ChasNote

As part of its celebration of Earth Day 2008, Chevy kicked off a sponsorship of a green “group blog,” Best of the Green Web.

GM partnered with FM to scout sites that cover environmental topics — from design and trend-spotting sites such as Core77, TrendHunter, Boing Boing and Uncrate to do-it-yourself sites like Make and start-up news sites ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. For those of you headed to Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, this weekend, you better arrive on your garage-built compressed air moped:

One post on the site (sourced from ReadWriteWeb) profiles a company, BadBuster, that makes a widget that grades the eco-friendliness of large, public companies — including GM. According to the widget, GM’s environmental-performance glass is a little better than half full (or, of course, nearly half empty). It’s doing better than its North American and German rivals but is still behind its Japanese competitors.

It’s refreshing to see that kind of content on a sponsored site. Clearly this is real content, not something pumped out by GM’s PR team. With its honesty it sends the message that Chevy is committing to the green conversation in a way that goes beyond “green washing.”

Announcing that it just launched a lithium-ion prototype Chevy Volt doesn’t take away from that perception either.

Credits: Adam Erhard and the GM Planworks team, along with Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Jared Katzman at FM.

Ford prevented a group of their most loyal customers — Mustang owners who are members of the auto enthusiast group Black Mustang Club — from assembling photos of their cars into a calendar. Full story at Boing Boing. I’m not sure it’s ever a good idea to sue your best customers, but you can sort of (sort of) understand record labels suing their fans when those fans — in their enthusiasm to share music with friends — cuts into record sales. But what is Ford thinking? A calendar of vintage Mustangs is going to divert paying customers??