The February Progress Report for the Designers Accord is out and my fears of this organization being merely a well-intentioned handshake between designers and affiliates are allayed. The list of guidelines has been stream-lined and a helpful introduction about carbon footprints from Natural Logic is a good starting point for fulfilling Step 4: Measure your carbon/greenhouse gas footprint and pledge to reduce it annually.

In other musings on sustainability, I found it interesting to see that, in a Levi's Store in Chicago's Wicker Park, their Capital E line of jeans made from organic cotton were integrated into the rest of the clothing display. The only indicator that they were eco jeans was the white-and-green Levi's label replacing the signature red label. A great example of how to effectively market (or not market!) green products.

[via apophenia] I always wondered who clicked on banner ads. There don't seem to be perfect data, but apparently "the 6% of the online population accounting for most of the click-throughs skews toward male Internet users ages 25 to 44 with household income under $40,000." I love the author, Danah Boyd's, beautifully politically incorrect hypothesis that, and I paraphrase, only dumb poor guys from the country click on banner ads. The best thing is the part of her hypothesis that says, and again I paraphrase, the same dumb people are the ones who meet up with strangers on social networking sites.

For most of us, this is no surprise. Nobody you know clicks on those idiotic epilepsy inducing things. You probably couldn't find anyone who does within a mile radius of your house, but there are probably at least one or two people making money off of them in your neighborhood.
The funny thing is, even though there is a lot of money being paid for clicks, these are not the clicks that most advertisers want. For instance. In meantime, other models of ad pricing are getting more traction.

Even though some are saying that this discovery has laid bare one of the biggest problems with online advertising, the real interesting thing to me is these people seem to actually be interested in the contents of banner ads. I have been known to fall for an especially funny or useful marketing ploy, but what is going on with these guys? They meet up with strangers online and then click a bunch of banner ads? I guess I never really thought about it, but I'm not surprised that the two activities are related.

Motorola is considering a "structural realignment" to spin-off its mobile device business. The article mentions that Motorola's main problem is its inability to come up with something new to follow the one-hit wonder Razr. If it does, in fact, move in this new direction, Motorola should consider two things.