Lighter Footstep has a brand new sister publication.

EcoTech Daily: Green technology, gadgets, and news launched late last month, and is filling out quite nicely. If you like keeping current on the technologies changing your home and community, EcoTech Daily might deserve a place in your bookmarks or RSS reader.

One of EcoTech daily's most popular new features is The Daily Five: a five item, five minute quick-read available each morning by 5:00 Eastern.  Current feature articles include SUNRGI’s Coal-Killing Solar Body Slam, How the Media Abandoned the Environment, and Urwerk’s Hyper-Expensive Windpower Watch.

If you'd like to subscribe to EcoTech Daily's RSS feed directly, you can follow this link. 

As for Lighter Footstep -- we'll be back. Soon. Watch this space or our RSS feed for more details.

A couple weeks back, I was interviewed by NPR’s Neda Ullaby for an upcoming environmental piece on Morning Edition.

The segment is scheduled to air today. Its topic is whether the environmental movement has become preoccupied with global warming. Morning Edition's report is based, at least in part, on a piece I wrote for Lighter Footstep last June: Five Things that Are Worse than Global Warming. I published it on the day of the Live Earth concerts, and it ended up being one of our most read (and most controversial) articles.

Lighter Footstep is primarily about personal approaches to Green Living, so we don’t directly address climate change that often. The position I took with Neda is that the success of the movie An Inconvenient Truth marked a real sea change for the environmental movement. At the same time, all the attention being paid to global warming is giving a variety of issues the cold shoulder.

I thought it might be appropriate to reprint the original article. Click through to see what the fuss was about, and please feel free to share your thoughts in our comments section.

Some green reading to wrap your weekend or start your Monday ...

Last Monday's Blog Action Day exceeded everyone's wildest expectations . Over 20-thousand blogs actually took part, with over 23-thousand Blog Action Day posts tracked by Google Blog Search. There were so many excellent posts, it's tough to nail down anything approximating a "best of" selection.

A few which stood out in Lighter Footstep's feed reader: Brian Clark's beautiful post on The Butterfly Effect at Copyblogger; 21st Century Citizen with Are You Here to Help; Zen Housewife's Being the Change; Conversation Agent's guide to green social media; Environmental Change Through Photography at andipants; eMoms at Home's 10 Green Business Tips to Help Prevent Global Warming; No Impact Man's What No Impact Feel Like After 10 Months; and a very thoughtful compilation of what Read/Write Web considers the Top 35 Environmental Blogs, in which we were pleased to be included. Lighter Footstep's contribution is here. We're already looking forward to next year.

There's more. Click through to read the rest of the article.

Search giant Google will "go dark" tonight for an hour -- ala Blackle -- in support  of this evening's Lights Out San Francisco event.

Lights Out San Francisco draws its inspiration from Sydney's Earth Hour, which dimmed Australia's largest city this March in support of measures to curb global warming. Organizers are asking Bay Area residents to switch-off non-essential lights this evening from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time and install a at least one CFL (Compact Fluorescent Bulb) to improve awareness of energy savings.

Google's is being joined by Craigslist, which is featuring links to Lights Out San Francisco's homepage from its Bay Area and Los Angeles sites. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is also lending his support for the event.  

Lights Out San Francisco is a run-up to Lights Out America, a national switch-off set for March 29, 2008. Eleven major metropolitan areas have already committed to participate, with several dozen other expected before next spring. 

It was a quiet week here at the site as we got underway with a project we're calling Lighter Footstep 2.0. You'll see the results before the end of the year: a top-to-bottom overhaul that will make Lighter Footstep faster, prettier, and more useful than ever.

In the meantime, we'll be back at full strength tomorrow, just in time for Blog Action Day. Fourteen thousand blogs -- reaching at least twelve million RSS subscribers -- have committed to posting about the environment. Google, Reddit, and the United Nations have also signed-on as participants. We'll be participating, as will our sister site ecoTumble. Be sure to browse around tomorrow and show your support for this unique event.

We'll offer our Weekend Reader as a starting point. Click through to the article for a bunch of great green links -- and make every day Blog Action Day!.