The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen wraps up this Friday. American leadership is critical to global climate action.

In that light, we thought you might be interested in Al Gore’s Repower America project.

Yesterday, Vice President Gore issued a bold challenge from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, calling on Members of Congress to pass clean energy and climate legislation in the United States by next April 22, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

Al Gore said “We have the means to secure our future. The question we must answer is whether or not we have the political will.”

The centerpiece of the Repower America campaign is an online “wall” where celebrities, leaders, and everyday people can share videos and images that will be used as the basis of campaign ads on TV, print, billboards, and online. Nearly 30 000 people have already posted on the Wall.

8coupons.com, find mobile coupons and deals in your neighborhood is evolving and growing. Once only known in New York City for Mobile Coupons and OCHO LOCO! promotions, 8coupons has improved into a one-stop shop for locating all of your favorite deals, regardless of where you live. With a loaded database of over 60,000 mobile coupons and deals throughout the country, consumers can now find all their money-saving information in one place.

When a user visits 8coupons.com, the map on the homepage will automatically populate the top 8 most popular deals based on his or her IP address. This ensures that anyone who visits the site will see the deals that are most relevant to them specifically. The top 8 deals will change dynamically as the user moves the map around to different locations, zooms in on a specific street, or narrows down the deals by sub-categories such as restaurants, entertainment, beauty & spas, services and shopping.

The deals on 8coupons.com now come from several different sources :

Exclusive Mobile Coupons – It has offered a self-service mobile coupon platform for small-businesses in New York City. The platform is now available nationwide, and to celebrate, 8coupons is offering an opportunity for any business to try the service free for 100 days (an $888 value!). Businesses can sign up here and use the promo code “MobileCoupons” at checkout to receive a credit of $888.

User Submitted Deals – Consumers can use this form to tell everyone about the specials at their local bar or their local sandwich shop (or accountant, or dentist, etc…). To date, there have been over 100,000 user shared deals.

Sponsored listings – It has partnered with Valpak, Money Mailer, and RedPlum’s SuperCoups as well as with several local bloggers and content partners to add over 50,000 local deals across the country.

A new website has launched which combines four very popular things that web users do online, shopping, socializing, watching videos and bargain hunting. Sososher has elements of all four including social shopping, member picture and video purchase review uploads, retailer promo videos, voucher codes and cash back on purchases – all on one website.

Boasting a selection of over 2,000 online stores spread across 40 different categories with big name retailers such as Hamleys, The Apple Store, T-Mobile & Karen Millen to name but a few, the chances are that if you’re looking to purchase a product or service online then you’ll find it on Sososher.

Some of the key elements of Sososher are:-

Social Shopping – Allows members to add shopping buddies,message – interact with other members and share product recommendations.

Cash Back – Users simply join as a member “for free” and receive cash back on every purchase they make. Online retailers spend an absolute fortune on online advertising. Sososher simply shares the advertising commission it receives from its retail partners with its members every time they buy something by clicking through to a retailer from their website. With the current economic climate, consumers are increasingly looking at ways to reduce costs. Members can receive for example, 2.5% cash back on all purchases they make at Marks & Spencer and £35 cash back when they take out insurance with Aviva.

Member Video and Picture Uploads – Members have the facility to upload picture and video reviews of their purchase alongside their written review. All too often online consumers make regretful purchases based on what they thought a product would do or how it would look based on retailer advertising. Having the facility to watch a video review by someone who has actually bought and used the product proves an invaluable resource when it comes to making an online purchasing decision.

Today’s Hot Offers – Highlights special offers that retailers have such as 70% Off Sales and Buy One Get One Free deals “many of which consumers may not be aware of” simply by searching via a Search Engine. With many of the Hot Offers combining Voucher and Discount Codes from Free delivery to additional discounts, this coupled with cash back that members receive would go on to show huge cost savings.

The team at Sososher maintains that everyone will love the using the website and if you have one “even your boss”, but for those of you in the office should your boss walk in unexpectedly – be sure to click on the Look Busy Button.

With violent crimes linked to classified ads sites like Craigslist in Boston and Minnesota recently making news headlines, it’s surprising that no company has emerged to make transacting on classifieds sites safer. That is until now. ListSafer is the first company to provide a ratings and reviews platform for classified ads sites such as Craigslist.org, OLX.com and Kijiji.com.

