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Yesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer's mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse, an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale.

YouTube announced today that in conjunction with CNN the site is now offering an opportunity for users to submit and vote on questions for world leaders to be asked at next week's UN Climate Change Conference.

It's the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out.

It's always amazing to see the lengths people will go to get a photograph of a cheetah, lion or African hunting dog. For some, it never occurs to them that as they stumble out of their car to adjust tripods and flashes, a rare predator is quietly considering eating them. In the circle of life there are many players and while there's no shortage of people, there are unfortunately thousands of endangered animals and plants. Biologists have been looking for ways to determine the most important species based on the number of feeding-related interactions, and surprisingly the Google search algorithm is playing a part.

In January 2009, only 41% of US voters believed that global warming was caused by fossil fuel emissions and other man-made causes. According to a recent Rasmussen national report, the majority of those surveyed over the phone believed that global warming was part of a natural planetary trend that will reverse itself over time. In a panic to sway public perception and environmental decision making, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat recently teamed up with Google to create a Greenhouse Gas Map detailing man's environmental pollution. The map is a color-coded Google Maps mash up that pulls national greenhouse gas inventory and Kyoto Protocol data to display toxic emissions in industrialized nations. The tool was created in anticipation of the UN's Climate Change Conference to be held at the end of this year.

Seventeen years ago today Nirvana released their widely loved album Nevermind and many of us in our 30s today were thinking about college. In between the less accessible era of nihilistic punk music and the post-engagement fluff of the Emo genre, Nirvana heralded a brief period when popular music acknowledged to kids that the world was in bad shape but that we weren't alone in feeling that way.

If it had been available then, I would have used the website GreenReportcard, just launched today by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, in my college hunt.

Earth Day is a time to focus on our environmental progress and think about ways we can help protect the planet. There are a lot of ways you can take action, but one of the easiest ways is to utilize an eco-conscious search engine. In that spirit, we've rounded up fifteen of the best green search engines available on the net today.

Flock, the Mozilla-based "social web browser," which we've profiled in the past here and here, has just announced its new Eco-edition browser just in time for Earth Day. This "green" version of the browser sports a new theme and comes pre-loaded with content that eco-minded folks will enjoy.

The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical information on populations, demographics, trade, commodities, agriculture, employment, the environment, industry, education, tourism, and much more.

Steve Bergman, CIO of Goodwill Industries, recently discussed Goodwill's use of innovative technology for the non-profit and how it drives the business. For example, some of the company's new offerings include their recent launch of an open source web portal for online collaboration and the company's use of geo-spatial mapping tools for their public web site. Meanwhile, internally, his company's technology focus was on improved inventory management and "going green."

Earthmine, the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category winner at tonight's Crunchies, is a company that might seem uninteresting at first glance. When I first saw earthmine I assumed that it was just a Google Maps Streetview knock-off. I was wrong.

This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.

Brighter Planet is a venture backed financial service that uses an innovative web interface to help you track and reduce your carbon footprint. Just like hybrid car owners obsess about the fluctuating MPG displays in their cars, Brighter Planet believes it will be compelling to show people visible progress online concerning their personal ecological impact.

MSN launched its sustainability focused content portal, MSN Green, this week and the announcement looked good enough. MSN will distribute videos and articles on environmental news from a wide variety of partner sites including heavy hitters TreeHugger and Grist.org.

Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnership like this looks like.

MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content.

Today we're a participant in Blog Action Day, a collaborative blogging event in which over 16,000 blogs across the web have marked off a single day to blog about the environment as it relates to their particular niche. In our case, that means web technology, and we've already published our list of the top 35 environmental blogs. That's why it was very apropos of a new web site called BadBuster to email us today about their product.

BadBuster is an online search engine of companies and products that displays information to consumers about whether those companies are environmentally friendly. BadBuster aggregates information on companies from a good number of publicly available databases of environmental ratings, including the Carbon Disclosure Project, Calvert Online, Knowmore.org, and ClimateCounts (who we wrote about in July). BadBuster then condenses the numbers from those sources into a single score for each company.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs dedicated to the environment on the Internet. That's really no surprise given that environmental conservation is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and has become especially pertinent in recent years due to concerns about global warming and mega-hit documentaries like Former US Vice President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

As part of our participation in Blog Action Day, we waded through much of the environmental blogosphere and picked out our favorites (caveat: not all of these are blogs in the strictest sense of the word, but those that aren't are generally still long-tail environmentally focused content sites). It's very likely that we've left a few of your favorites off the list, so please feel free to leave them in the comments below. Presented in no particular order:

Jack Johnson tipped me off to this website. Well, okay, he tipped off a couple of billion other people at the same time. I'm writing this while I watch the web stream of Johnson's set at the Live Earth concert in Sydney, Australia, and right before an energetic rendition of "Staple It Together," he urged the crowd to visit Climate Counts.

Climate Counts, which launched on June 19th, is a non-profit website that rates corporations based on their environmental impact. They use a 22-item scorecard that asks questions like "Is there top-level support for climate change action?" and "Does the company require suppliers to take climate change action or give preference to those that do?" You can read the full list here (PDF). So who's on top? And how do web companies rank?

Yahoo! announced two initiatives today to become, in their words, the "go-to resource for all topics green." That's green as in, environmentally friendly. The first is a competition called Be a Better Planet to find the most eco-friendly city in America. The prize? Carbon credits and a fleet of hybrid taxis. Participants can also earn free compact fluorescent light bulbs for themselves.

More notably, Yahoo! is launching Yahoo! Green, a climate change information portal that includes news, information, and guides to help people cut their carbon emissions and do other things to become more "green."

Yet another social network launched publicly today, but this one called Change.org caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly it's for a great cause - enabling people to form communities around social issues like global warming and Net Neutrality. But it's also a very well designed site that makes excellent use of 'web 2.0' technologies.

The first thing that you notice when you visit the homepage of Change.org is the tagcloud, which draws attention to the top issues in the network. The tagcloud constantly updates, but as of writing 'Empower Women' and 'Recycle' were the top tags. To get a feel for the site I clicked on 'Stop Global Warming', a hot topic currently (pun intended)...