As I click around some of my favourite sites I’m starting to see more and more Blog Action Day posts appearing, there are some great articles, pledges to donate earnings, and in the case of one of my favourite blogs onStartUps, Dharmesh the blogger there is donating his entire year’s earnings to charity!

Along with Dharmesh, here are a few of my favourite posts from around the web:

• Behance is writing about Adopt The Sky
• FreelanceFolder is talking about Plastic Bags
• CopyBlogger has a great post about The Butterfly Effect
• Dumb Little Man is discussing all those Items you never thought to recycle

and there’s plenty, plenty, plenty more! I didn’t realise it but I can see I’m going to be wasting many hours today clicking around the web just reading all these fantastic articles! Long Live Blogging!

We’re starting to see articles appearing in some big media publications today about Blog Action Day. My favourite so far is from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis which is fantastic, here’s a quote from the piece given by Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota:

“It’s about solidarity,” he said. “If I didn’t sign up, who would take my place? An effort like this can’t be successful if I don’t do my part to make it successful. And if one person out there reads an article today that makes them think twice before they throw their cigarette butt on the ground, then my part mattered.”

Another great article is in the American Chronicle written by Kevin Stirz, here’s an excerpt:

The power here is in diversity, passion and energy.

Most bloggers write because they want to, not as a job. That implies a passion that might not exist for someone who writes for money. And, most bloggers are not trained as reporters or journalists. (In fact, we’re often criticized for that.) So, bloggers offer a different background than journalists would.

And, most bloggers participating in Blog Action Day are not environmental activists or writers. So, again, we’ll bring a different perspective to the discussion of how to protect our environment better.

Blog Action Day is important because it shows us the power, energy and diversity of many people to voluntarily propose ideas and start conversations about an important topic. It should add great value to the current conversations about how to protect our environment.

Cyan is giving interviews today to Skai Television in Greece, Rem.fm in Europe and others. If you have a media enquiry please email her!

Well I have just published the first of a few posts I am writing for various blogs today, it’s over at NorthxEast and is the ‘how-it-all-happened’ post which explains how we started the initiative, where the idea came from, the strategies we used to get the ball rolling and what we hope it’ll achieve. It’s a bit of a long post, but I hope people enjoy it and get something out of it for their own ideas. It’s called Building Momentum: How Blog Action Day Got Going and if you like digging things, Give it a Digg!

Happy Blogging Folks!

And so we come to it at last… Blog Action Day has now officially begun for the first countries closest to the International Dateline.

I am about to send out an email to the 14,000+ bloggers who have registered. We’ll be leaving registrations open for all the latecomers during the day so we may reach a still higher number.

For myself over here in Sydney there is still one hour before the clock ticks over to October 15th and I still have a bit of sleeping to do before it’s time to post. I think as the day progresses on we can expect the posts to build up in volume from a trickle to an ocean.

And one last reminder, don’t forget that if you can it would be great if you could either tag your posts with the words “Blog Action Day” or simply use those three words somewhere in your post as we will be measuring how many times the phrase appears in the blogosphere today.

I’ll post again later today on the Action Blog and we’ll have a special recap of the day and what we’ve achieved up at www.blogactionday.org in two days time with statistics, news and more.

Have a great Blog Action Day!!

Collis on behalf of
The Blog Action Day Team

Today while going through the increasingly long queues of blogs who have committed to participating on Blog Action Day I came to a series of blogs bearing a name that you and I and just about everyone with a computer is familiar with. Today over a dozen of Google’s blogs including the mighty Official Google Blog and the hugely popular YouTube Blog joined Blog Action Day. With them they bring a combined RSS readership of well over a million internet users further swelling the ranks of this initiative.

And if you thought Google was the only company who’d be writing for the environment this Monday, then you may want to think again. From blog networks, to media blogs to even the blogs of American banking corporation Wells Fargo, it seems that ordinary bloggers like you and I are shoulder to shoulder with companies who believe in creating a better world. And call me an optimist or an idealist or anything in between, but I think that’s pretty cool.

As the Blog Action Day storm builds and our number passes 12,000 as I write this, along comes some extraordinary news. Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s Environmental Commissioner has announced he will hold a special internet chat for the day. The Financial Mirror reports:

The chat will take place between 1400 and 1700 on the Commissioner’s blog site and will be conducted in English, French, German and Greek.

