July 09, 2007 | Monday

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Can we save the World?

By Justin Hayward, Strategic Development Director in News |PPC |Search Engines |Google |Microsoft

I know it sounds a bit ‘Flash Gordon’, but after spending a good chunk of my Saturday watching the Live Earth concert this weekend, i’ve at least started thinking about it.

There’s been a lot of backlash about the whole sincerity of the event with people chipping in about what a contradiction it was to host concerts globally to create awareness of reducing our carbon output while at the same time flying in the artists and using some serious lighting.

On the other hand, it did create mass awareness of the issue. I, for instance, logged on to Google to search for the artist playing at the time which happened to be the Beastie Boys (i’m an old school kinda guy) and found MSN using paid ads to promote their involvement in the event. On further searches for the artists i found MSN to be bidding on all the playing artists names.

Cool i thought.

However, the copy was all the same generic stuff, not even mentioning the artists name. Further searches on Yahoo! found that MSN were not using any paid ads on their engine. I thought this was a Global issue, so how can you forget the big Y!?

I also found out that i’m a major contributor to global warming with MSN’s carbon footprint calculator. According to the calculator, the average UK persons footprint is 5 tonnes per year. Blimey! apparently i produce a whacking 18.4 tonnes of CO2 each year. Carbon offsetting anyone?