ListSafer, which just entered public beta, seeks to solve issues related to an increase in identity theft, scams, and violence on classifieds sites by building a platform that allows buyers and sellers to post ratings and reviews on their experiences on these sites. Therefore, potential buyers and sellers will be able to view each other’s ratings and reviews before entering into a transaction, making the whole process safer and reducing fraud.

ListSafer provides a seller with an html badge that can easily be placed into their listings on sites like Craiglist.org. This badge provides a summary of the seller, including the seller’s photo, name, location, overall rating and total number of reviews received. Potential buyers can view this or click through to read the reviews posted to the seller’s profile located on ListSafer’s site. If the buyer likes what he sees he can click on the “Place Bid” button located on the badge and place a bid on the item being sold.

1. Add Listing for Bids / Generate Badge

2. Add Badge to Classifieds Site

3. Buyers View Seller’s Profile / Place Bids

4. Seller Views and Picks Winning Bid

5. Seller and Buyer Rate Their Experience

Sellers can then log into ListSafer and review all the bids from buyers, and for those buyers who have used ListSafer before, sellers can see ratings and reviews they have received for past transactions. Once the seller selects a winning bid, ListSafer sends the seller the buyers contact information, notifies the winning buyer and bidding for the listing is closed. When the transaction is completed the buyer and seller can rate and review their experience.

ListSafer is essentially providing a “trusted badge” for sellers so that buyers can get comfortable with buying products and services from them, allowing sellers to differentiate themselves from all the people who are selling the same thing. ListSafer helps sellers build a positive reputation of safety and reliability, freeing them from competing only on price. As ListSafer also allows sellers to review buyers, if a seller gets a bid from a buyer that had a negative review in the past, the seller can ignore that bid and avoid the potential hassle. ListSafer helps potential buyers by allowing them to read past reviews which sellers have received and make a more educated decision as to whether they should bid on the item being sold.

ListSafer also utilizes Facebook Connect so that users can signup for the service and create a profile in seconds. Integration with Facebook also allows buyers and sellers to see how they may be connected and which friends they have in common, further lessening the anxiety of entering into a transaction.

Hubpages is a social media website, which facilitates its users to place their contents on the website for free of cost. Hubpages has thousands of registered users who are taking advantage of this facility. This user-friendly website can be utilized by anyone to prop up and promote their products and services. Hubpages can thus be defined as an Internet society that authorizes its users to make the content created by them known to thousands of people around the world. It helps the users gain comprehensive knowledge and detail about meticulous subjects. The user will be able to widen his familiarity in different categories like technology, business, computer, etc… as well.

The concept of Hubpages came into being in 2006 and has become very popular among its users. Users who have little or no technical knowledge can create Hubs or web articles that can be used by viewers. These content rich articles are a source of money for the hubbers or content creators. The hubbers market their product through web content writing.

Hubbers have established an online community by creating hubs on topics of their interest. The HubPages network provides an infrastructure which deviates traffic from search engines like Google to Hubs.

Listing of the Best Hubbers on HubPages

HubPages is the inventor and initiator of Yieldbuild. Hubpages known by the name online publishing ecosystem has started with a new service popularly known as YieldBuild. The aim of this new service is to make the most advantageous and best possible advertisement units for your website. They are making an effort to get the most out of a primary limitation of contextual advertisements. Usually once the advertisements are placed somewhere around the text the publishers seldom take care to modify their placement, formatting, and layout. Continuous modification and updating, helps to improve the user response in viewing the website.

This is where YeildBuild has a major role to play. YeildBuild is capable of optimizing the ad spots of your website and that too automatically. It creates the best and most profitable combination of ad style, layout, and network to be displayed on the site. The system is also capable of testing alternative configurations of networks, layouts, and colors continuously. It then chooses the combination that has the highest performance. YeildBuild takes around 100,000 imitations to prepare the system. The same layout and style continue to be displayed on the screen until the time the system realizes that users have become indifferent towards the ads. Once this is noticed the system automatically switches over to a more profitable and lucrative combination of layout, color and networks.

How Does YieldBuild Work?

Apart from using YeildBuild, the hubbers will have to keep on updating their pages with new contents like contents on the latest trend in the market, contents on politics, contents on new technology, etc… so that the visitors to their web page are not getting bored with viewing the same old content, every time they visit the website. Only when the pages are updated and attractive, more traffic can be attracted towards the web page so that you will be able to earn more.

