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There was an interesting post on the Celcias blog about a huge surge in awareness of climate change a while back. I’ve been wondering whether this is a trend that will continue.

I’ve always been interested in how ideas spread, especially important ideas. And I’ve always been interested in ways of tracking how widely an idea is spreading over time.

It’s only a certain type of person who blogs so using the blogsphere as a measure of general consciousness is flawed. Nevertheless, there are a lot of bloggers out there, and when you look at what they are saying over a given period of time you can get a useful measure of how an idea is spreading.

So I thought I’d pop over to Technorati to see how often the term ‘climate change’ is being mentioned in the blogsphere. This handy little graph shows that massive surge talked about on Celcias. It doesn’t look like the increased interest was a permanent change but there is a definite trend.

It would be interesting to look at what was happening at the time of that big spike.

Here’s some related real time graphs.

Posts that contain "climate Change" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" And Greenpeace per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I don’t have an apple but I would love to have one …. especially if it came in green. This is the essential message in the Greenpeace GreenMyApple campaign.

We love Apple. Apple knows more about “clean” design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned? A cutting edge company shouldn’t be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That’s why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple.

Very cool indeed. Worth special mention is the use of technorati and del.icio.us to spread the campaign. By asking everyone to tag their blog entries about the campaign with the keyword ‘greenmyapple’ the buzz is created throughout the blogspere, but as Brian Fitzgerald explains, that is not necessarily enough. So what they’ve popped a rss feed from all items tagged with greenmyapple on del.icio.us on the green my apple site itself and then when someone blogs the campaign the Greenpeace team can bookmark it with del.icio.us. The end result is a handy record of campaign references, a lively immediate-update set of links to stuff all over the webscape. Beautiful.

Don’t know how to tag? Here’s the code:

<br /> <a class="techtag" rel="tag" xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/greenmyapple" mce_href="http://technorati.com/tag/greenmyapple" >greenmyapple</a><br />

Resulting in : greenmyapple