The New York Times examines a new green technology media play that’s run by media people, not environmentalists.
Apprently like everyone else, we are going green!” wrote Om Malik this week, pretty much owning up to his lack of enthusiasm for the new blog his company introduced, Earth2Tech.
“It took a bit to convince Om to go GigaGreen,” the site’s editor, Katie Fehrenbacher, wrote in her introductory post. She said that the clean-tech boom — fueled in part by the money and marketing prowess of venture capitalists like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla — could turn out to be not much more than a faddish investment vehicle.
“It might be a bubble,” she wrote. “We’re agnostic. As always, through bubble or boom we’ll keep the same GigaOM skepticism on this new site.”
To me this signals the maturation of green. It’s more than a movement today, it’s fast becoming mainstream for businesses to be conscious about their impact on people and the planet, and how that in turn, impacts the bottom line.
The most popular green sites on the web–TreeHugger.com and Grist.org–don’t focus on the business and investment side of green. Rather, they are aimed mainly at selling green idealism and products to eco-conscious consumers.