Month: December 2008

See you in 2009!

Todays post is the last post before Christmas and this year. I would like to thank everyone and especially my faithful readers for their support this year. It has been a real rollercoaster ride this year and I only hope that 2009 will not be as turbulent as 2008. But I guess these are things out of our control. We can just live our life to the fullest. And this is certainly what we are doing at the moment.

I therefore wish everyone a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. Anne and I are taking the rest of the year off to recharge our batteries in order to be 120% ready for 2009. 2009 will be an interesting year and I hope that all or least some of you will continue to be part of this community, provide me with invaluable feedback and enjoy reading my blog.

Kind Regards,
Fabian

Yahoo News Groups on Sustainability and CSR

Online News Groups have been a very useful networking tool in my work in the Sustainability / Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field over the last few years. I have been using Google and Yahoo News Groups mostly to connect to like minded people. There are obviously many more providers of these kind of newsgroups but I have been using these two extensively over the past few years.
Todays post will be to introduce you to the most interesting and useful Yahoo News Groups on the topic of Sustainability and CSR. Another post in the next weeks will be about Google Groups on Sustainability and CSR.

Interesting Yahoo News Groups on Sustainability and CSR:

CSR-Chicks and Blokes
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/csr-chicks/
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/csrblokes/
CSR Chicks and Blokes is a global network for people working or wanting to work in corporate social responsibility. CSR Chicks is one of the largest and most active communities of people working on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. There are two different news groups. Blokes for males and Chicks for females. The Chicks group is a lot bigger then the blokes but everyone is allowed to join either of the groups.
Members: Chicks: 6300, Blokes: 2000

Compass Network
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/compassnetwork/
The Compass Network is a global group of people who communicate on issues of sustainable development: from recycling to renewable energy, conservation to corporate responsibility, transport to fair trade. Members include marketers, PR and advertising professionals, businesspeople, civil servants, campaigners, local government employees, CSR consultants and more.
Members: 750

CSR International
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/csr-international/
This is a forum for the exchange of CSR ideas and information including: best practices, case studies, conference announcements, courses, research findings, public reports, corporate reports and job advertisements. Postings are moderated to ensure relevance – both in terms of CSR content and international (rather than only local or national) focus.
Members: 560

LocalSUSUK
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/localsustuk/
This group is to discuss ideas, share information and help solve problems relating to new areas of work on local sustainability. It is primarily (although not exclusively) aimed at those already involved in local sustainable development. As such, we ask that you have respect for other people’s inbox and do not reply to the whole list when you are addressing one or two people.
Members: 1100

Selected Sustainability & CSR Vacancies – 16.12.2008

The current economic slowdown may have shaken the general recruitment market but the Sustainability/CSR job sector did not go down in the number of vacancies from what I can see at the moment. Maybe this is a sign that Sustainability in businesses is too important to scale back. Let’s hope so.

So without further delay. Here is another collection of interesting new Sustainability /CSR jobs from the SustainabilityForum.com website.

More vacancies are available here: Jobs and Internships on SustainabilityForum.com

Interesting Sustainability News Stories of the Week – 13.12.2008

This week was another big week in terms in sustainability, environmental and corporate responsibility topics in my opinion.
We had the Climate Change Conference in Poland (with a not so positive outcome as hoped), Obama did his climate and energy appointments (good choices but not Al Gore unfortunately) and there has been a lot of talk about the impact of the financial crisis on corporate responsibility activities of businesses across the globe.  Especially the last point is a worrying point in my opinion. But we will see how this debate will unfold in the next few months with our economies ever weaking unfortunately.

Here are my Top 5 Sustainability News Stories of the week (in no particular order):

Obama names climate and energy appointments – Choice of Nobel Prize winning scientist and political heavyweights underlines president-elect’s seriousness over climate change agenda.

IBM, Tesco and Dell Earn Top Marks for Climate Change Governance – IBM, Tesco and Dell are among a select group of major consumer and technology companies taking active steps toward addressing the risks and capitalizing on the opportunities posed by climate change, according to a new report from the nonprofit Ceres.

UK wins battle over carbon capture billions-sources – European leaders agreed on Friday to put billions of euros of funds behind cutting-edge technology to trap and bury global warming gases underground, a key demand of Britain in climate talks, diplomats said.

Poland Climate Change Conference Wrap Up – Top environmental ministers arrived in Poland on Thursday for the conclusion of the United Nations Climate Change conference, which has been underway the last two weeks.

How To Go Green And Stay Cost-Competitive – A good read on the myth that going green is just a luxury.

My Four Twitter Tools

I have been using Twitter (What is Twitter?) as a social networking tool and to connect to friends for over 6 months now.
Since then the possibilities and tools using Twitter have increased immensely. Todays post will be used to provide you with the four tools I use to manage my updates using Twitter.

Best Twitter Client
The best management tool for Twitter other then using the web version in my opinion is TweetDeck. There are some more Twitter clients out there but this is by far the best one I think. Tweetdeck provides everything you need to use Twitter in an effective way. Really useful.

Instant Twitter Posts

I also frequently use the TwitThat program as an instant posting client. TwitThat is a great little tool for a quick and easy way of instantly posting to Twitter. No need to register just but in your Twitter username and password and go. If you are not really looking for a more sophisticated Twitter Client like TweetDeck than this is for you.

Twitter and Music
If you are into music then Blip.fm is something you really need to check out. With Blip.fm you can share your music with your Twitter friends as well. Just sign up to Blip.fm and add your Twitter account name in the options to automatically send updates to Twitter whenever you listen to a song on Blip.fm.

An Immediate Blog with Twitter Integration
Last but not least am I using Posterous. Posterous is very easy tool for you to post anything and everything in a proper blog format. The neat thing is that there is no need to register or to administer before you can get started. You only need to email them the blog text and possible pictures as an attachment (if you want to use pictures) and they do the rest by posing it automatically. Here is my Posterous blog if you want to have a look at the look and feel. Once you have done your first post you can decide to automatically post updates from your Posterous to Twitter everytime you add a Posterous blog post. Really easy.

These are the four tools I use to make my Twitter usage easier and more enjoyable. I hope you will find them useful.