Finding the right services to help you save some cash (and headaches) when you travel can be difficult. That's where this roundup comes in. Below you will find a few resources to help you enjoy a better traveling experience whenever you want to get out of the house.
Get your trip on
Campus Visit If you have a high school student who wants to look for colleges outside of your area, go to Campus Visit and get an Amtrak coupon that gives that student 50 percent off his or her rail fare.
From now through December 13, Amtrak is offering students visiting a college campus the opportunity to save half of the cost of their train tickets. Whoever accompanies the student still needs to pay full price.
Campus Visit, a site that's operated by Collegia, takes care of the coupon process for Amtrak. You'll need to input where you're going, what school you're visiting, and whether or not there's an interview scheduled. As long as the application is approved, you'll have a discount coupon you can use when booking an Amtrak trip. It's a highly commendable service.
Campus Visit helps you get some discounts on Amtrak trips.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Hello Travel Hello Travel is the site for those who don't want to deal with booking a trip on their own.
When you first get to Hello Travel, you'll have the option to research different countries around the world. Once you determine where you want to go, Hello Travel lets you create a full travel itinerary on the site. It's then posted on its agents page where travel agents can review your itinerary, get in touch with you, and build you the trip you want.
I wasn't overly impressed by Hello Travel. Although the service is great as a premise, creating an itinerary took much longer than I would have liked. I'm also unsure what kind of agent response each trip will get. I'd prefer to work with an agent I know, but that's just me. Hello Travel is a nice idea, but your mileage will vary.
Hello Travel helps agents find your trip.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Going "green" is quickly becoming an important part of our lives, and Web entrepreneurs have taken notice. A variety of green social networks have cropped up that help us live more sustainably. From reducing your carbon footprint to raising money for environmental causes, these social networks will back up your efforts.
Green social networks
BigCarrot BigCarrot is based on the premise of rewarding people for the good deeds they do. After signing up, you can start creating prizes for people to receive if they achieve a goal that helps the environment. So if you want to donate $20 to the first person to plant 20 trees in your area, you can do it. Users who prove that they have completed such tasks will be rewarded in more ways than one.
Unfortunately, BigCarrot is designed poorly. It's difficult to make your way around the site, and creating a new prize is far more difficult than it should be. But its community is relatively active. Finding friends is easy and winning prizes isn't as difficult as you might think. It's not the best social network in this roundup, but it's worth trying out.
Win some cash for completing green tasks on BigCarrot.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Carbonrally Carbonrally tries to get its users to reduce carbon emissions by working together to achieve that goal. After you sign up for the site, you can create your own challenge. To complete that challenge, you'll need to find team members to help you out. You can also sign up for challenges created by other users.
In either case, you'll communicate with your other team members, discuss what you've done to help achieve that goal, and comment on how to tweak the challenge to make it more meaningful. Luckily, the tasks generally aren't hard to complete--one of the more popular challenges is to alter your air-conditioning level by two degrees for a week.
Carbonrally lets you pick a challenge to help the environment.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Earth Day happens one day a year. But it should spur us to do our best to reduce our impact on the environment for the other 364.
I've picked five sites that provide a framework for how to live your life in a way that's better for the environment. Whether it's car-pooling or simply eating the right foods, you'll find ways to be a more responsible Earthling.
The tools of the trade
When you start using Carbon Diet, you'll be required to input your usage of electricity, natural gas, and vehicle fuel. Simply input your monthly bill amounts and Carbon Diet will do the rest. It then calculates your impact on the environment. You can go back each month to update your usage. As you input more information about your activities, it continuously modifies your impact, displaying graphs and charts to give you a visual outline of what you're doing to the planet.
The best tool on Carbon Diet is its "analysis" feature, which examines your activities and gives you tips toward becoming a more responsible environmentalist. It told me that I need to stop driving so much. I also need to turn the TV off instead of leaving it on for most of the day.
You'll learn a lot from Carbon Diet. It's the best carbon calculator I've seen. Try it out.
