It wasn’t a banner day for Consumerism.

Black Friday — the retail kickoff of the holiday season — is always a bit of a nuthouse. Marketers spend months devising ways to get you in front of a cashier, and early morning “doorbuster” specials have become an after-Thanksgiving tradition. All it takes is an advertising budget and a few loss leader markdowns to get shoppers queued up before dawn.

Or, in the case one Long Island Wal-Mart, lined up twenty four hours in advance. As you’ve probably heard by now, things went terribly wrong at a 5 a.m. sale event when crowds literally pushed down the door and surged inside, trampling 34-year-old store employee Jdimytai Damour. He was pronounced dead an hour later.

It gets worse. Witnesses say that when horrified Wal-Mart managers attempted to clear the store for rescue workers, bargain-hungry patrons complained and kept on shopping.

There’s no point moralizing about this: the incident speaks for itself. But people being trampled to death is the sort of thing you might expect from a panic in a rice line — not from consumers trying to snag a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for only $28, or an “The Incredible Hulk” DVD for the low, low price of just $9.

Over at Lighter Footstep, I took a moderate line on Black Friday this year. Counter-events — such as the well-intended, but more symbolic than effective Buy Nothing Day –aren’t likely to make much of an impression on someone who would queue up at Wal-Mart a day in advance for the honor of maxing out their credit card.

But perhaps a little futile symbollism is just what we need. It certainly trumps the events of Friday morning: a symbol of the consume-at-all-costs spirit which denudes our forests, poisons our cities, and pushes our planet toward exhaustion.

The GreenWashBall claims it can eliminate laundry detergent and save consumers money. Is it an eco-revolution — or another case of greenwashing?

My first impression of the GreenWashBall was that its manufacturer some chutzpah to market a eco-friendly product under a name synonymous overstated green marketing claims.

But it was the sort of pitch I look for: a modestly priced green product which could potentially save consumers some cash. It arrived in my inbox, as dozens do each week, with an offer of product for testing. I shot back a reply, and found my GreenWashBall was sitting on the front porch a week later.

Farewell to laundry detergent?

The GreenWashBall is presented as a replacement for laundry detergents. This seems like a good thing, given that the petroleum products, perfumes, and optical brighteners in conventional laundry detergents are sometimes irritating to people with chemical sensitivities. We already have enough unpronounceable substances in our daily lives — and who wouldn’t want to cross laundry soap off their weekly shopping list?

The ball itself is made of an unmarked, somewhat rubbery smelling green plastic. Rattling around inside are a handful of small round and cylindrical doodads the box describes as “powerful ceramics” designed to “break water into smaller pieces increasing its speed and penetration factor.” They are visible through a system of slots in the GreenWashBall’s sides.

The product literature goes on to make some fairly vague references to ions, pH levels, and eliminating chlorine in the wash water. These all sounded like something for more objective consideration. But first — let’s wash some laundry!

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Claims which seem too good to be true usually are, but I had several loads of dirty clothes on hand and nothing to lose. I picked a few particularly nasty towels, some socks, and my Golden Retriever’s favorite binky; set the water to warm; and tossed the GreenWashBall on top. I often line dry laundry. But it was raining, so I ran everything through the dryer and brought them to the kitchen table for a sniff test.

A surprise

The laundry was clean. Not just clean, in fact, but really good. Everything smelled fresh without the benefit of perfumes or fabric softeners. The socks were a bit dull — we’re all used to whites with the benefits of artificial brighteners — but fit for wear. Ubu’s dog blanket was fur-free and ready for fresh slobber.

I was particularly taken by the towels. They were dramatically softer and fluffier than after a conventional wash. Perhaps the GreenWashBall wasn’t greenwash, after all.

Over the next several days, I did more loads: jeans, t-shirts, underwear, and a set of all-cotton sheets. In every case, the fabrics were clean and good-smelling, with superior loft.

Twitter weighs in

At Lighter Footstep, we’re fortunate to maintain an active Twitter stream with almost two thousand eco-conscious followers. At the beginning of the GreenWashBall test, i thought it might be fun to conduct our experiment “live” and pass along the results in real time.