People spend much of their time following the hottest stars, reading the latest headlines, and looking at the newest pictures. With more than 100 million celebrity fan Web sites; the majority are created and written by professional editorial staff. Tabloid magazines often cover the same the sensational gossip and incriminating photos as their counterparts.

So where can people go to see the “human” side of celebrities?

iFollo launch of its new, fan-driven online community that provides a place for people to contribute stories, pictures and videos about their personal encounters with celebrities past or present, famous teams or groups. iFollo is the only interactive celebrity site that bases all of its content on real encounters with celebrities from real people.

iFollo satisfies the public’s craving to know about, and connect with, celebrities in sports, politics, fashion, music and entertainment. The site also offers a broad and more balanced view of what celebrities are really like versus one-sided, sensational headlines and incriminating photos. This is because information comes from real stories told by everyday people. Fans read about, watch and see their favorite celebrities in settings other than the red carpet.

To participate, users upload photos and video along with their celebrity stories and rate celebrities by looks, smarts, arrogance and more. On iFollo, people have the ability to personalize and follow only the celebrities they care about, including local celebrities, without being bombarded by media minutia.

iFollo Features & Benefits :

• People choose who they want to follow
• Celebrity stories are genuine, first-hand and unfiltered
• Experiences with celebrities are from sources other than front page tabloids
• Best-rated and most-followed stories rise to the top, receiving the most prominence on the site
• Thousands of celebrity names are currently listed, and users can create additional celebrities, groups and teams.

Not only can people post stories about individuals, but they can also create groups. For example, attendees at events like the Sundance Film Festival, the Academy Awards, or the Super Bowl could post their celebrity experiences in that particular event group on iFollo. Radio or TV stations can validate their fan trust factor by setting up a group for their on-air personalities.

Combo Adds is the first friend-adding website of its kind that offers a free, user-friendly interface to market profiles on multiple social networks at the same time. Users will have access to an effective way to promote profiles, increase views, subscriptions, followers, and friends without spam. The VIP points program entices users to add friends and click links that drive traffic to profiles on some of the most popular social networking sites.

Combo Adds streamlines the MySpace friend-adding process by
allowing users to accrue points while adding one, five, or 25 friends at the same time. MySpace imposes daily adding limits on how many friend requests users can send, but no limit on how many friend requests users can receive. It’s fast and easy to meet the daily quota of friend requests with Combo Adds and even easier to receive incoming requests 24-7. Combo Adds even offers the option to search by interests, gender, age, and applications. By targeting popular apps like Mafia Wars and Fashion Wars players can also quickly build their teams.

Combo Adds helps businesses target customers via social networks and grow their fan base. Filmmakers boost video views, bands increase song plays, products build popularity, and online networkers link to individuals with similar interests. Businesses can capitalize on the social networking movement now more than ever.

Combo Adds hosts profile links driving traffic to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yuwie, Youtube, Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, Squidoo, Mashable, Orkut, Bebo, LiveJournal, Ning, and more. Combo Adds also hosts monthly contests that feature users on the front page of the site for added traffic.

Do you know where librarians buy books for their own families? It may surprise you to learn that many librarians save hundreds of dollars a year by “swapping books” online.

Online book-swap sites traditionally have had the reputation of being hit-or-miss, and a lot of work. Today’s reality is very different. Bookins.com, the book-swap community (now has over 50,000 users, including many librarians!), offers more books than the largest Barnes and Noble, and is as easy as walking to your mailbox.

Sue Wargo, a school librarian from N. Grosvenordale, CT saves more than $500 a year on book purchases. How?

“I regularly swap books online to supplement my personal and school libraries. I also get books on CD for travel. I listen to them and then return them,” says Sue. “It helps feed my book addiction at a fraction of what I would have paid elsewhere.”

Bobbi Wood, a librarian, wife, and mother of four from Grand Forks, ND agrees:  “Bookins.com is easy, and you can find almost any book you are looking for. Plus, some you aren’t! In these economic times we need all the help we can get just to make ends meet. Bookins is a good affordable way to find entertainment.”

While traditional swap sites like PaperbackSwap, Swaptree, and TitleTrader have been online for years, Bookins.com is the only site of its kind to eliminate all time-consuming contact between trading parties. It is also the only site to provide a quality guarantee.

inDegree.com, connects four separate yet interdependent groups to improve professional networking and job searches : graduate students and graduate alumni seeking jobs with employers searching for top recruits and with universities who need to stay connected with high-value alumni.

