The Obama Campaign has made voter registration easy

When I created a yahoo group in 2003 to encourage discussion on how to make voting and voter registration easier in the U.S., I would have stopped in my tracks if VoteForChange.com [could have] existed. Chris Hughes and the gang in the New Media team of the Obama campaign have hit this one out of the park, and there’s precious time left to get the word out about this site. Now it’s 2008 and we have all kinds of social media and online networking tools to make sure people who would vote for Obama actually do vote.

Obama needs registrations from the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina. Most of these states have an October 6th registration deadline, so if you are to write a blog post or tweet about this site, or perhaps send the link to the people you know in those states, now is the time to do so. Ask them to share this site with the younger people in their lives. Share it on the OSNs like Facebook and MySpace, and share it with those who are on university campuses. Above all, if you’re reading this and you’re one of those Web 2.0 folks who has a vast online network of connections or blog subscribers, please take the time to explain to them that their act of sharing can make a big difference in this election.

I don’t have to take up any more space writing on why this is important. You already know why. Now just please spread the link, and be persuasive:  VoteForChange.com

Thank you.

FreeBirthdayTreats

FreeBirthdayTreats.com is a great example of a niche website that has maximal utility with minimal complication. I call sites like these Nichepedias — they have a very useful database for a very specific action or set of knowledge. The question is, how long do such sites exist before they are gobbled up by the larger compendiums of niche information? What meta-database of niche database sites is currently in greatest use? The birthday treat niche is not important enough for Mahalo and not a google-friendly search; you have to think up a question before you can search for it.

Much is made of social media and its collaborative and informational benefits. I love talking about the wisdom of the crowds and any form of collective intelligence online. But there are times where the objective is too niche for the crowd to care much about it, like where to go for a free birthday ice cream. Then again, what would this website look like if it were turbocharged by the community-at-large? Perhaps we just mash it up with Yelp and Google Maps and call it day?Thanks to Francisco Dao for turning me on to this website; it has renewed my interest in niche sites that compile useful or interesting information we didn’t know we needed and then love to share.

Attention marketing people: Are you starting to wonder what you’ll offer people on their birthday?

Recently I started working at Blankspaces. This is a coworking office environment designed for freelancers and independent professionals who work solo, but who want to do so with others in an office environment. This can be a temporary, or somewhat more permanent solution to the isolation of working from one’s home. It’s a fantastic idea that embodies the best aspects of collaborative work and the potential for cross-pollination of ideas.  The proximity encourages conversations that might only arise seldomly at a cafe or cocktail party, thereby increasing chances of serendipity in one’s business and life.

Blankspaces is the paradigmatic example of the intersection between physical and online space–they have an online community that compliments and augments the offline community. Some of my graduate school work looked at examples of synchronous and asynchronous online/offline collaboration; I’ve been looking for more examples ever since.

Looks like I’ve found an important place, in that this office space provides the perfect research laboratory for the study of how offline and online interaction mutually affect one another, and how online tools in an intimate environment can facilitate friendships and business in physical space. It also uncovers what humans in this culture prefer to do online versus offline, when given the option to choose.

Kudos to Jerome Chang for creating a well-designed office space and in many respects a community center. Unlike Starbucks, Blankspaces has the potential to become a true “third place” that merits a mention to the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who first discussed the necessity of such a place for the social vitality of a given community.

It is not often that I tell people they “must read” something. Bill McKibben eloquently tells us in this article why it is necessary for us to act now to make sure our governments collaborate on climate change agreements in the next 3 years.

I will say this at the outset– I believe him. I believe the scientist Rajendra Pachauri who McKibben quotes as giving humanity a hard deadline of 2012 — if we do not begin actions to lower emissions before that date, we will set off irrecoverable chain reactions in the environment.

The goal is to roll back our CO2 emissions from 385 to 350ppm (parts per million).

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

If ever there were a time for me to proclaim “this is the paradigmatic example of why social and collaborative media are crucial,” now would be it. If you’ve ever asked, “what’s the point of Web 2.0?”, here is the moment to jump on and get involved. Those of us who are using social and collaborative media on the web more than others owe it to humanity to pass this along in whatever form we think will make the most difference. If you blog, please consider writing about 350.org. If you use a social network, consider posting the URL; if you use Flickr then consider joining the Flickr group. McKibben is not an expert on Internet collaboration and new media, but he certainly gets its potential for results:

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

And with that, I will reproduce the article in its entirety after the jump. It’s that important.

The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we’ve managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that, if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: “…if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we’re the Coyote — because “doing everything right” means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That’s possible — we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase “gas tax holiday” has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton’s gambit didn’t sway many voters). And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try. In fact, it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.