As my skepticism yielded to surprise, the questions started rolling in: What kind of plastic is the GreenWashBall made from? What’s inside? How does it really work? It was time to become more objective about what could be happening here.

Examining GreenWashBall’s key claims

We’ll start with GreenWashBall’s stated benefits, as listed on a small pamphlet which accompanies each unit:

• [By eliminating detergents] You elimate allergic risks linked to detergent residues on your clothes and linen.
• GreenWashBall safeguards your linen from bleaching and oxidization caused by chlorine diluted water. Fabric remains elastic.
• GreenWashBall has an anti-bacterial effect.
• Due to its efficiency, there is no need to add any bleaching or other additive to your detergent.

Yes, eliminating detergent improves the lot of those irritated by commercial laundry ingredients. There’s certainly no downside in reducing chemical exposure, even for those of us who tolerate cleaning products.

The amount of chlorine in tap water is generally minute, and it’s difficult to imagine it has much effect on modern fabric dyes. Since GreenWashBall doesn’t list its active ingredients, it’s tough to judge how it removes chlorine from water — if it does so at all.

GreenWashBall’s claim of anti-bacterial action is more troubling. While the product website hints of “remote infared rays emitted by GreenWashBall” (whatever those might be), the company’s lack of specifics make it impossible to verify disinfectant action short of lab testing. That isn’t to say it’s not happening: silver, for instance, has true antimicrobial properties. It is at least within the realm of possibility that silver might be contained somewhere in GreenWashBall’s mysterious contents. But the company should do a much better job of substantiating its benefit in this area, particularly in view of a specific health claim made on the GreenWashBall website:

[The] GREENWASHBALL eliminates pathogen germs in the water of your washing machine, giving clean and healthy linen. GREENWASHBALL has an antibacterial effect and eliminates bad odors.

Customers expecting GreenWashBall to contribute to the reduction of things such as fecal coliforms deserve a more detailed explanation of how this product is effective.

So why was the laundry clean?

My testing was unscientific, so I’m not saying that GreenWashBall doesn’t work. But I can think of at least one reason my clothes came out clean: I washed them. In detergent.

While we generally think of detergents in terms of the stuff we buy at the store, any compound used for cleaning is a detergent. That includes water — it suspends dirt until it can be rinsed away. Warm water introduces a surfactant effect, dissolving dirt and oils. We’re strongly conditioned by advertising to believe laundry cannot be cleaned except through the introduction of soaps and foaming agents.

We’re also accustomed to baking commercial detergents into our fabrics as they dry. That’s why our clothing smells of perfume after the wash, and how optical brighteners are still able to do their job. The added loft and softness I noticed in my laundry was probably due to the absence of detergent residue.

Just for fun, I did a final load of laundry similar to that of the first batch. Using nothing but warm water, the results seemed identical to those with the GreenWashBall. Lesson learned. We can probably save money and turn out better quality laundry by reducing the amount of detergents we use.

And the GreenWashBall has a way to go if it intends to live down its name.

More Reading:

Consider Earth-Friendly, Cruelty-Free Clothing (Lighter Footstep)
Laundry Ball (Wikipedia)

The Blackwater Heritage Trail is a rails-to-trails greenway which runs north from Milton, Florida, across a large tract of rolling pine forest. It’s actually two trails, with shared management by the Florida Park Service and the U.S. Navy.

With its smooth road service, twelve foot width, and peaceful vistas, the trail gets a lot of use. There’s a well-kept trailhead with parking, restrooms, and a nearby bicycle shop. Once you clear a few crossroads leaving Milton, it’s a pleasant and relaxing eight mile cruise to Whiting Field before the turnaround on a gently sloping grade home.

My son, James, and I saddled up on a sunny Saturday morning a few weeks ago. It’s not a challenging ride, and that’s the beauty of it.

[Show as slideshow]

So Microsoft debuted its long-anticipated, $300 million marketing campaign today. And the initial reviews — at least from the tech and early adopter gang — aren’t all that kind.

