sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

This article was written by Innocent, who is the Chief of Gorilla Monitoring for ICCN in Congo. It’s an account of why and how he became a ranger, and his career so far. He wrote it because his team can’t go out to work, because of the civil war there.

I wanted to post a link myself because it’s an amazing personal account, about something important, and also because it shows the power of online when it’s done with authenticity and honesty. There are a bunch of very brave people in a remote part of the Congo, who are keeping the rest of us in touch with what’s going on in their efforts to save the mountain gorilla (only 700 remain in the wild) and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with a blog. The BBC, CNN, AP, Al Jazeera have all picked up this blog and are reporting. Some have sent camera crews to spend time with the rangers.

You can sign up for their RSS feed here, if you want to stay in touch.

Someone was surely trying to create an “all environmentalists are insane” story when they announced this morning that the UK Government was trying to get us all to switch from fresh to UHT milk. Had this story been true (apparently it isn’t) the outrage would’ve sent greens throughout the UK scurrying into holes, thus ruining Blog Action Day.

Personally, most of my activity in this field is about helping people to do the green thing. Sign-ups for the project are going really well, and it’s exciting to see something I’ve been involved with for almost a year come to such a successful fruition.

Thanks to Slasheco for reminding me (via Facebook, how web 2.0 of us) about blog action day… None of my reminder emails having arrived.

In preparation for Blog Action Day on October 16th, there’s a quiz that tells you what kind of blogger you are. I’m a purist expert socialite, apparently. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not…

Do the green thing! The project that I’ve been helping a little bit, to launch a creative, fun environmental website called http://www.dothegreenthing.com, went live on Thursday. The content and idea are really lovely, and it’s bound to generate lots of interest and action.

Well done Andy and Naresh, and everyone else who’s been working so hard on it. Now it’s up to the rest of us to use the site and take the suggested actions.

Friends of the Earth are holding a video competition in conjunction with Youtube. The voting is now open, and some of the entries are brilliant. Here’s my favourite.

I’m going to join in Blog Action Day, a day when thousands of bloggers will be writing about the environment. The idea is to create as much noise and attention at once as possible. If you have a blog, join in!

020 8568 0022 is the number for Green Tomato. They’re a taxi company that only uses hybrid cars, and I had a ride in one last week. The driver told me he spends 20% of what his non-hybrid colleagues spend on fuel. Toyota can’t tell stories like that because of regulations around fuel consumption calculations, but I think it speaks for itself.

The only downside I can see is that the cars are so quiet when the engine is off that pedestrians don’t hear them coming!

http://www.greentomatocars.com/ is the URL.

Not a spelling mistake, I promise…

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.

http://www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla

This blog has up to date information from the field about the Wildlife Direct charity’s work to protect gorillas and other wildlife in Africa. It’s a brilliant use of blogging to support fund-raising, and to help people see what their money is buying. There’s video too.

Whenever I’m talking to businesses about blogging, it always has to be authentic, factual and based on something real to the organisation, and all of that’s true here.

I received an email today inviting me to help save the tiger by contributing a photo to an online tiger mosaic that WWF are building. When I got to the site and had uploaded my photo (which was of an actual tiger, by the way), I had a look around and it’s amazing how much they have been doing.

They have:

• RSS feeds
• A creative commons licence
• A page explaining how to use their content on your site
• A Digg this link
• An add to del.icio.us link
• Browser toolbars
• A search plug-in for Firefox or IE7
• The tiger mosaic, of course, at http://www.panda.org/how_you_can_help/campaign/endtigertrade/viewer.cfm

They’re also doing some very interesting CRM work, based on participants accumulating points for involving themselves in aggregated actions like emailing a government minister.

I have no idea who’s doing this work for them, but it’s impressive how much they’ve embraced interactivity.

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