Few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Chinese netizen, Guo Baofeng, put together an open-source Google map that locates major pollution sites around china. As it went publicly-launched, the map attracted a lot of interest on Chinese Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and forums: the number of views more than doubled to about 5,000 compared to a week earlier, when it first came online.

This is a very interesting case for many reasons:

• This is not China’s first pollution map. For example, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based environmental NGO, published a “name-and-shame” corporate water pollution map in 2007. The web has been used as a tool to publicly denounce corporate misbehaviors early on by, in this case, naming thousands of alleged pollution makers, including many multinational companies.

• However, Gua Baofeng’s Google map is the first one that enables other users to contribute themselves: netizens can mark spots associated with high levels of pollution or incidents of contamination, based on publicly available information (often media reports). Here, bloggers can now re-expose the polluters publicly, and their misbehaviors might potentially live forever in search and be accessible to a much larger audience, etc…

• When looking at the map as it is now, many ‘pollution spots’ are around the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta – China’s highly industrialized manufacturing hubs. But some other pollutions sites on the map show much more sensitive areas, i.e. locations where multiple lead contaminations cases got highly controversial, etc… Bloggers’s interest in this map is likely to grow (if the map remains accessible in the future) as public awareness of such pollution issues is high: such issues are extremely local and linked to what people care the most about, i.e. their health, safety and their families’ welfare.

• Given that peer-to-peer conversations or conversations with a “person like me” are among the most trusted sources of information, this Google map can have significant ramifications for corporate reputation as Internet users are able to scrutinize corporate activities to an unprecedented degree, while providing to companies an important barometer of the issues that matter to the public at a very local level.

To be followed then, if the map is allowed to last online in China…

From the Blog Action Day website:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis.

We encourage you to write about climate change in the context of how it relates to the topic of your blog. To help you start thinking, here are a few ideas about how you might connect climate change to things that you might already write about:

• A Technology or Business blog might write about emerging clean tech and how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change.
• A Health or Lifestyle blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and daily living.
• A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues – such as poverty and conflict.
• A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design.
• A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.

Mashable, Global Voices, and some others of your favorite blogs will be participating. And you?

 True to Greenpeace’s traditional use of ‘non-violent direct action’ to generate noise and create effective disruption, a group of Greenpeace activists have shut down coal export facilities on the Queensland coast for the second day in a raw.

Why talking about this in an ‘Ad of the day’ post…well, because the campaign has also integrated  digital activism on the home page of 2 major online Australian newspapers – The Australian and The Courier Mail. The action shows activists painting the slogan “Toodle-oo Tuvalu? Your call Kev” across the home page.

As my great colleague and friend – @ilsevs, who shared with me this story - pointed out, such tactic is an ideal way of getting campaign message across to as many people as possible, and especially to key Australian decision-makers and political elite who represent a great part of the newspapers’ readership.

Of course, Greenpeace is also leveraging Twitter and its official website for live-updates as the campaign unfolds at the coal ports and in the media.

A interesting example of disruptive adverstising/adctivism for environmental purpose. Let’s see if any  positive change  will result from this campaign at the political level, especially as  fight against climate change is one of Kevin Rudd’s priority, and his favorite blogging topic…

Credits: Creative Director: Peter Novosel // Art Director: Taimi Soome //Account Management: Alison Ray