VentureBeat sniffs that the campaign opener, a quirky 90-seconds of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft founder Bill Gates talking shoes and technology, is “awkwardly odd” and really not very good. The First Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft Ad Makes No Sense moans Gizmodo. Conversation on Twitter is almost uniformly negative.

There’s no denying the ad is, at first, a bit puzzling. Perhaps people were expecting something a bit slicker from the folks at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, the überhip agency hired to rescue Microsoft from a decade of marketing cruft and miscues. Watch the video above and see for yourself.

It’s an ad about nothing

Sound familiar? That’s how Jerry Seinfeld used to describe his show, co-created with Larry David. Seinfeld really stuck out as a network series back in the Nineties, and the new ad nails the same vibe. Not a bad idea, given that consumers have become nearly impervious to traditional marketing. We’re all pretty good at tuning out a pitch, but the new ad doesn’t come off that way.

“They’re not selling anything!”

Over on Friendfeed, where I sprend too much time these days, a lot of the conversation faults the Seinfeld and Gates Show for failing to get Mac users back to the PC, or explain why Windows is cool. I imagine Microsoft’s marketers used to be similarly puzzled by Apple’s unconventional advertising. Microsoft Windows honcho Bill Veghte told CNET earlier this summer that the new campaign would be presenting “a bunch of stuff,” which presumably will be trotted out in the coming months. But that’s not what this first ad is designed to do.

Why the campaign rollout works

The campaign debut isn’t about selling Windows, trying to out-irony Apple, or reversing the fact that Microsoft’s strongest current marketing image is the strangely lovable PC Guy in those Mac spots . It has one purpose: to brand Jerry Seinfeld as the new face of Microsoft.

Mission accomplished. I can’t imagine a surer way of binding Seinfeld to Microsoft than his goofy extended eye lock with Bill Gates as they try on shoes, or coaxing a very un-corporate hip sway from the former Chairman as they walk off camera together. It’s the first glimpse of a warmer, less up-tight Microsoft. A company you might even — yes, it’s unthinkable — like.

Microsoft has written a pretty hefty check in the hope that Seinfeld can put a smile on their core customers’ faces. They’ve opened with a bit of a soft shoe routine. The real dance is yet to come.

Everybody loves a giant killer, so there was no shortage of online ink today over the public debut of Cuil, a new engine which claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”

Cuil couldn’t fail to whistle up a tempest of launch coverage. Staffed by former Google employees with $33 million worth of investment capital at their backs, the secretive startup hinted at a new kind of search based on content, rather than link popularity (an oversimplification of Google’s methodology). All very exciting stuff.

Cuil’s big launch

The site’s rollout on Sunday night was met with hosannas from the Usual Suspects. Techcrunch, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and many others did a great job of quickly sizing up how well Cuil lived up to its pre-launch hype, and the web buzz went into overdrive when Cuil’s servers folded like a bad poker hand within hours of launch. The site managed to struggle to its feet, and Cuil enjoyed widespread coverage in the mainstream media all day long.

While all these reports had differing viewpoints on Cuil’s first-day success, most had one thing in common. You can see it in the highlighted section below, captured from a Breitbart article:

Virtually everyone who wrote about Cuil today felt compelled to waste a sentence or two explaining the service’s oddball name. According to the company’s About page, Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. That’s not really true, but it goes nicely with the mystical stone circle photo on the website. We’ll roll with it.

There’s a fine line between clever and stupid

I’ve mucked about with brand names all my adult life, mostly in the form of radio station identities. One of my pet peeves is when a station insists on adopting an eccentric spelling of a common name. Unless you’re talking about breakfast cereal, for instance, there’s just no unspelling the word “kicks” in a person’s head. But the dial is littered with KIX and KIXX and KIKKS variants, all waiting to confuse an Arbitron survey participant and cheat a station out of the diary credit it deserves.