When you first go to The Daily Green, you'll probably have trouble finding what you're looking for simply because there's so much content to consult. If you start with the news, you'll find a host of interesting articles and discussions on topics that relate to the green lifestyle. The section is also filled with articles on political news surrounding environmental concerns.
But the most value you'll get from The Daily Green can be found in the site's "Tips and Advice" tab, which shows you ways to save money with green products. The site also provides advice on how to turn your home green so you become a more responsible environmentalist.
If you want to change the way you eat, The Daily Green also has green recipes. All of the dishes contain organic products, like soy milk and basmati rice. The site claims green food is just as delicious as dishes that don't use organic ingredients. I can't corroborate that claim--the recipes didn't sound all that appetizing to me.
The Daily Green is the perfect destination to immerse yourself in the green lifestyle. It makes you a better inhabitant of Earth.
... Read moreAdobe Systems on Monday is set to finally release Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software, which is on the leading edge of a movement to make Web applications act more like traditional desktop applications.
At the company's Engage event in San Francisco on rich Internet application design, executives will announce the availability of AIR 1.0, a free download for Windows and Macintosh.
The New York Times is releasing a beta of an AIR application called ShifD (seen here on an iPhone), which enables users to move content--including Web links, notes, and Web maps--from their desktop computer to a mobile device.
(Credit: New York Times)Also on Monday, Adobe will release Flex 3.0, its application development tool that is now free and open-source. Another development tool, called BlazeDS, for linking Flex applications to back-end business applications, will also be released into open source as planned.
Adobe has been working on AIR for at least two years, when Kevin Lynch, now Adobe's chief technology officer, first publicly spoke about it. The company plans to build AIR versions of many of its Web applications, including photo-imaging application Photoshop Express and Premier Express for editing video, he said.
AIR is software for making Web applications appear like more like desktop programs. Applications can run offline, access data on a person's hard drive, have a desktop icon, and run without the need of a browser.
Developers can use any Web development kit, such as Ajax frameworks, to write applications that will run on AIR or they can use Flex.
These Web-native desktop applications have become an active area of software development--Adobe says that there are over 100 AIR applications--and alternatives to AIR are starting to appear.
The Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox Web browser, launched a project called Prism that brings offline access to Web applications.
Lynch said that AIR is far ahead of what Prism offers but he expects many other platforms that bridge the Web with desktops to emerge.
"We're just getting back the lost treasures of the desktop that we lost when we went to the Web," Lynch said.
He said AIR is not competitive with Microsoft Windows or other operating systems; it's a layer above operating systems that enables people to use Web development techniques and toolkits.
A version of AIR for Linux is expected later this year, he said. Adobe will also create versions that run on mobile devices in the future.
Salesforce.com on Monday will release a free toolkit that will allow developers to write applications on its Force.com hosted development platform using Flex and AIR. The main driver for bringing offline access to Web applications is mobility, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at Salesforce.com.
The New York Times, for example, has created an application with AIR that will enable people to transfer content, such as Web links and maps, from their desktops to mobile devices.
"Our customers want offline access because they have users in mobile contexts like people in hospitals with tablet PCs or retail settings like supermarkets," Gross said. "I think we're going to see a variety of new technologies around how to effectively create offline Web applications."
Adobe made the low-end edition of Flex open source to lure developers who prefer open-source and standards-based software because it does not tie them to one proprietary technology or vendor.
Lynch said that Adobe intends to use open-source software and practices more. He noted that many pieces of its development products are already open-source, including the scripting engine in Flash, which was donated to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in the Firefox Web browser.
Lynch, who was named chief technology officer of Adobe earlier this month, said Adobe's different product teams are changing to embrace rich Internet applications, AIR, and online services to complement its existing products.
"This is a very, very important time in Adobe's history. We've made some big shifts--Postscript, multimedia, the Web," he said. "Rich Internet applications is one of those important transitions."
MSN is going green.
