Gerald, you clearly lean anti-environment & are a climate change-skeptic. Instead of suggesting ways to help Basil's company go "green", you have mocked the very notion.

Basil's company has a set of principles which are based on values, which, in turn, are subjective. Fine. One of their values is to pursue "sustainability" - it's admittedly a very loose term, but Basil helps the audience out by defining what the term means to his company.

If you have thoughts on how to achieve this values-based goal, your contribution would have been a positive one.

The question you raise about how you might know that your efforts are effective and actually "do anything" is an excellent one. It sounds like you would suggest looking at some hard numbers and pursuing the path with the best returns for their efforts. Something to the effect of: we only have so much money to spend & so many hours we can devote to going green, would our efforts be better spent recycling vs building a green roof vs encouraging employee carpools vs telecommuting?

Instead, you spoke of the non-quantifiable and intangible ways your environment might improve your productivity: having a new car so your auto worries don't affect your work & having a good aura which inspires productivity in those around you. Great. I'm not going to argue with any of that, but it's a very similar concept to having a recycling program in the office rather than throwing reams of paper in the trash everyday, or encouraging non-auto means of getting to work. These efforts also foster a good workplace environment - hopefully improving worker productivity as well.

"A super ghetto fuel efficient beast" is not a numbers type of argument either - it's a values based one. You value a slick car (uh, the monster truck kind? the race car kind?). Whatever. Your value is not worth more than Basil's. But, take note that yours appears to be based on personal desire rather than doing good for the society and/or environment around you.

Also, the earth torn apart by a few humans? Try 6 billion or better yet, the cumulative population of the industrialized world since let's say 1860. A 100 year period? What about the tree rings analyzed spanning 500+ years? The core samples taken from glaciers spanning 10,000+ years?

And why is it either/or? Either you can go green, *or* you can work & learn better when you're happy? I know lots of happy people who are green, and not all that many happy ones that are not.

David, I loved your article. Being of the non-profit world, let me add the free VLC Player to your list. It's open source and available for Mac, PCs and Linux.

I've used the VLC Player for a long time, but was surprised to find that it had the ability to screencast. I found a YouTube video that shows users how to do it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn66KDbRR0c

Domestic travel is one thing. But, international? It's been my personal experience that travel agents are worth the time and money.

While wondering how to triangulate here, it occurred to me that certain activities should allow a basic user to temporarily upgrade and receive what paying customers receive.

Activities such as:

• invite a new user (who registers)
• hold a biznik event
• I don't know - other, desired things

This would give users incentives to conduct desirable (from Biznik's point of view) activities. Also, it would give free users a taste of what they're missing out upon - creating the desire to pay for the service.

I think the "bad" here was taking something away that people got used to, as opposed to offering a new service exclusively to paying customers.

I don't know much about Garage Band, but I do know about the free, open-source, mult-track recording software, Audacity. It's found at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

I've used it to record my own tortured-artist music and it's pretty simple and straightforward. I record directly onto my laptop with no fancy hardware. It's definitely DIY.

Depending your podcasting vision, you might already be good to go. You might consider background or intro/outro music. An electronic keyboard with a range of sounds and percussive options would be a good cheap way to go. You can probably pick up a low-cost Yamaha for ~$150 brand new. You never know what you'll find on craigslist.org or other used sites.

I had very good experience using a software called High Impact Email. I remember it was a one-time fee of $100.

It comes with templates. Being somewhat of a control freak, I just made my own template using basic html.

It integrated well with Outlook or with a spreadsheet of contacts.

If you include photos in your e-newsletter, they aren't delivered to anyone's inbox until the message is opened and read - meaning when the email is opened, the images are found on a website (yours or the company's) and then downloaded when needed. The beauty of this solution is that your photos aren't clogging anyone's inbox (and getting you on their bad side).

The downside is that there isn't an online solution to collect email address from people who might want your e-newsletter. This can easily be done separately using other means, but it has nothing to do with the software that I mentioned. I've created simple sidebars on websites for this purpose. When someone submits their email information, it comes to me via email. Better yet, would be for this information to go directly into a sql database.

Finally, everyone's email clients interprets html and related code differently - it's a more chaotic environment than say internet browsers. My recommendation is to keep things somewhat minimalistic. I've read that a good rule of thumb is to test using gmail. If gmail will read it, so will most other email clients.

This answers your question on the computer side, but not on the paper side. There is a higher cost to mailings and it typically involves a lot more content. Whereas a few paragraphs will suffice in an email, you typically need to fill 3-4 pages of content for a traditional newsletter.

I think Susan's advice is right on. There are many reasons not to have an all flash-based site and SEO concerns are only one of them. Accessibility for those with sight or mobility disabilities are another.

Many people without medically-certified sight disabilities like to resize the text on their computer screens (I'm thinking about my parents). Flash prohibits this.

Finally, when I hover over a link, I like to know where I'm being directed to. This allows me to not blindly pick a pdf or word file for download. Or, I'm alerted to the fact that I am about to be whisked away to an external site. This is another thing that the all flash-based site doesn't allow.

Let me clarify I don't hate Flash or that I think it's inherently "wrong". It's just that it needs to be implemented selectively. What I would've done if I were designing your site and you liked what Flash has to offer, is to have used it for the the photo sideshow portion only. My thinking is that Flash should be used only for "the effects" and not for navigation or content.

I also want to mention that the arrangements on your site look amazing.

I have a message in my Action Items inbox. I can't seem to delete it. It always appears like I have 1 new item, when, in fact, I've read it several times. Help!