Al Gore and The Alliance for Climate Protection have announced that they are interested in creating a new .eco domain name extension. The .eco domain extension will be for individuals to express their support for environmental causes, for companies to promote their environmental initiatives, and for environmental organizations to maintain their websites in a namespace that is more relevant to their core missions.

“We fully support Dot Eco LLC in its efforts to secure the .eco top level domain through the ICANN application process and look forward to working with Dot Eco LLC to promote .eco. This is a truly exciting opportunity for the environmental movement and for the internet as a whole,” said Al Gore.

But what is more exciting than a new “green” domain extension is that a majority of the profits generated from the sales of the .eco domains will be distributed to support environmental causes and organizations.

Cathy Zoi, CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection said that: “The .eco initiative, as proposed by Dot Eco LLC, is a unique approach for fundraising for nonprofit environmental organizations such as ours. We are thrilled to be working with Dot Eco LLC to generate funds for our organization and to promote awareness of climate change.”

“It is an honor and a privilege to be working with Al Gore and Cathy Zoi on the .eco initiative,” said Fred Krueger, CEO of Dot Eco LLC. “We are confident that we will generate substantial funds for the Alliance for Climate Protection to promote their efforts to increase awareness of climate change.”

Dot Eco LLC will be applying for the .eco domain name extension idea through the ICANN gTLD application process in late 2009. So maybe in a near future you will read this blog on www.green-blog.eco?

Here are 14 applications and groups for Facebook, a social networking website, which will easily help you to save our environment and climate. If you know about any others please let us know by making a comment.

Plant trees:
1. iChapters will plant one tree for every person that joins their Facebook page. Their goal is to plant 100,000 trees.
2. For every ten people who joins TreeNation’s group they’ll plant one tree.
3. Hotspex will plant one tree with your proverbial ‘name’ on it if you join their group.
4. If you add this application to your Facebook account Outreach International will plant one tree.
5. Earthkeepers Facebook application allows you to plant virtual trees and share seeds with your friends. Each tree grown to adulthood will be planted in the real world to fight deforestation, desertification, and drought.
6. For every 50 people who joins EcoTopia’s group they will plant one tree.
7. You can plant a sponsored tree for free, or buy a tree for $1, if you add PlantYourTree.com’s application to your Facebook account. Plant-trees.org’s application is similar and allows you to buy a tree for $1.

Reduce your carbon footprint:

8. With this application from Big Green Switch you can put yours and your Facebook friends’ eco-credentials to the test by issuing and completing challenges to reduce your carbon footprints.
9. The Climate Pledge application allows you to “pledge” any number of actions to reduce your contribution to global warming. Then you can invite your friends to do the same, and watch as your total reductions (your pledges, plus all of your recruits) add up.
10. With the MakeMeSustainable Facebook application you can see your impact on a larger scale by tracking both the actions you take to reduce your carbon footprint and your ability to mobilize your community and friends.

Other:

11. Help re-green Greensburg! This Facebook application will donate $1 towards replanting the trees in Greensburg if you add it to your account.
12. The We Campaign application lets you earn points from actions you take. For every 10 points you earn a donor will give $1 to help halt global warming.
13. For every 25 people that join this group £1 will be donated to help solve climate change through C&C.
14. Yatrips application makes it easy for you to share rides to the places you want and need to go with your friends and to make new friends, while directly helping to reduce climate change.

The Flock browser is based and built on from Mozilla, the same engine that powers the popular browser Firefox. But even so the two web browsers are very much different. Flock’s slogan is “the social web browser.” And that is very much true. Flock is a browser for more social-minded people and bloggers, like me, who like to keep everything just a few mouse clicks away.

With the Flock browser you can stay connected with all your friends from the major social websites such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, for example. You can easily share photos, links, text and videos with your friends. With its built-in blog editor you can post to your blog over at Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress and many more. Flock also has an awesome RSS reader, which looks great if you got a larger monitor.

And with Flock’s eco-edition you can browse the web a little “greener.”

The Flock eco-edition is packed from the start with green blogs, green RSS-feeds, and news sites such as National Geographic, Treehugger, Ecorazzi, Green Yahoo! and many others.

If you decide to use the eco-edition 10% of all search engine-earnings generated by you and others who use the same edition will go towards an environmental charity.

“Flock believes in providing users who download the Flock Eco-Edition a means to give back by donating 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back.”

The eco-edition will also come with its own “green” skin. I personally don’t like this skin. And because somehow you can’t change to the more pleasant and default Flock browser skin I had to delete the eco-edition and download the default Flock browser. Of course I still kept all the green bookmarks and RSS-feeds.

The Flock eco-edition is a great browser if you can tolerate the “green” skin it comes with. It does misses a few good features that it’s “cousin” Firefox 3 has, but I guess that will be fixed when Flock 2 is released. I really recommend this browser to bloggers or people who often hang out at places such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The browser is free to download and use. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Just in USA alone these data centers used enough energy to power nearly 6 million homes during 2005. And the energy usage is expected to double by year 2011.

New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton takes a closer look on what is being done to make these “SUV’s of the tech world” more energy efficient and green, something that might not be as easy as you think.

If you run a website or blog you can help speed up this process by choosing a green web host from our green webhost list. These hosting companies power their servers with renewable energy such as wind and solar power or offers carbon offsetting by buying green tags or RECs.

Image credit: Clayirving. Image licensed under a Attribution-No Derivative Works license.