No, I don't mean that it has decided to compost all its Starbucks grounds. And I'm sure it's had recycle bins on more than PCs for a while.
The Microsoft-owned Web site has launched MSN Green, a site for all kinds of environmental news and information. Partners include Conservation International, National Geographic and Grist, an edgy environmental news site.
The initial content is a mixed bag. There was an interesting article on whether extended daylight saving time actually equates to energy savings, but also more iffy concepts, such as a story on how much wood is used for Major League Baseball bats.
Another article, recycled from MSN Health and Fitness, is titled "Are boys an endangered species?" It's overbilled, but an interesting look at how, in a few spots around the world, girl births are outnumbering boy births by 2 to 1.
The goal of Tree-Nation is to plant 8 million trees in sub-Saharan Niger, Africa, the world's poorest nation.
The sunny Web site, based out of Barcelona, Spain, provides social networking for would-be huggers and planters of trees. You can donate between $14 to $106 per tree, and then track and map its growth via GPS and Google Maps.
Working with ecologists in Niger, Tree-Nation will nourish the sprouts of the baobabs, acacias and other species in a nursery before transplanting them outside. Although desertification threatens most of the land in Niger, the trees grow in places that receive enough rainfall to support them. Their roots are meant eventually to reach into underground aquifers, bringing otherwise untapped water to the surface and improving the soil.
Tree-Nation maps each member's tree with a personal message.
Tree-Nation says it has planted 5,000 trees so far, with 74 members responsible for 10 more trees in the past day. Organizers of last week's Web 2.0 Summit planted a tree for each attendee via Tree-Nation.
Tree-Nation is one of many Web-based services built to address global warming, pollution and poverty (see also alternative gifts, Kiva, Google's cleanup weekend, and WiserEarth). Such online tools are changing the face of philanthropy, connecting people with causes in parts of the world where they may never travel, and helping people to find others nearby who share charitable interests.
If you prefer to ditch the tech tools and support trees closer to home, Plant Health Alternatives, based out of New Jersey and exhibiting at last weekend's Bioneers conference, offers classes in "tree whispering." The company's backers claim that you can help failing trees sprout new leaves just by talking to them. How's that for social networking?
(via Treehugger)
At an event in Google's New York offices on Tuesday, the company unveiled a new initiative to make its Google Earth geography software a more accessible tool for nonprofit organizations.
"We're now officially launching a program called Google Earth Outreach," said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps. "Google is stepping up and validating this as a bona fide program that will be staffed in our group."
Google Earth Outreach is now live, and several downloadable layers from the program's inaugural partners--the Global Heritage Fund, Earthwatch and Fair Trade Certified--are now available online.
The new Outreach program came about, according to Google executives, because the company saw the diverse range of ways that the software was being used. "We just completely didn't see the majority of uses for Google Earth," Hanke said. "I think it's blown away everybody on the team."
Nonprofit uses, particularly those pertaining to environmental and humanitarian causes, have proven to be one of the most prolific uses for the software. "We think that the technologies we're developing can be an important catalyst for education, for sharing information, for advocacy, to address global and local issues that affect everyone around the world," said Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs.
Organizations can now apply for grants for the Google Earth Pro program, which normally costs $400 per person per year, as well as technical support for its Keyhole Markup Language, which Hanke described as "the HTML of marking up the Earth. It's pretty easy to use," he added, "but it's a new thing, so it needs to be explained."
The wildly popular, information-heavy Google Earth software has not been without critics who have suggested that perhaps it's unwise to make so much detailed mapping data freely available over the Internet.
In response, Google has repeatedly stressed that the benefits of the Google Earth software outweigh the drawbacks. Over the past year, different organizations have utilized the tool as a way to promote tourism, animate the spread of a hypothetical virus and highlight architectural marvels.
In April, Google formally partnered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to create downloadable map layers to help visualize the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.
