New Web 2.0 news site for climate issues launches

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 31 July 2007 04:29

Your IT - Home IT

A couple of Dutch entrepreneurs have launched a Digg look-alike news aggregation site devoted to climate and environmental issues. The new Web 2.0 site, Climezine.com, enables users to post links to content, add comments and vote for stories in a similar manner to Digg, Netscape and other aggregation sites.

Climezine is divided into different channels covering different environmental aspects and contains a tag identifying the geographic region a particular news item covers. News, as well as pictures and video clips, on air, water, nature, health effects or climate change can be put on the site once a visitor has registered.        

Founders Maarten Blokdijk and Eric van den Berg from The Hague , say they were influenced by Al Gore’s "wake-up call" when he released his film An  Inconvenient Truth.

Blokdijk has an IT company specializing in Web 2.0 and content management solutions while van den Berg is an environmental campaigner.

A quick look at the site shows that it appears to have been seeded with links to about 200 articles on environmental issues. It is not exactly clear if the voting system is working properly yet because the few articles with a number of votes are sitting on latter pages rather than near the front.

It remains to be seen whether a single issue site like Climezine.com can garner enough interest to flourish or whether established sites like Digg, which has an environment stream, already services the market sufficiently.