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!

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.

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.)

This caught my eye over the weekend – first, because I think it’s a great idea. Second, because it involves Trek, our very own client.

David C. Joyce, president of Ripon College [WI], wants to make a deal with new students this fall: Leave the car at home for the first year and get a free Trek mountain bike. To keep.

The college has purchased 200 Trek bikes to give to a portion of the roughly 300 first-year students that will arrive in the fall. After students sign a honor code, saying that they will not bring a car to campus that year, they get a bike, a helmet, and a bike lock, altogether worth about $400. The program is supported by college donors, trustees, and alumni, and the college got discounts on the equipment from Master Lock and the Trek Bicycle Corporation, which is based 60 miles south of Ripon.

Read the full story here.

Common sense tells us that if we hear good things about a company or a product, we’re more likely to use that product. In the online world, this is now a proven fact. If you’re considering adding online reviews to your site, you might want to take a look at the results of a large-scale study recently conducted by comScore with The Kelsey Group.

• Nearly 1/4 of internet users read reviews before paying for an offline service.

• 97% of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate.

• Reviews generated by fellow consumers had a greater influence than those generated by professionals.

• Consumers are generally willing to pay at least 20% more for a service that received an “Excellent” rating.

Read the full study results here.

We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist . . .
in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

This incredible video is a crash course in understanding how technology affects young people’s lives and development today. Originally a PowerPoint presentation for a 2006 Arapahoe High School faculty meeting in Centennial, Colorado, it went viral last year, getting over 5 million views in 5 months. The number has grown to 10 million+ since then.

This new version is eight minutes of sheer information design genius, bringing to life what would otherwise be a very dry lecture on technology, education and economics.

It’s engaging, frightening and surprising all at once. Well worth the eight minutes.

Behance Network, a national creative network dedicated to inspiring, educating and promoting creative professionals, is featuring HDC’s Trek ‘08 site today.

While this may seem like a mere design-insider-pat-on-the-back, it’s a tremendous honor to be selected as a featured site. Sites are chosen by a small team of professional, well-regarded designers, developers, product designers, and researchers.

Features like this remind us that – while technology and branding are critical – beautiful and effective creative is what makes a site stand apart.

Hearty congratulations to Trek, Dan Herwig (for his work and submitting the site to Behance) and to the rest of the Trek team. Well done, folks. Well done.

More about the Behance team:
We advance the philosophy of Productive Creativity in three ways. First, we seek out and learn from exceptionally product creative people and teams. Second, we synthesize the best practices and insights we learn to make them accessible to the broader creative community. Third, we publish articles, design products, run seminars, gather resources, and plan other initiatives to promote Productive Creativity in the creative community.

The greatest way to spread Productive Creativity is to feature it. We are constantly on the lookout for creative professionals that are “getting it right” and making ideas happen. We feature the work of these productive people and teams, along with their insights, in the Featured Section of Behance.com.

Last week, Morning Edition on NPR included a fascinating story about “whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look.”

To do this, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer studied hotel maids, 67% of whom felt they didn’t exercise, despite walking all day and lugging heavy equipment around.

When told they exceeded the surgeon general’s guidelines for fitness, they started losing weight.

Read or listen to the story here:
NPR | MORNING EDITION | Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect by Alix Spiegel

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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