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.

Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLs Blue Edition for Enterprise IT is winning fans. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says:

“Now [PopURLs founder] Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I’ve seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring — but the site is cool…..”

“The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you’ll find links to Intel white papers and blogs.”

I also love the disclosure attached to the post. FM manages advertising for ReadWriteWeb and Intel’s ads have been running on the site, but Marshall says he notices the campaign only after seeing Intel’s ads on another FM site, Boing Boing.

“Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.”

Advertising works in mysterious ways.

Credits: The people behind this project include Thomas Marban at PopURLs; David Veneski at Intel; Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner at FM.