The service is free for everyone, even employers, who can post jobs and view unlimited resumes at no cost.

Each group faces unique yet related challenges :

• For graduate students, placement services have been cut back, on-campus recruiting is down, and increased enrollment means higher competition for fewer jobs.
• Graduate alumni have watched their competitive advantage shrink, as the number of people with graduate degrees increases.
• Universities’ costs to maintain alumni services have climbed as donations have dropped.
• Employers’ costs for hiring graduate degree holders continues to rise, along with the resources it takes to find the right candidates.

On the positive side, some recruiters—anticipating a thaw in hiring in the first half of 2010—are reaching out to candidates, planning to scoop first-string talent as soon as they have openings. At the same time, social and professional networks enable students to increase their exposure online.

In addition to the benefit of improved placement, inDegree combines career and alumni services that are separate at most universities, eliminating the duplication of resources—that can free up budget for other priorities. Graduate programs can also track student placement with inDegree.

“inDegree.com is a niche site that employers can use to efficiently target candidates with advanced degrees only,” says Alex Miningham, cofounder and chief executive officer of inDegree.

inDegree’s partnership with the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students will bring on a number of the top public and private universities across the country. Beginning in 2010, universities can access additional premium services such as exit surveys, benchmarking studies, and other analyses.

For students and alumni, the benefits are manyfold:

• Access to over 500,000 jobs that target graduate degree holders only
• Interactive platform to publish a professional profile, apply for jobs, manage applications, and see who’s viewed their resume,
• Automatic links to classmates and alumni, with real-time updates on connections, and
• Ability to search networks across many dimensions, such as employment information.

In collaboration with CreatAd, Utrecht University initiates today (31 August) a viral competition for the development of its new national and international marketing campaign. CreatAd is a platform specialising in creating user-generated advertising campaigns. Utrecht University hopes the partnership will result in virals that demonstrate in a single glance that it is the best university for talented and ambitious students. The winning entries will be used in the university marketing campaign.

Utrecht University is the first Dutch university to invite the public to contribute ideas to a viral campaign aimed at prospective Dutch and international students.

Shared via Hyves, Facebook and Twitter

According to Bas Schreiner, manager of marketing communication at Utrecht University, ‘We are calling on creative minds to create a design, animation or video about Utrecht University – this is a unique opportunity for ambitious young creative types to work on our campaign.’

The competition participants can link their entries directly to Hyves, Facebook or Twitter to enhance the competition’s viral dimension. The fact that young people are invited to contribute their creations and to share their designs via their favourite social network gives the campaign a more personal touch. It also means that current and prospective students will identify more with the campaign. According to CreatAd founder, Sander de Jonge, ‘It’s crucial for Utrecht University to use these aspects to demonstrate that the campaign is being developed both for and in collaboration with a particular target group.’

Competition starts 31 August

The four best entries will receive a total of €2200 in prize money. The competition starts on 31 August. The Utrecht University jury will select one of the winners, the public the other three according to a point system. The three contestants who have shared their entries the most widely via social networks, blogs and other websites will receive the most points. Those who wish to participate in the competition must submit their designs by 6 November and should read the competition briefing on the website.

Objective

Create a viral (graphic design/animation/video) for Utrecht University which shows immediately that Utrecht University is the obvious choice for talented and ambitious (inter)national students to start or continue their study. Graphic design, animations and video entries are allowed. You are also free to use sound if you like to. The posted designs and video’s can be used for an international print or video campaign to recruit ambitious students. So make sure that it’s a distinctive design that addresses young ambitious people (17-25 years old).

Prizes

There will be one winner chosen by Utrecht University. There is also the possibility that this will further be implemented in a global campaign. Chair of the jury will be Yvonne C.M.T. van Rooij LLM, president of the Executive Board of Utrecht University.

Company prize: € 1000

There are also three prizes for the virals that obtain the most points:
Community prize nr. 1: € 750
Community prize nr. 2: € 300
Community prize nr. 3: € 150

Deadline

Your Ad must be uploaded before the 31th of October, 2009. Voting is possible until the 6th of November, 2009. CreatAd released new integration software for sharing your Ad, which will give you the possibility to earn votes also from your Facebook and Twitter friends. These functions can be found under the ‘+’ button in the video player.

Winners

The winners will be announced in November, shortly after the contest is closed.

Information

For more information about Utrecht University, check out the website of Utrecht University and the special Follow Your Ambition webiste.