Sustainability Context

Google is helpful in finding popular and potentially useful content and they even have directories, but it's actually takes some time to know what kind of content is on each site.

For those of us who want a quick glance at the latest news and have an overview of the entire news-scape, Alltop is the place. Serial entrepreneur and creator of the site Guy Kawasaki calls Alltop an "online magazine rack."

On it's Green page, Alltop lists the 5 most recent stories from the various news sources it has identified as being green.

The sources include blogs at NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, but include many non-mainstream sources that have emerged because of the Internet. The big stories will get lots of coverage but what's interesting is the news that are lower profile but just as interesting and valuable to know. These come from sites like EcoGeek and the .

Besides, eco and green news, Alltop features everything from Egos to Yoga. There's even a page dedicated to Japan. If you scroll to the bottom of that page, you'll find news aggregated from Japanese language sources!

Clearly, the web is transforming how we get our news. While mainstream sources will undoubtedly have a role to play, blogs and sites that do up-to-the-minute reporting and editorializing are becoming a regular part of journalism, providing valuable information.

Alltop Green is really a dream come true for me. It has saved me the time of sifting through many sites. But the bigger picture is the opportunity for the web to help facilitate sustainable practices. Check out this great article by Max Gladwell, in which he says:

The Internet did for communication what cheap oil did for consumer goods. It brought the world seemingly close together. From the U.S., you could find people in New Zealand or China who shared your same interests and then build a global online community. It was liberating. And now social media has turned this on its head.

Services like Meetup and even the big social networks (Facebook and MySpace) are enabling like-minded people to find one another online with the express purpose of meeting up in the real world. In Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, he recounts how stay-at-home moms are the number-one group on Meetup. He says they are reinventing the social infrastructure of small towns and neighborhoods. Perhaps they’re getting together at the farmers’ market to do some local, organic shopping? on how social media and sustainability can align.