When presented with “Cuil,” someone who doesn’t speak Gaelic will pronounce it like “quill,” rather than some l33tspeak version of “cool.” Let’s suppose this user somehow manages to navigate to the site, likes it, and is telling a co-worker to try Cuil. Unless there’s a physical link or some tedious spelling involved, the co-worker will return to his or her cubicle and either call up the Quill office supplies website or this page:

That’s right: Cool.com — the way Cuil’s brand name is properly pronounced — is for sale. You’d think that if Cuil wanted to be known as “cool,” they’d have created a budget line item tagged No Brainer and written a check for whatever the owner of Cool.com wanted. Then they could have dispensed with the high concept Emerald Isle stuff and offered people a Cooler Way to Search.

What a mess

Think this isn’t a problem? Take a look at this screen grab of popular Google searches today and look at all the variants of Cuil.

It gets a little worse. Cuil locked down the .net version of their URL, but not the .org. Cuil.eu is a spammy page covered with Google search boxes. And — as Crunchgear’s Nicholas Deleon discovered earlier today — should you happen to mistype Cuil as “Culi” in your browser, you’ll be greeted by an entirely NSFW Italian porn site.

Cuil debuted a beautiful site with some fresh thinking about the way search can be done and presented to the user. Their privacy policies are enlightened, and there’s plenty of available goodwill for anyone who wants to give Google a run for their money. But Cuil has a big job ahead of them — not the least of which involves their branding.

Cornered

So what does cuil mean, anyway? The original version of the company’s name was spelled Cuill, invoking the ancient folklore character Finn McCuill and a mythological hazel tree associated with knowledge. Butcùil is a different word altogether, meaning a corner or recess.

If one were of a superstitious bent, naming a new company after something dark and hidden might be considered a poor omen.

It’s hard to get too angry at a free service — particularly one which has been so enjoyed by its users. Which is why, when my frustration levels with Twitter passed the redline, I signed-off in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner.

For those who don’t labor in the dark seam of geekdom, Twitter is a microblogging service. Part instant messaging system, part bulletin board, Twitter has elevated the simple question “What are you doing?” to a bustling community of users and software developers. And unlike many small tech startups, Twitter has managed to carry its 140-character gospel well beyond the early adopter crowd. This week’s 1,400 word feature writeup in USA Today is ample evidence of Twitter’s breakout appeal.

Too big, too fast

Unfortunately, Twitter’s popularity has been its undoing. Beginning last year, the service was struck by clusters of outages and technical missteps. Its lighthearted error screen has become a permanent addition to the geek lexicon as the Fail Whale. “Twitter is down” articles in the tech press haven’t been news for a long time.

The problem lies in Twitter’s software code and infrastructure, which wasn’t written with the sort of loads in mind the service must now routinely manage. That didn’t stop Twitter from taking venture funding, which assumes further growth. Nor has it prevented the company from blaming virtually everyone but themselves for their current state of affairs, shutting down basic services, and leaving key segments of its developer community out in the cold.

Faithful like a puppy

Through all this, Twitter’s user community has been amazingly loyal. They’ve remained at Twitter’s bedside, always quick with a cheery word when the patient is momentarily lucid, faithful in its hope of the service’s ultimate recovery.

While this looks like simple codependence, Twitter’s users haven’t stuck around through the service’s flailings out of blind loyalty, brand attachment, or gratitude. They’ve hung on for something quite tangible: their commnities.

On Twitter, users create their own communities over time, choosing to follow or be followed by others. This is the secret sauce of social media. Each user’s community is different and unique to the service. In fact, to the user, community is the service.

A new level of FAIL

Yesterday, Twitter took a big step toward undoing this critical connection with their user base. Over the course of several hours, user communities began to simply disappear. Follower counts — and, perhaps more importantly, the lists of people users were following — began to evaporate. For once, user reaction was closer to panic and anger than frustration.

Twitter shut down, restored some sort of backup, and returned with a vague error notice:

We are recovering from an issue affecting your Twitter relationships. You may see inconsistencies in your timeline or your profile counts as we resolve this.

Almost 24 hours later, personal communities are not back to normal. Twitter’s Biz Stone issued a brief statement on the company blog promising further action, but the damage is done. Users now know Twitter is not reliable custodian of their communities.