Commissioner Dimas said: “International Blog Action Day is an excellent initiative that will help to raise public awareness of the serious environmental challenges we face and to involve citizens in Europe and the rest of the world in contributing to solutions. This is also the aim of my blog. I look forward to a lively internet chat with a large number of participants.”

This is fantastic news and just shows the traction that Blog Action Day is getting around the world.

If you are a Digg user please feel free to vote up the Financial Mirror’s story by clicking here

With just days left to go, the momentum behind Blog Action Day has been really building. Emails are flooding in, press requests, messages of support, new blogs joining in and more. It’s also great to hear that four more top 100 blogs have gotten involved and will be posting up on Monday. Mashable and Read/WriteWeb are two giants of their genres both holding audiences in the hundreds of thousands, TreeHugger is far and away the leading environmental blog and John Chow is something of a legend amongst bloggers. So it’s very exciting to know that these four join a growing number of A-listers to be throwing their lot in with all the rest of us!

With so much happening, I can’t wait to see what each new day’s worth of email is going to bring!

We have been absolutely flooded with new blogs joining Blog Action Day in the last couple of days. In fact, there seem to be more and more each day now that we’re less than one week away.

We have no idea how many blogs will end up participating, and we thought it would be fun to see if anyone can guess correctly (kind of like those old-fashioned ‘count the lollies’ raffles they had in school - but online).

Whoever guesses the closest number to the final number of blogs participating on October 15 will win US$250 to spend at GreenHome.com, so they can make their home a bit greener.

To enter, simply post your guess in the comments between now and 5pm October 14th, Sydney Australia time. If you’re the closest, you’ll win the prize!

Make sure you include your correct email address so we can contact you to provide the prize.

Good luck!

Well after two months of planning and promoting, we are on the home stretch with just 9 days to go to Blog Action Day!

So it is time to start kicking things up a gear in the final lead up. We have come so far, with almost 7,000 blogs enlisted now it looks as though we are heading for an amazing impact! So whats planned still?

• An Awesome New Video
  One of the most popular things we’ve done so far has been the Blog Action Day video, which according to YouTube has been viewed some 30,000+ times. So on Monday with a week to go we’re going to release a follow up video for bloggers to post on their blogs and get everyone excited again in the lead up!
• A Viral Quiz
  Nothing like a bit of viral marketing to get the word spreading, that’s why we’ll be posting up a quick little viral quiz called “What Kind of Blogger Are You?”. You’ll see it here on the Action Blog and in the email reminder sent out next week…
• A Big, Diggable Post
  Leo Babauta from ZenHabits who is on the Blog Action Day team is the master of writing diggable posts and is putting together one of his specialties for the Action Blog about easy ways to do something environmentally friendly. We’ll see if we can’t get that onto digg and drive some more traffic back here!
• A Big Email Reminder
  On Tuesday we’ll be emailing all 7,000 bloggers who’ve signed up to make sure everyone remembers what day and what to do on that day and everything else that needs reminding!
• Tagging Posts
  We’re going to ask bloggers to tag their posts with the words “Blog Action Day” or if at all possible to mention Blog Action Day somewhere in the post so that on the day we can use services like Blog Pulse to see what impact we’re all making, I think it’s going to be huge!
• A How-We-Did-It Post
  You can keep your eye out for a post all about the story behind Blog Action Day, and how we managed to get this thing started and where we’re hoping it’ll go in the future!

My posts here on the Action Blog are going to start getting a little more frequent now too as we head through the final days, I’m very excited!!

We’re rolling along steadily through the campaign here at Blog Action Day with about 100 new blogs joining every day. Today we will be passing 4000 blogs, and with another 40 days left before THE day, I’m hoping we’ll surge past maybe 10,000 which would be quite an achievement.

Last week we added languages to the homepage, specifically - English, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Farsi, Italian and Turkish. I’m hoping to add more as we go to make the initiative truly international.

Also in some good news, I received an email from the editor of the prestigious Wired magazine and it looks as though we may be getting written up! Now that we have some significant statistics behind us, I’m going to work a little on drumming up some press. If anyone has any contacts with newspapers, magazines or any other press, then please do let them know about Blog Action Day!