At Burning Man this year, I witnessed one of the most powerful images I've ever seen. (similar to my experience when CivicActions visited Greenpeace International's office in Amsterdam - and we gasped when viewing some of their own pictures from around the world)

This picture, by artist Chris Jordan, "depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes."

Detail at actual size:

When I get asked to comment on a campaign communication or web page, I typically go through the same mantra -- who's the audience, what's the intended outcome, what are the key messages, and how will we measure success?

This morning the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on the battle to keep open fires at San Francisco's Ocean Beach.

"Park Superintendent Brian O'Neill decided about a year ago that enough was enough and banned beach fires. That didn't sit well with the public, which sent more than 3,000 letters and e-mails protesting the decision," via Save Ocean Beach

"The Ocean Beach Foundation took up the cause, joining Burners Without Borders and Surfrider in suggesting that local artists design fire pits."

Ocean Beach Foundation and the original Save Ocean Beach are volunteer project of the CivicActions team.

7th Most Popular Amazon Tag

I ran across this post on O'Reilly about tagging - it referred to our Amazon tagging experiment with our Defective by Design campaign (for the Free Software Foundation). I ended up poking around Amazon and discovered that we are currently the 7th most popular tag now on Amazon - after one alert to our membership.

Free Range Graphics (makers of 'The Meatrix') have produced another great video about the dangers of PVC (aka Vinyl) in the home.

Did you know that PVC, the material used in shower curtains and kids’ toys, is dangerous to our health and our environment?

Free Range produced the video for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ). This new movie is part of a national campaign asking Target Stores to phase out the poison plastic and switch to safer, cost effective alternatives, as other retailers have done.

Complex formatting in mass email is bad. There. I said it. I just don't like it. When I look at a message (and I look at messages in a preview pane that is less than a 3rd of a screen high) and there are complex headers that mimic the website through the use of tables and all the image elements are suppressed by my mail client, it looks ugly. If the point of the message is to... well... to convey a message, I should be able to see/read that message easily. The website mimicry interferes with me getting the message.

So how do you make your email look pretty? If you think it matters, use simple HTML formatting that will be easily interpreted by mail clients. Don't use embeded images images that will be suppressed by the mail client, and link back to your site often throughout the email if you want people to come back to your site.

Speaks for itself. A MUST WATCH!

DefectiveByDesign.org a joint project of teh Free Software Foundation and CivicActions got some digital ink this morning in the Chicago Tribune. Columnist Eric Zorn wrote about Amazon's Unboxed license agreement which FSF ED Peter Brown described as: [A] road map for what all content providers want to have down the line: Their goal is to have so many locks and gatekeepers that every interaction you have with copyrighted material becomes a transaction. Cory Doctorow published a point-by-point analysis of the Unboxed license which represents some of the most restrictive and anti user DRM we have ever seen.

This is why we have declared October 3rd the "Day Against DRM". DBD members around the world will be taking part in both virtual and meat-space actions to raise awareness of the dangers of DRM. Check out the site, join an action, or start your own. The only way DRM will fail is if people know about it (and don't take my word for it, that line is borrowed from a Disney Exec!).

Reports of the death of journalism

may have been exaggerated. Keith Olbermann delivered a presentation Wednesday on his MSNBC Program "Countdown" which transcended modern newscasting completely. It was, unambiguously, Murrow-like. I was transfixed, and if you haven't seen it, please click below and prepare to have your socks knocked off with pure unadulterated elocution. Democrats, wake up. This is the voice of the New American Evolution. Here's a great article about it: Richard Greene's HuffPo blog on the masterful message and the masterful messenger. Waaaaay to go Keith, and kudos to MSNBC for backing their man.