry.

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Last month, Facebook introduced a new ad program, Beacon, that tracks users’ activity on external web sites in order to serve up targeted advertising on Facebook. The program also broadcasts to the users’ friends what they’re buying.

Sounds great - especially for advertisers - except that Facebook made everybody opted in by default, requiring them to opt out if they didn’t want to participate. Hunh? Needless to say, it was a privacy hot mess. Naturally, users revolted, speaking up all over the blogosphere and even involving online lefty heavyweight MoveOn.org.

Facebook wisely reversed its op-out policy yesterday and apologized to users. Users must now opt in to the program, and no response is considered opting out. The reversal is a smart move by Facebook - after all, what is a social network without a satisfied community? Unlike ad-riddled MySpace, Facebook has now established itself as not only the fastest riser in the social networking game, but also the one that respects its community.

Read more over at the New York Times.

Here I am introducing Hanson Dodge Creative’s first blog. I started HDC out of a spare bedroom about 25 years ago, the same time that Apple introduced the computer that would change everything. At the time, our mission was simply stated as creating “Design that works.” We’ve believed from the start that great design has to serve a higher cause. For us, that cause has always been defined as serving the best interests of the end-user while making things better for our clients. This simple mission combined with an abundance of talent, passion and hard work, has brought us to where we are today – the infinitely provocative convergence of four major forces: design, business, marketing and technology.

Today I am proud to say, Hanson Dodge Creative is 90 of the most talented people in branding, design and technology. We continue to serve the same mission: to make things better for our clients. As we have grown, so have our ambitions. Beyond our passion for branding, design and technology, we have sharpened our focus to brands that want to reach the Active Lifestyle Consumer. This has enabled us to grow our expertise and provide greater insights and value to our clients, a list that includes many of the leading active lifestyle brands in the world. Serving Trek Bicycle, Horizon Fitness, Old Town Canoes, CycleOps Power and many others has given us a unique vantage point to study this consumer. It is this experience, combined with our time-proven expertise and growing research efforts that establishes HDC as America’s foremost brand experience designers focused on the Active Lifestyle Consumer.

This blog is an effort to turn Hanson Dodge Creative inside out and provide a platform to explore this dynamic and wildly convergent landscape. Thanks for reading. We invite you to share your ideas and explore with us a rapidly evolving world that we find infinitely exciting and challenging.