Whether this proves to be fatal remains to be seen. But the point is, it should be fatal. Twitter’s grotesque incompetence cannot be allowed to stand as a model for other startups: lock in your users, then treat them as you will.

Take action

Friendfeed. Identi.ca. Plurk. Even old standbys such as Facebook. There are plenty of great alternatives to Twitter these days, and more in the pipeline. Move your communities over. Create new ones. If you’re on more than one platform, all the better.

But clinging to Twitter’s smoking ruin is both servile and counterproductive. You and your community deserve better. Our future communities on other services deserve better. Twitter must die.

I spend most of my day writing and editing Green websites: EcoTech Daily, ecoTumble, and our soon-to-be-relaunched Lighter Footstep.

So I tend to bump into a lot of folks from the environmental crowd. Inevitably, these days, the topic of conversation turns to fuel prices. The last few months have turned us all into armchair energy analysts. We can tell you the daily closing price of light, sweet crude; we notice every hiccup in the production line; and there’s endless speculation about what instability in Nigeria or a hurricane strike on Gulf oil platforms might do to summer prices.

We told you so

There’s a certain amount of gloating, too. I suppose this is to be expected: environmentalists have known for years that nothing would be done to prepare our energy future until prices justified the research and development of renewables. Now — almost 25 years after the Arab Oil Embargo — the chickens have finally come home to roost. A lot of Greens are cheering on the price of oil as if it were the hometown football team.

Which is unfortunate, since gloating rarely wins hearts and minds. It’s not as if the general public doesn’t already nurse a long-held suspicion that environmentalists value wildlife and wilderness over people. Ignoring the pain caused by high energy prices — particularly to the working class — is neither compassionate nor pragmatic.

Unintended consequences

Sure, high fuel prices have really lit a fire under the alternative energy industry. Venture capitalusts are funding small energy startups with the enthusiasm of the DotCom boom. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies floating around for industrial-scale power and fuels development, and even the oil companies are broadening their portfolios to include safe renewable bets, such as windpower and solar.

But those who are cheerleading the price of oil are also rooting on environmental compromises we’ve so far been unwilling to make. Take, for example, the European utilities who have been deeply committed to cleaner-burning natural gas over the past couple decades. With natural gas tracking oil prices and coal remaining — for the time being — a relative energy bargain, big Euro utilities are flipping to coal. That’s right: hyper-dirty, carbon dioxide-producing coal. Just as we were getting serious about greenhouse emissions and air quality.

Not unsurprisingly, high oil prices have led to renewed calls for drilling, both offshore and in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While even a crash drilling program wouldn’t have the slighest effect on prices at the pump, recent polls show overwhelming public support for new exploration. It will be politically difficult for Greens to put the brakes on drilling, despite its futility and environmental downside.

The Moonbat Factor

Before An Inconvenient Truth made it possible to talk about the environment again, Greens were on the ropes. The environmental movement was generally viewed as a bunch of effete, Birkenstock-clad moonbeams who care more for snail darters than people. Rejoicing over oil prices while the cost of gasoline chews up grocery budgets plays to these old prejudices. It’s the fast track to popular irrelevance.

In any case, we’ve already reached the tipping point: even if energy prices crest over the next few months, the swing to meaningful alternative energy solutions is already being carried by its own momentum. It’s time to stifle the Green gloating and help people through the transition to come.

The noise you can’t ignore. That was the more-or-less official slogan of Jacor Broadcasting, one of the hot companies from back in my radio days.

Noise is good. It’s how people discover content, and is what drives the growth of the web. Social media guru Robert Scoble is fond of saying how “noisy” he is, and the same holds true for the top tier of SM personalities on services such as Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed. Together, they’re the Jacor of New Media.

Bring da Noise

Someone asked me the other day when I became one of “those social media guys.” I haven’t: I’m a web publisher. Content producers and the Noise are joined at the hip, but to excel at one or the other requires its own skill set and an exclusive commitment in time and energy. This is one of the reasons I’m becoming more selective in the services I utilize. There are simply a limited number of hours in a given day.