It was the success of the Darfur layer, which Schrage described as "an incredibly vivid, powerful way of informing people what is going on in a faraway part of the world," that ultimately convinced the company to devote more Google Earth resources to the nonprofit initiative. "We believe that Google Earth can revolutionize the way people see the world around them," he added.
The announcement featured a videoconference appearance by legendary activist and humanitarian Jane Goodall, whose Jane Goodall Institute has been using Google Earth as a tool for some time now.
"When I began in 1960, my tools consisted of a paper and a pencil," she said to the audience. "That's putting the Jane Goodall Institute into a whole new era, and it's a very, very exciting era...it's certainly helping us hugely with our conservation efforts." Thanks to Google Earth, the Jane Goodall Institute now has a "geoblog" that's "a soap opera for wild chimpanzees."
Hanke said near the end of the event that footage of the conference will later be uploaded to the Google-owned YouTube video-sharing platform.
Many green products and services sprout on Earth Day only to wither the rest of the year. Hoping to maintain the momentum year-round, many geeks are nurturing social-networking sites for the nature-loving set.
RiverWired is among the new green-living hubs.
(Credit: RiverWired is among the new green-living hubs.)Online communities built to help you take baby steps to green your life include Riverwired--where you can keep a blog, upload videos, and mingle with other members--and Be Green Now, a project of Green Mountain Energy. And in addition to the many green car-sharing, rental, and limo services out there, the new GoLoco site might help you find carpooling pals.
Internet services that encourage users to mobilize politically against global warming include Care2, which claims millions of members, 2People, and the WorldCoolers browser plug-in.
Ecologically motivated people already may get together on established social networks MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Tribe, and Meetup to plan tree plantings and the like. As an Aquarian Age alternative, the over-the-top earnestness of Zaadz offers its members, who adopt handles such as Beltane Yogini and Cosmicjaguar, a chance to chew the fat about changing the world. Perhaps a bit more grounded, the Vancouver-based Gusse gets people to plot more livable cities. The Seattle branch of Green Drinks, monthly shoulder-rubbing sessions around the world, has a spiffy new site.
Big nonprofits such as the Nature Conservancy back Care2.
(Credit: Care2)Singles in the (often meat-free) meet market can cut to the chase with green dating sites such as EarthWise, DharmaMatch, YogaConnect, and VeggieDate.
If you're shopping for products rather than life partners, there are a host of choices for finding green goods. Alonovo has the most thorough corporate ratings. The makers of such peer-to-peer company ratings hope to offset the effects of greenwashing, whereby corporations deploy public relations pros to cover up ecological misdeeds.
Alonovo's ratings let you set preferences so you can emphasize, say, a company's recycling and clean energy practices above things you value less. Alonovo lets users make forum posts but it doesn't emphasize user profiles as much as Do the Right Thing, whose 1,599 members also assign values-based ratings to companies. Meanwhile, the Hooze wiki lists 3,000 companies so far but its community features are still under construction.
Another way to accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives.
(Credit: dotherightthing)The Sustainlane community shines in local search in addition to ranking the greenness of U.S. cities yearly and producing the Unsustainables cartoon. I also like the bright interface of FiveLimes, which is still building its databases of businesses in 19 cities. Its social networking features are strong, letting you leave messages for and subscribe to feeds from other users. In addition, Evolvist came out of beta this month. Like Palore, Evolvist's icons indicate organic, fair trade, and other green goodies at a glance.
Of course, you can always network with folks in a virtual world. Global warming even struck the virtual seas and shores of roleplaying game Second Life on Earth Day, where environmental events were held and hundreds of avatars wore green wristbands. (But critics charged that all the hubbub just stressed Second Life's servers, making it more power hungry and less green than usual.)
There's even a green search engine.
Some might see this marriage of neo-greens with Web 2.0 services as a blend of two merely contemporary cliches--er, trends. How can so many overlapping sites possibly be sustainable over the long term? And the more mainstream green issues become, the less green they may look; hence that color's absence in the design of new online magazines such as Sprig. Are we witnessing a green media and multimedia bubble? You could check out the landscape by giving the Green Maven search engine a spin.
