Inhabitots. Blogroll. Ideal Bite launches with scantily clad dancers, mechanical bull. I've got to say that I walked into Monday night's Ideal Bite party in midtown Manhattan with absolutely no idea of what to expect. I knew that Ideal Bite was a new daily e-mail list that specialized in "light-green living"--you know, a sort of DailyCandy for eco-yuppies.
The event, titled "Garden of Hedonism," promised "a night of total titillation that's both decadent and green," and that it would be held at--Johnny Utah's!? New Yorkers who follow restaurant openings and closings are undoubtedly familiar with Johnny Utah's, an "upscale-cowboy" theme restaurant and bar across the street from Rockefeller Center. It's also home to one of only two mechanical bulls in Manhattan, and apparently, the rationale for holding a vaguely green-related party there is that the bull is solar-powered. Al Gore would be proud. Unfortunately, I didn't ride the bull; I had some reconnaissance to do because I still wasn't exactly sure what the event was all about. 50 ways to green your business from fast company. MSN Distributing TreeHugger and Grist? Not So Fast. MSN launched its sustainability focused content portal, MSN Green, this week and the announcement looked good enough.
MSN will distribute videos and articles on environmental news from a wide variety of partner sites including heavy hitters TreeHugger and Grist.org. Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnership like this looks like. MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content. How is that the case? There's no mention of Green on the MSN front page. Yahoo! Moral of the story?