If you look at the top tier of social media personalities — the early adopters and Usual Suspects on the most popular social media sites — you’ll see most aren’t known as content producers. Sure, they communicate well, and many of them write about or are employed by the social media industry. But top social media people who are also content producers are few and far between.

The real deal

Anyone can print business cards or start a TypePad blog announcing themselves as a social media expert. To really do social media, though, requires a unique set of skills: being able to root out truly great content, wherever it might be hiding; a sharp sense for what could be popular and engaging; speed, organization, and the ability to manage extended networks of collaborators and fellow travelers.

It’s hard work, but it’s not the same as the creative process which powers effective content production. As with everything, there are exceptions to the rule. But content and social media are different sides of the New Media coin.

Content or the Noise — which are you?

Dear Twitter,

We’ve had some good times over the past couple years, haven’t we? The long, rambling, late night chats. The little in-jokes. The reflexive tendency to address our friends with an @ symbol.

But things have changed. I know you feel it, too. You’ve grown — a lot, really — and so have I. We’ve come to lead very different lives, and I think it’s time we both moved on.

Before you say anything, I want you to know this has nothing to do with your recent problems. I’ve always taken those in stride. After all, I’m not the most consistent person in the world, either. I’ve gone days without saying anything to you, and when I do manage 140 characters or so, it’s usually something trivial. You deserve so much better.

Maybe this is just a midlife crisis. I don’t know. But I’m not getting any younger, and I really only have time to nurture the quality relationships in my life. It’s something I’ll have to work out.

I know you’ve heard I’ve been seen with FriendFeed. It’s true. We started seeing each other about the same time I thought you were no longer there for me, and things took their natural course. That being said, FriendFeed can never be you. And I wouldn’t want it to be.

You’ll be fine. I know you’re seeing some folks who will help you get yourself together, and I’m sure you have a wonderful future ahead.

I’ll think of you as you were right after SXSW 2007: so young and full of promise. We’ll always have our memories of Frozen Pea Fridays, the Color Wars, TweetJeebus, and that silly whale error message. You know, I may miss the whale most of all.

A couple weeks back, I was interviewed by NPR’s Neda Ulaby for an upcoming environmental piece on Morning Edition.

I just got a note that the segment is scheduled to air Monday.

The topic is whether the environmental movement has become preoccupied with global warming. It’s based, at least in part, on a piece I wrote for Lighter Footstep last June: Five Things that Are Worse than Global Warming. I published it on the day of the Live Earth concerts, and it ended up being one of Lighter Footstep’s most read (and most controversial) articles.

Neda interviewed me for the better part of a half hour, and I expect the finished piece will only be three to five minutes. That means the bulk of what I had to say will remain on NPR’s virtual cutting floor. We’ll have to see what ends up actually making it on-air.

Lighter Footstep is primarily about personal approaches to Green Living, so we don’t directly address climate change that often. But the position I took with Neda is that the global warming issue was a real sea change for the environmental movement. Before An Inconvenient Truth came out, U.S. environmentalists were deeply demoralized after six years of being largely dismissed by the current administration. Within a matter of months, everything turned around. People are actually talking about the environment again, and you can’t walk into a store or turn on the television without seeing an unprecedented variety of green products and services.

The downside to all this attention to global warming is that other issues — some related, some not — are getting the cold shoulder. People are pretty quick to wonder how much carbon dioxide comes out of an automobile tailpipe or the stacks of some coal-burning power plant, forgetting entirely the tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and an alphabet soup of known carcinogens which find their way into our food and lungs each year. In terms of time line, the most pressing environmental issues probably have to do with water and energy. Our oceans are under increasing pressure from pollution and overfishing; deforestation is advancing at an alarming pace; and we have yet to fully address the ultimate environmental threat: nuclear weapons.

It’s a complex web of problems. We’ll see how the segment turns out. You can track down your local NPR station here. NPR also makes streaming audio available from their website.

I’d like to thank Neda for having me on, and WUWF — our NPR affiliate here in Pensacola — for so courteously proving me with studio time.

Streaming audio of the Morning Edition feature is now available here.