New Media

Our email filters may not be intuitive enough to completely stop spam from going to our inboxes, but there’s an easy solution to old fashioned paper junk mail. It takes about two minutes and is awfully easy.

Tape a “No Junk Mail” sign on your mailbox.

Done. That’s it. No heavy lifting. It’s awfully intuitive as well.

You won’t receive junk mail. As well, your name is then put on the Consumer Choice database to ensure advertisers reduce their quantity of published materials by the number that was formerly sent to your household. Since up to 98 per cent of junk mail is wasted on people who don’t want it (Red Dot), if enough people opt out, we’ll be reducing our garbage and greenhouse gas emissions significantly.

For more information, check my blog post about the Red Dot campaign and more ways you can reduce the environmental impact of random marketing efforts in my article on the Vancouver-based David Suzuki Foundation’s blog, Junk Mail: Just Stop It With A Red Dot.

In between my writing gigs in Vancouver and out of town, I’ve managed to string together a few blog posts for writers, copywriters and social media marketers, people in need of said experts and people who will read anything you put in front of them. For the target audience mentioned above, here are a few quick links to some hot topics.

Keywords vs. Good Copywriting. Sadly, the ever-more critical requirement for Search Engine Optimization are reducing some websites to mere repositories of really clunky writing. Don’t let this happen to your website.

Brand Image: What’s In A Word? A lot, actually. Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the heads-up on this.

Using Web 2.0 to Save Our Planet. One blog post at a time.

Green Vancouver 2.0. Join my Facebook group and get a high five from David Suzuki.

Vancouver is a leader when it comes to mixing traditional urban landscaping with green space. Heck, Stanley Park may be the third biggest urban park in North America, but we’ve got a lot of parks and green spaces besides that for us to play in.

Metroblogging Vancouver blogger Carol Browne has touched on one of the growing trends in Vancouver of community gardens. Enterprising green thumbs are revitalizing empty, gloomy sections of neighborhoods with urban agriculture. These help make their neighborhood nicer to look at, bring people together and reduce the amount of food Vancouverites have to transport in from outside sources, thus reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Another greening trend in our city has been a rise in the number of rooftop gardens. Sometimes it amounts to nothing more than a grass lawn, which is still better than nothing. But we can also grow food there. When one thinks about all those flat roofs we have downtown and elsewhere that aren’t really producing anything, you realize the potential of really maximizing our urban spaces for urban farming. Increase the supply of uber-locally grown foods and we’ve got a way of cutting our grocery bills and creating a more sustainable society at the same time.

Looking at this classic scene from Jerry Maguire, one sees echoes of our current crisis in Myanmar.

In this scene, Tom Cruise plays “the international community” literally begging to be allowed to administer humanitarian aid and deliver food to the brutalized citizenry of Myanmar. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the role of “Myanmar’s junta”, openly mocking the international community’s earnest desire to help the people. Enjoy.

Who new Tom Cruise operated on so many levels?

On a side note, even New Media platform NowPublic can’t seem to get any news out of Myanmar to fill in the gaps of traditional media. Looks like the generals really have the place locked down.

Laying out the precise reasons why Canadians are involved in Afghanistan, why the progressive left in this country really ought to be getting behind the mission (and why they largely aren’t), and why we ought to be optimistic about solving the larger problems facing humanity, of which the Afghanistan war is merely one aspect. That’s what.

It’s a fun (if lengthy) romp through the thought processes of two leading intellectuals on the issues that matter. Read the Afghanistan dialogue and enjoy.