Alex Reid

Today is Earth Day: a religious holiday for corporate social responsibility.

So this is [Earth Day].
And what have you done ?
Another year over
and a new one just begun.

Well, IKEA is doing away with their plastic bags (in July 2009) and from then on you’ll have to buy their “blue bags” for one dollar. Whether you re-use them or not doesn’t matter to IKEA. At one dollar? Really.

If you bring a travel mug to any Starbucks coffee shop, they’ll give you a certain kind of free coffee. Walmart is highlighting 10 environmentally friendly products under $10 all month to respect the “day” while McDonald’s celebrated Earth Day by announcing that its global headquarters building in Illinois has been awarded the LEED Platinum certification. Sony’s PlayStation Store will donate $1 for each of the first 10,000 movies and TV shows purchased through the PlayStation Network on Earth Day to some environmental group.

The lobby to remind us about the ecological issues has gone beyond the “one day”. In the shadow of the green movement, lazy leaders use the “day” to capitalize on how they are so great and responsible. Get with the program guys, just be yourself and celebrate that. Cuddling up to a theme for a day just makes you look cheap.

In a troubled industry, Southwest Airlines is known for “mixing” it up.

Oprah will begin to Tweet tomorrow (Friday) as she talks to actor Ashton Kutcher about his race with CNN to become the first twitter user to pass one million followers. Of course as this article points out Oprah may surpass them both soon.

She currently has 52,000 followers at 10pm CST. She will probably have half a million in four days.

A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects.

This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content with other free culture projects and vice versa. Wikipedia is currently using the Free Documentation License because Wikipedia was started before Creative Commons existed.

To qualify to vote, you must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15, 2009, using your login profile.