Social Media tools and Climate/Energy are two of my great interests.

I've been reading and writing about social media tools for a while now, and I'm an more or less active participant on many social media platforms.

As mentioned before, a recent job change introducing a focus on Climate and Energy, combined with the recent G8 meeting and the up-coming COP15 summit to be held in my home city of Copenhagen, Denmark, has really awakened my interest to the various aspects of the climate & energy discussion.

The discussions are many, the topics vary, and the same arguments are often made to prove many different points. We have countries, politicians, "media experts", "climate experts", journalists, climate sector spokes people, fossil fuel sector spokes people and the average Joe - all trying to make sense of the facts and figures and to create a sense of meaning to fit and frame their individual understanding of the world.

It is my belief that in all discussions we join, in all conversations we enter, we all have an agenda, no matter how subtle - an idea of where we come from and where we want the discussion to go.

Friendfeed Climate & Energy Room

I have earlier written about how to use tools like Twitter and Friendfeed to promote conversations (for example here and here ). It is no secret that even though I like Twitter as a platform, I feel it is much too limited and fragmented to have real conversations.

So, thinking about what I could do to better promote the conversation around Energy and Climate I decided to make a Climate & Energy room over on Friendfeed.

Here is how it works

I have imported via RSS feed, some Twitter profiles and blog posts I found relevant, both from mainstream media and individual bloggers.

I want to keep the room open, so if you have any ideas for blogs or feeds which should be included, please let me know, and I will add them.

The room can basically be used in 2 ways:

1. Passive: You can use the room as a master feed, and even grab the RSS into your feed reader. What this means is that instead of subscribing to many different blog posts, you can subscribe to this master feed and use it as a hub for all things relevant to climate and energy. For example, I have imported the twitter searches for #COP15 and for #G8 - meaning whenever anyone over at Twitter tags their tweets with these tags, they automatically appear real time in the Friendfeed Climate & Energy room, next to all the other blog feeds. 
2. Active: All the above. Plus, everyone can comment on any post. Comments appears in threaded form for all to see - in this way making conversations on Friendfeed so much more powerful than over on Twitter where it is difficult to follow discussions between people. Furthermore, conversations on Friendfeed have two interesting aspects. Participants have the choice to "like" or to "comment" on a post. When a post has been liked on commented on, it automatically re-appears in the top of the feed stream. This in effect means that the more a post gets liked or commented upon, the more it re-appears in the top, making sure other readers don't miss the most important posts. Crowd-sourcing in its finest form!

Basically this is how it works. I hope you will get some value from the room, and that you will stop by and join the conversation. If you care about the climate, you should make your voice heard.

Please let me know if you feel there is a feed which should be included in the room.

Go sign up for Friendfeed, if you haven't already. The Friendfeed Climate & Energy room can be found here.

Let me know what you think!

Update on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 7:20PM by Peter Efland

Update

I have made a "How-to" for using the Friendfeed climate room.