(Credit:
CNET)
Even if the people in your life are spoiled, you don't need to turn to coal as a holiday gift. Instead, you can stuff stockings with gift cards that send cash in their honor to a worthy cause.
Changing the Present lets you make charitable contributions in the name of a loved one. Unlike other do-good gifting services (see below), you and your giftees can set up personal profiles that specify favorite causes. Plus, Changing the Present's Stupid Gifts Hall of Shame could be a destination in its own right (although I think fake vomit makes a fine present).
The list of causes runs the gamut from Aging to Women--with the environment, microcredit, and 28 others in between. For example, you could pay $160 to send a laptop to a child on the wrong side of the digital divide, or $15 to clear 10 meters of landmines--then deduct it from your taxes come April. Your loved one gets a recycled paper gift card to show off his or her passive selflessness.
(Credit:
Kiva)
While it connects with hundreds of nonprofit organizations, Changing the Present doesn't yet hook up to GuideStar or another database that would let you add just about any 501(c)3 group to the roster. The site plans to expand its listings, although at this point, for instance, I only found three Illinois organizations.
(Credit:
Heifer)
If ecological cleanup and human rights protections are high on your wish lists, check out these other gifting Web sites:
(Credit:
Seva)
- Alternative Gifts International can send clean water, wheelchairs, and doctors to villages on the other side of the planet.
- Heifer International's gift cards enable you to send honeybees, bunnies, chicks or big mammals like llamas and cows to rural families who need a hand to sustain their way of living.
- Seva means service in Sanskrit. Purchasing Seva gift cards in the name of a friend or family member can help fight child blindness and fund development projects for Indian, Native American, Latin American, and other communities.
- Through Modest Needs, you can offer a no-strings help to U.S. strangers who are having trouble paying paying medical bills and other vital expenses.
- Want to help, but you need the money back? Kiva microloans connect you with people in Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa who are looking to borrow funds for their small businesses.
There are many online calculators for assessing how your lifestyle pollutes the planet; environmental nonprofits sponsor most of them, such as the Earth Day Network's Ecological Footprint Quiz. But learning about the downstream effects of your driving, computing, and shopping can give you guilt to last. Once you feel like the sky is falling, what are you supposed to do about it?
(Credit:
BeGreen.com)
Entrepreneurs bent on spreading sustainability have created Web sites to capitalize on either your guilt, survival instinct, or nobility--whatever the personal motivation may be--by letting you examine the ecological impact of your way of life. Then, you can plunk down matching penance cash to fund clean energy efforts intended to cut down on carbon emissions and combat global warming.
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OffsetMyLife.com)
Among the various carbon pay-up plans, Be Green incorporates social networking. This project of Green Mountain Energy lets you set up a personal page to show off your progress. It quizzes you about your use of energy and transportation, draws a chart of your carbon consumption, and then lets you buy certificates that send cash to wind and solar energy or reforesting projects. My chart (above, right) reflects how I've given up my car this year but have indulged in many plane trips. I'm supposed to pay $195 to enter the pearly gates of carbon neutrality. Be Green remains in beta testing, so it's currently short on user profiles.
Offset My Life beta gets a little more specific. Not only does it calculate carbon emissions from your jet-setting, it even adds up how much your coffee-drinking, TV-watching, Web-surfing, and UPS-shipping habits might contribute to climate change. The Web 2.0 angle is its invitation for you to add your own offsets and get a commission when someone pays up (anyone up for a chocolate offset?). A business edition is in the works.
TerraPass was one of the original carbon offsetting services, which have been winning corporate allies, as seen in Travelocity's partnership with the Conservation Fund. Along the same lines, Sustainable Travel seeks to remedy the blight caused by your flight. The Sioux-owned NativeEnergy helps you to finance wind and solar energy services. Conservation International lets you give offset gift cards, such as $10 to make up for a cross-country road trip.
