Put up a camera. Anywhere. You will be surprised by just how badly everyone wants to be on telly whenever they see a lens pointed at them. It’s why many kids think web cams are more important in a computer than a CPU, and also a reason why Big Brother revolutionized trash TV and Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg a Billionaire.

The urge to exhibit one’s private persona seems so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, that you begin to wonder if it’s an evolutionary trait also present in other species. And indeed it is. Forest animals love the camera.  The TEAM network has put up camera traps in forests across the globe to snap photos of  animal wild life. The experts of TEAM (or, more accurately and less sexy “Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring”) are now celebrating the 1 millionth photo taken.

TEAM makes the photos available to researchers and the public as “real-time” data to help track how biodiversity evolves.  And, of course, also to show how wild life is impacted by changes in their environment – be it deforestation or warming temperatures. The primates shown below are an example of the quite entertaining footage collected by the scientists:

The TEAM network still has some way to go: With a million plus photos they are way behind Facebook – that other network providing real time data on a not so different type of primate: you and me.

 

Are you also wondering, why your electricity bills are so high? Probably you are not paying enough attention on your energy saving opportunities. The social network “welectricity” can help you understand what you could do better. It allows you to contribute your information on the energy consumption habits and to compare them with your friends.  This idea made welectricity one of the top 10 ideas that had been put forward in the General Electric ECOmagination global contest. GLOBAL IDEAS has met the founder of welectricity, Herbert Samuel.

Did you know that Greenpeace broke a Facebook record this week? The international environmental organization got the most comments ever on a Facebook post in 24 hours–80,000! And that was after setting a goal of 50,000. The comments came in all different languages from around the world, all on Greenpeace's "Unfriend Coal" page.

 

Greenpeace launched the record-setting drive as a way to step up its pressure on Facebook. The company still relies on coal to power its data centers and some of its other operations, and Greenpeace has been calling on Facebook to go coal-free for more than a year. Now they're urging the social networking company to achieve that goal by Earth Day 2011 on April 22nd. Facebook, for its part, has been making efforts to change its data centers into cleaner, more green-friendly operations.

 

The "Unfriend Coal" campaign is ongoing, so you can check it out and see if you want to take part!